What Is Emotional Hygiene And How To Develop It?

In the same way we take care of our physical hygiene, we must also learn to observe and develop our emotional hygiene.

Emotional hygiene is the ability to live in harmony with your emotions and to know how to control them. It is important to learn to understand them, and not to suppress or try to get rid of them. The first step towards emotional hygiene is awareness.

Here are some tips to help you increase emotional awareness, understand the origin of emotions, and learn how to live them correctly:

Identify emotion
It is important to track the moment when the emotion is manifested, and try not to "rush into" it. Take a deep breath, give yourself time to watch your condition. What do you feel? How would you define what excites you now?
By identifying and observing our emotions, we increase our awareness and learn to understand ourselves.
Anger and irritation can hide a banal fear, and anxiety often arises from insecurity. Get to know your emotions - how they come to you, manifest and sometimes mask themselves.

Learn to recognize the main triggers
Understand what triggered certain emotions. Emotions do not arise from nowhere, they are caused by certain situations, events, people.
Define your main triggers, that is, pathogens, so that next time you can monitor your condition and consciously change the reaction to them.

For example, when you are rude, most often there is aggression and a desire to say something offensive in response. This is the most common trigger of anger and irritation. If you react to this situation with a destructive emotion, then you will only have unpleasant feelings.

Later you will regret that you did not hold back, and it will take you a long time “digest” the situation, thinking that you could say another offensive thing in response. It spends both your time and your energy.

The pattern of emotional behavior: trigger — emotion — action.

Learn to recognize the main triggers and change the destructive emotions into positive ones s that you could keep yourself in control and behave consciously.

Be in contact with the body
It is said that emotions are often reflected on the face. But not only on the face. Our whole body is a vehicle for emotional impulse. Observe how your breathing, heart rate, tension in the body, and skin sensitivity change.
Emotions control both our mind and the body. Therefore, the ability to be in contact with the body is an important step on the path to emotional stability and awareness.

Pause
Having identified the main triggers and the emotional reaction to them, learn to pause between the reaction and further action.
Feeling angry? Inhale-exhale deeply and count to 10. This pause will help you return to a controlled and conscious state and prevent you from acting out of your emotions.

Practice emotional control
In order to maintain emotional hygiene, you need to learn to identify, accept and express emotions correctly.
The ability to keep emotions in check improves relationships with others and oneself, it also helps to express oneself and overcome a suppressed emotional state.

It takes time and practice to learn how to control strong emotions such as anger, fear or irritation.
But this increases our ability to consciously and efficiently live life without wasting energy; it teaches us to be more patient towards ourselves and others.
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By getting rid of destructive emotions and replacing them with positive ones, we begin to live more freely and fully.