Emotional Fitness

What is emotional fitness?

Emotional fitness is our ability to understand our emotions, feel them, and proactively practice self-awareness and mindfulness. This is especially important in our ability to connect in our relationships, connect with ourselves, and ultimately live a satisfied life that involves healthy communication, healthy coping strategies, healthy relationships, and healthy mindsets.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the ability to understand our emotional triggers and biases. It’s the foundation for emotional fitness, because if we can’t reflect on our own experience and whether or not it’s impacting how we interact with others, the rest of the traits are tough to develop. Self-awareness is a key aspect of emotional fitness.

Research shows 95% of people believe they’re self-aware, but only about 10–15% really are. The truth is, there’s so much we don’t know we don’t know.

Why is emotional fitness important?

Since stress is the number one cause of illness and disease, it’s only logical that any emotional self-regulation techniques practiced regularly is literally preventative medicine.

– Nick Terrone.

Men often learn to push physical and work performance but remain unaware that they are neglecting their emotional wellbeing. The message they get is ‘work hard, play hard and a healthy mind follows’. But emotional wellbeing also works on a different plane. One of slowing down, experiencing your feelings and connecting more deeply with others. That level of experience regulates the body and mind in other ways that ultimately increase wellbeing, health and performance.

– Dan Auerbach. 

Building Emotional Fitness

1. Check in with yourself daily

Checking in with yourself every day is a good place to start in strengthening your emotional fitness. Take a few moments each day to observe how you feel, your thoughts and how your body feels. Think about each of these areas, thoughts, feelings and body awareness, because this will help you to identify each types of sensation.

2. Acknowledge your emotions

Acknowledging your emotions is the first step in understanding them. Integrating acknowledgement in your emotional fitness regimen is essential. After checking in with yourself and reflecting how you are feeling, acknowledgment is the step that makes those emotions validated. This is important, in order to work through your emotions, they first must “exist” to you.

3. Show yourself patience and compassion

Showing yourself patience when working through an emotion is the upmost important factor. Don’t make yourself feel wrong for feeling a certain away, simply be present to it and hold space for yourself. This process may be challenging at the beginning of this journey, but with consistency and support, it gets easier. On the journey of emotional fitness there are several steps, take it one step at a time.

4. Let go of judgement

Don’t make yourself “wrong” for feeling a certain way, rather get curious. Ask yourself, what in my life is no longer serving a purpose? What in my life can be contributing to how I am feeling right now? Emotions are how our body communicates with us and its our job to listen.

5. Feel your emotions fully and work towards letting them go

This step in the process is scary. More often than not, when you are experiencing an overwhelming emotion, it’s hard to allow it in, it’s easier to block it out. But in order to work through it, you have to acknowledge it, and work with it head on. This is how you can deal with it, otherwise you are ignoring it, or avoiding it and it lingers in the background. You can only go as deep as you allow yourself to, remember that. Letting go is the final step. Allowing yourself to feel it and then let it go is vitally important because it teaches you how to feel an emotion without becoming it. You learn how to separate yourself from the emotion and simply hold space for it.

Letting go of difficult emotions is not easy, here is a useful framework for letting go, so that you can experience emotional fitness.

Step One: Turn toward your emotions with acceptance

Once you become aware of the emotion you are feeling, notice where it is in your body. You may feel it as a stomachache, a tightening of your throat, the pounding of your heart, or tension somewhere. Sit with this anger, anxiety, depression, grief, guilt, sadness, shame, or whatever emotion you are experiencing. Become aware of it and don’t ignore it. If this is difficult, get up and walk around or get a cup of tea.

The key here is to not push the emotion away. Bottling it up inside will only cause it to bubble up and explode later, resulting in more difficult emotions or even a complete emotional shutdown. Listen to your difficult emotions. They are trying to help you wake up to what is going on before a major crisis occurs.

Step Two: Identify and label the emotion

Instead of saying, “I am angry”, say, “This is anger” or, “This is anxiety.” In this way, you’re acknowledging its presence, while simultaneously empowering you to remain detached from it.

