If you've been paying attention in the business world lately,
you've probably heard the term emotional health. But what's the definition?
What is emotional health?
Emotional health is a person's ability to identify process and act upon
feelings in specific circumstances and over the course of time.
Maybe you have questions now? What makes up emotional health?
How does emotional health differ from mental health?
And how does one go about building strong emotional health? In this video,
I'm going to answer all those questions and be sure to stick around until the
end,
because I'll share with you five powerful behavioral and lifestyle strategies to
build unshakeable emotional health. This is the Dr. K Show.
Most high-achieving professionals and entrepreneurs suffer silently in chronic
stress. I'm Dr. Karthik, Ramanan,
executive emotional health coach and licensed naturopathic physician.
I help professionals and entrepreneurs end burnout by creating unshakable
emotional health.
You deserve to lead a purpose driven life without compromises. On this channel,
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valuable topics to end burnout and build emotional health.
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Emotional health is a person's ability to identify process and
act upon it feelings in specific circumstances and over the course of
time,
emotional health incorporates emotional intelligence and emotional
resilience. So let's unpack these two concepts.
Emotional intelligence is the awareness of one's emotional state and
those of others, especially in response to external stimuli.
Have you ever been around somebody who,
especially in the face of immediate adversity simply knows how to carry
themselves and how to interact with others?
Emotional intelligence is an extremely important aspect of leadership at all
levels. The other part of emotional health is emotional resilience.
This is one's ability to adjust to circumstances and recover
from emotional setback. How well do you respond to bad news?
Do setbacks and acute stress send you down a dark road?
How quickly can you return to your fully functioning state of mind?
Just like health is not merely the absence of illness,
emotional health is not the act of suppressing emotion.
Here's an example of emotional health with two fictitious friends.
Jack and Susie are both dealing with the pandemic and social distancing.
Jack is a high achieving individual,
and having to furlough his employees and not be able to grow the company
started to get to him.
But he refused to let anyone know when it all started,
Jack felt anxiety, but never allowed others to know that he was in pain.
And as the weeks went on and the isolation continued,
his stress increased to the point that he took naps during the day,
felt no energy to do the things he loved and generally stayed in a
pessimistic state of mind, which was very unusual for him.
Jack is a proud man trying to tough it out, suffering in silence.
Unfortunately, our character Jack is emotionally unhealthy.
Susie on the other hand also felt anxiety in the beginning.
Susie is a high achieving entrepreneur. And unfortunately, due to the pandemic,
she had to effectively shut down the business.
She was passionately growing for the past several years. However,
she was willing to experience those emotions and let them pass.
She recognized that she needed to allow herself to grieve the loss of her
business and the changing state of the world. Once she did,
she was able to refocus her attention on taking care of herself and making the
most out of the time that she had given the new circumstances,
pivoting her business and finding new opportunities to serve people.
Susie is emotionally healthy. If you're getting value out of this so far,
please do me a favor and hit that like button. Thank you.
What is mental health then? How does it differ?
It is generally agreed upon that mental health is not the same as emotional
health. However, the lines are not that clear.
The World Health Organization describes mental health as "a state of
wellbeing in which an individual realizes his or her own
abilities can cope with the normal stresses of life can work
productively and is able to make a contribution to his
or her community."
mentalhealth.gov says "Mental health includes our emotional,
psychological, and social wellbeing.
It affects how we think feel". And act and they go on.
So is emotional health, a subset of mental health,
or do they stand side by side? Honestly,
these definitions are in a way arbitrary conclusions created
by human beings using the tool of language.
One way to think about it is that mental health focuses more on thoughts
and neurotransmitter function.
Whereas emotional health focuses on feelings and processing.
In my experience though,
I have never worked with a patient or a client who was mentally healthy,
but emotionally unhealthy or mentally unhealthy,
but emotionally healthy. Why?
Because the underlying determinants for emotional and mental health are
generally the same: lifestyle factors, brain health,
the gut microbiome. Let's dive into that next.
Now that you know what emotional health is,
you might be wondering how does one improve emotional health?
How does one create unshakable emotional health? Oh, I'm glad you asked.
