Wellness is a paramount aspect of living your best life and regaining your identity after a substance abuse disorder. It goes beyond just not being sick and focuses on identifying your ideal well-being. Emotional wellness will be the focus in this post.
There are a number of sub-groups to wellness: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, environmental, financial, occupational, and social. According to the World Health Organization wellness is, “”a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Wellness is an important topic to discuss in regard to recovery for a number of reasons. First off, because it can help a person avoid relapse. Figures from the National Institute on Drug Abuse indicate forty to sixty percent of people who go into recovery will relapse within one year. The flip side to this statistic is that as much as sixty percent of people in recovery don’t relapse. Another reason wellness can be helpful is that it offers people recovering with the necessary tools to create a healthy lifestyle. Recovery is a lifelong process that takes place gradually. The further into recovery a person goes the greater their opportunity to build good habits one after another.
Emotional Wellness
We are all familiar with our emotions, however some of us end up having our lives run by them. Emotional wellness helps prevent us from becoming a slave to our emotions by evaluating how well we’re handling our feelings. In addition, this dimension helps us recognize, manage, and properly work through our emotions. Furthermore, your emotional health typically determines your ability to undertake obstacles that come up in life.
Having strong emotional wellness promotes the development of resiliency, reduces stress, and improves your ability to unwind and relax. Part of emotional wellness is being perceptive to positive and negative emotions and the ability to recognize how to cope with these feelings. Our emotional wellbeing also incorporates our capacity to learn from and as a result grow due to our encounters. This promotes developing strong skills with decision making and is integral to our overall well-being.
Emotional wellness is important because it teaches us how to accept our feelings. After you’ve accepted how you feel you can start learning why you feel such a way. This allows you to determine how to act as a response to these emotions. In order to work on our emotional wellness we must keep in mind the importance of optimism. When we’re optimistic we can handle both positive and negative emotions confidently and be mindful to learn from our mistakes. Conquering emotional wellness allows us to encounter life more easily. Life becomes more balanced as we learn to develop our mindfulness.