When my husband was in the hospital before he passed, I felt a deep sense of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. I needed to acknowledge and identify the emotions and say to myself, “I know that I am experiencing anxiety and fear right now and I don’t know what will happen, but I am going to just ‘be’ with it.” Although it remained an extremely painful experience to the end, identifying and labelling my emotions in this way allowed me to take some of the pain out of what I was feeling. This, in turn, allowed me to stay in the present, versus catapulting me into the future, or trapping me in the past. Being thrust in either direction would have only caused me to blame myself. I can just imagine how that critical voice would have rung out, “If only you would have done something different, maybe there would have been a different outcome.”

Step Three: Accept your emotions

When you are feeling a certain emotion, don’t deny it. Acknowledge and accept that the emotion is present, whether it is anxiety, grief, sadness, or whatever you are experiencing in that moment. Through mindful acceptance you can embrace difficult feelings with compassion, awareness, and understanding towards yourself and your partner.

Think of a friend or a loved one who might be having a hard time. What would you say to them? Bring the scenario of what you would say to them into your mind’s eye. Now, say the same thing to yourself: “I am ok. I am not to blame. I did the best I could.” Hold these images and phrases within yourself with loving kindness and compassion. Extend this act of kindness toward yourself and become aware of what is going on within you. In this way you will gain the power to not only calm and soothe yourself, but also your partner.

You will soon come to realise that you are not your anger, fear, grief, or any other difficult emotion you are feeling. Instead you will begin to experience these emotions in a more fleeting manner, like clouds that pass by in the sky. Opening yourself up to your emotions allows you to create a space of awareness, curiosity, and expansiveness that you can then apply to your relationship, as well as any other aspect of your life.

Step Four: Realise the impermanence of your emotions

Every one of your emotions is impermanent. They arise and reside within you for a time, and then disappear. It’s easy to forget this when you’re in the midst of dealing with difficult emotions.

Allow yourself to witness and observe your emotions with kind attention and patience, giving them the latitude to morph, and in many cases, completely evaporate. To embrace this process, ask yourself:

• “What and where is this feeling?”
• “What do I need now?”
• “How can I nurture it?”
• “What can I do for my partner?”
• “What can my partner do for me?”
• “How can we, as a couple, turn toward one another with acts of loving-kindness?”

Asking these focused questions and responding in turn will go a long way to promote empathy, compassion, and connection within your relationship.

Step Five: Inquire and investigate

After you have calmed and soothed yourself from the impact of your emotions, take a moment to delve deeply and explore what happened. Ask yourself the following questions:

• “What triggered me?”
• “What is causing me to feel this way?”
• “What is the discomfort I’m experiencing and where is it arising?”
• “Was it as result of my critical mind, or was it in reaction to something my partner said or did?”

Perhaps you had a hard day at work or difficulty dealing with your family. Maybe you feel unappreciated, lonely, or disconnected as a result of your interactions with someone. Whatever the cause or trigger, look at it closely and ask yourself what is happening here. Consider what was said or done and compare it to your values:

• What were your expectations surrounding the situation?
• What reactions or judgments caused you to become angry or anxious?
• Is this a pattern that keeps arising?

Asking yourself these critical questions and investigating the root of your difficult emotions will help you gain empathy and insight into what you are experiencing.

Taking yourself off autopilot and trusting your deepest, authentic self to answer these questions about your situation will create a space to see things with a different perspective. This will ultimately allow both you and your partner to be more present and connected with each other.

Step Six: Let go of the need to control your emotions

The key to mindfully dealing with your difficult emotions is to let go of your need to control them. Instead, be open to the outcome and what unfolds. Step outside of yourself and really listen to what your partner is feeling and what he or she has to say. Only then will you truly gain an in-depth understanding of your emotions and the interactions surrounding them within your relationship.

Mindfully dealing with emotions is hard, the path to emotional fitness takes time. Be kind, compassionate, and patient with yourself and your partner. You’re in this together! As Dr. John Gottman has said, “In a good relationship people get angry, but in a very different way. The Marriage Masters see a problem a bit like a soccer ball. They kick it around. It’s ‘our’ problem.”

We are fortunate that we live in a world where you and your partner can take the time to explore, discuss, and learn about mindfulness and your emotions. Emotional fitness starts with you taking the first step to check in with your self and consider how you are feeling, what thoughts are you having and how your body feels.

This is adapted from three articles, Why Every Man Should Track Their Emotional Fitness and 6 Steps to Mindfully Deal with Difficult Emotions and The Seven Traits of Emotional Fitness

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