Have you ever noticed how emotions can affect you physically? For example, when you’re very angry, stressed, or afraid, you might experience a rapid heart rate or adrenaline rush that makes you feel pumped up. When you’re embarrassed, you could start to blush. When you’re nervous or excited, your palms may sweat or you might feel “butterflies” in your stomach. When you’ve had a tough experience like a relationship breakup, job loss, or fight with a friend, you may have felt other physical symptoms like fatigue, muscle tension, and even headaches. 

The vast majority of us know what it’s like to have our emotions affect our physical and mental state. When you’re happy or at peace, you may feel more energetic or able to relax. When you’re sad, you may feel sleepy or unable to concentrate. These outward symptoms of our emotional state are just one of the reasons why emotional healing is so important. It can have a big impact on your mental, spiritual, and physical wellness. 

What Does Emotional Health Mean to You?

Being emotionally healthy doesn’t mean you’re happy all the time. But an emotionally healthy person is aware of their emotions — positive or negative — and able to deal with them in productive ways. If you recognize when you’re feeling angry, stressed out, or sad, and then manage your emotions instead of denying them or taking them to extremes, you’re probably an overall emotionally healthy person. And if you need a little help sorting things out, that doesn’t mean you’re somehow broken or inadequate. In fact, it means you’re emotionally intelligent enough to recognize and seek support when you need it.

If you’re healthy emotionally, you’re probably more likely to be happier overall, even when you have bouts of sadness, stress, or frustration. You’ll have better control over your thoughts and actions, which can help you in your career and relationships. Practicing emotional healing and looking after your emotional health can help you bounce back when life inevitably happens, and things go wrong.

How Can I Heal Emotionally?

For you, emotional healing may happen more naturally. For others, it’s a learned and conscious skill. For some, it comes with some kind of professional support. No matter what category you fall into, there are many things you can do to improve your own capacity for emotional healing. Here are several things to consider:

Work on Your Mindfulness

Research indicates that being mindful may help you be less reactive emotionally, and get more satisfaction out of your interactions with others at home, work, and in your social life. Mindfulness may begin as the simple act of putting down your phone when you’re around family and friends. Focus on being truly present and involved in what’s going on around you right now. 

One easy mindfulness exercise is to sit near a window and watch outside. Follow the traffic with your eyes. Watch people walking their dogs. Watch how the tree or bush in your front yard moves with the breeze. Watch the birds. In whatever you choose to observe, be detailed about it. Really focus and appreciate what’s happening. The key is to be in the moment and not be distracted by the past or future. It’s all about now. Then, as you go about your day, mentally focus on the task at hand instead of thinking about past or upcoming events and worries. 

From an emotional standpoint, practicing mindfulness could be almost as simple. When your feelings start bubbling up, stop and think about what you’re feeling right now, and why. Recognize it and let yourself feel it, but then consider how you’re about to react. Is it rational? Does your reaction seem balanced with what you’re reacting to? 

Emotional healing and mindfulness go hand in hand. If you know what you’re feeling and why, you should be better equipped to process those feelings and keep your reactions under control.

Woman sleeping peacefully

Get Enough Sleep

When you’re tired, you can’t function at your best physically, mentally, or emotionally. You might also react more severely to things and people. If you’ve ever noticed this, scientists can back you up. A 2018 study found that sleep problems may actually make people more prone to negative thinking. And when you’re tired, you might also be more likely to feel stressed and anxious.

Balance Work and Play

Both work and play are important for emotional healing. We all need the personal satisfaction that comes from a job well done, not to mention the boost of confidence. But no matter how much you love your job, you also need to temporarily leave it behind and have fun on a regular basis. Don’t let your professional pursuits rule your life or make you give up the other things you love. Career burnout is real, and can be damaging to emotional health and relationships. When the workday is done, close the laptop and go do something you enjoy.