Allow me to introduce you to the five pillars of emotional health:
your psychology, your relationships, nutrition, sleep,
and exercise. Your psychology by this.
I mean your established patterns and beliefs, the way you talk to yourself,
your history of trauma,
the stories about the facts of life that you grew up around.
This is personal development.
This is your willingness to step outside of your comfort zone to discover what
patterns have been running your life.
This is your ability to create and live into a vision of the person that you
wish to be. Your relationships. If you study personal development at all,
you know that we are the average of the five people in ideas that we spend the
most time with,
but it bears repeating because it is so monumentally important.
If our relationships are sour with those five people,
we spend the most time with our emotional health will suffer significantly.
There is no way around it.
Working on your relationships means addressing the pain points with your
significant other and those close to you.
It means having conversations with your boss, your coworkers,
to create an environment around you.
That's most conducive to emotional intelligence and emotional resilience.
It means releasing who you think you should be and embracing who you are.
So you can attract the best people into your life. Your nutrition.
What does nutrition have to do with emotional health? A lot, in fact.
I think you'll agree that if our brain and nerve function is not operating
at proper capacity, we're not going to feel well.
And if we don't feel well, our emotional resilience will suffer.
Neurotransmitters are the compounds that aid in sending signals through our
nervous system. Examples include epinephrine dopamine, serotonin, GABA,
and many others.
What you may not know is that 90% of the neurotransmitters in our body come from
our gut.
There are an estimated 100 trillion bacteria in our
gut that are responsible for neurotransmitter production,
as well as many other functions that we're learning about seemingly daily.
What I'm talking about is called the gut microbiome.
These are the bacteria that provide us with essential compounds needed for us to
function, and we provide them a place to live.
But the types of bacteria that grow in your gut depends on what we eat.
If we eat too many foods that harm our gut microbes,
we're going to lose the body function that those microbes provide.
Diets high in refined sugars, fried fats, processed foods,
and animal products tend to word producing a suboptimal gut
microbiome. But on the other hand,
diets high in whole plant foods and insoluble fiber are essential
for a thriving gut microbiome and therefore optimal emotional
health. Let's be honest, us high achievers, like to sacrifice, sleep,
to get more done don't we? Major projects or work? Stay up late.
Building your company? Get up early. I get it because I was that way too.
During my undergraduate studies at Cornell university,
I routinely slept for four hours a night and in 30
weeks over two semesters,
my freshman year I pulled 37 all nighters.
And during my years at Goldman Sachs in my twenties,
I got more sleep. Six hours. I'd work late,
stay up late beyond call or constantly checking emails,
and then get up early to go to work the next day.
And I prided myself on needing as little sleep as possible.
After four years of medical school,
that lifetime of sacrificing sleep caught up to me in the form of
"adrenal fatigue" and burnout. Needless to say,
it took a toll on my emotional resilience, which as you now know,
is a component of emotional health.
It wasn't until I personally shed the workaholic identity as a badge
of honor, that I took my emotional health to the next level.
We can still work hard and work smart while still getting our critical
sleep. Why is sleep so important?
Sleep is when our brains process the day's events.
We place the day's events and lessons into long-term memory and form connections
in our brains. It's also the time when our bodies detoxify and shed waste,
sacrificing sleep will catch up to you eventually.
And if you want to end burnout, if you want to build emotional health,
you have to prioritize sleep.
If you need help fixing your body clock so that you can get good sleep,
check out this video, which I'll also link in the description below.
Your exercise. Motion drives emotion.
How great do you feel after a workout? Endorphins run high,
your blood is flowing and your body and mind finally feel in sync.
Working out isn't as much about weight loss as it is about training our bodies
to operate at the highest level. If you want to feel good,
if you want to perform at your best, if you want to feel your best,
there is no substitute for moving your body.
Emotional health requires physical health. Your psychology, your relationships,
your nutrition, your sleep, and your exercise.
The five pillars of unshakeable, emotional health.
Which of these five do you need to work on? Let me know in the comments below,
be sure to tune in next week for another episode of the Dr. K Show,
where I'll talk about how burnout affects your body and what might be going on
hormonally to contribute to it. In the meantime,
be sure to check out this video right here on how to fix your body clock.
Always remember, I believe in your greatness.