Connect With Others

Loneliness may make emotional healing more difficult. When you’re sad, sometimes you just want to curl up on the couch with your friends Netflix, and Ben & Jerry’s. We all need alone time and need to be comfortable with just ourselves. Perhaps spending some time alone can help us recognize and process our feelings. However, if you’re on your own consistently, you could be more prone to feeling negative, sad, or stressed out. You may feel like wallowing in your negativity. 

Don’t take alone time to an extreme. Maintain your emotional connection  — beyond social media. Say hi to people in the grocery store, have dinner with friends, and talk to coworkers around the water cooler. Even when personal, physical gatherings aren’t possible, pick up the phone or use video calls to connect and have meaningful conversations.

Express Your Feelings

Keeping sadness, anger, or worry bottled up can prevent emotional healing. Find someone to talk to when you need to vent or sort out your feelings. If you’re mindful of how you express them, letting your feelings out — such as in an honest but tactful conversation — can go a long way to helping you bounce back.

Practice The Emotion Code

Energy healing practices like the Emotion Code® can help you resolve negative energies from the past. We embrace the idea that everything is energy, including emotions. Left unprocessed, the energy of negative emotions may literally become trapped inside you. We call them trapped emotions, and they are literal, physical energies that may become lodged in any part of the body. We believe these could lead to emotional and physical distress, discomfort, anxiousness, sadness, and more. 

For example, if you have the energy of guilt trapped somewhere in your body from a bad experience, you may be more likely to feel guilt over other experiences which may not ordinarily cause you to feel that way. This is because part of you is literally feeling guilty all the time. Not only that, but that physical energy and its lower vibration could throw off the normal flow of energy in your body, and lead to discomfort or other unwanted symptoms. 

Practicing the Emotion Code can help rid your body of these energies that could get in the way of physical and emotional healing. In a few simple steps, you could remove those energies for good. Using muscle testing to access your subconscious mind, you can begin identifying trapped emotional energies (you might call them “old wounds” or “emotional baggage”) that could result from turmoil or bad experiences, and work to release them. You can do this on your own or with the help of a certified Emotion Code Practitioner — in person or from half a world away.

The Benefits of Emotional Healing

Being emotionally healthy doesn’t mean always wearing a smile. You might feel angry, stressed out, or sad, but you can manage and move past those feelings after you’ve processed them.

If you’re not used to actively maintaining your emotional health, emotional healing can feel foreign or “out there” to you at first. But once you begin, you may start feeling the effects very quickly. The better you feel, both emotionally and physically, the more you can achieve. Your relationships may become closer, and you may begin to experience more joy in your life. When you begin to experience those things, you might feel more energetic, confident, and motivated to achieve your goals.

If you look at your body and its systems holistically, you’ll realize there are emotional, mental, and spiritual aspects to health as well as physical. Emotional healing can have a positive snowball effect on the rest of your life. The longer you practice it, the more beneficial it can be. The momentum of actively taking care of your emotional health can help you feel better in your mind, spirit, and body. If you believe in a holistic approach to self-care, you know that the better you feel emotionally, the better your body is likely to feel. And the better your body feels, the better your mind and spirit can feel! 

Don’t Neglect Emotional Healing

If you don’t feel like yourself, or feel in your gut that something isn’t right, maybe it’s time to do some soul-searching or emotional healing. Trapped emotions or not taking care of your own emotional healing can result in feeling stress, which in turn may lead to:

  • Lowered immune system response
  • Digestive issues
  • Poor skin and hair quality
  • Headaches
  • Weight gain
  • Increased belly fat due to cortisol accumulation

This is also why letting go of emotions like jealousy, unworthiness, sadness, or bitterness is often described as taking a weight off your shoulders. Many people actually FEEL lighter once they release this baggage, or “unpack” it for emotional healing.

We All Need Emotional Healing

Feeling negative emotions is human and even healthy, especially during life’s challenges. But holding onto that negativity is not productive or healthy. 

Now as much as ever, people need emotional healing. Even the most balanced and emotionally stable people can be deeply affected by political strife, illness, cultural differences, and disasters as we watch them play out in the media and even in our personal lives. Emotional healing and proactively looking out for your emotional health can help you stay positive and strong through it all.