“Emotional Diet”?

HEALTH Nov 9, 2020 1547 Add to Reading List

Thoughts creates emotions and emotions create our mental health.

To be emotionally fit, one needs to be emotionally independent.

This means, if there is a crisis outside, can you be calm inside. Somebody can be rude or angry to you, be shouting at you, can you still be stable and respond with dignity. This is called emotional fitness, where you are not affected by the energy of the situations and people and have the strength to choose your response.”

Emotional fitness can be effectively practiced in our day to day lives by making a few conscious decisions focusing on filtration of content being consumed, designing a healthy emotional diet and practicing lifestyle discipline.

Emotional diet consists of what you watch, what you listen and what you read. This makes up our emotional health. Our thoughts are created based on information.

First step to take care of your mind is discipline.

Take a lot of care of the content you consume. Calibrate how much, how long and the quality of the content you want to consume from social media, digital platforms, television, movies, serials and songs. If the content has too much of stress, violence, anger, criticism, ridicule and others, then that is what will slowly affect your mental health, so be on emotional diet stop consuming such stuff.”

A few tips on practicing healthy emotional lifestyle like disconnecting from work related activities 2 hours before bed, signing out of social media platforms 1 hour before bed, denoting 10 minutes to journaling before bed so as not take negative thoughts and grudges to sleep and practicing affirmations right before sleep so that the positive high thought vibrations are carried through the sleep time.

To implement

Try to be more aware of your thoughts.
Now and then, ask yourself whether the thoughts you are thinking are useful and can help you in anything.
Acknowledge the fact that you can choose your thoughts. Thinking is usually an automatic process, but with more awareness of what is going in your mind, and with some self-discipline, you will be able to reduce the time spent on unnecessary thoughts.
Try to choose your thoughts, and reject thoughts that cause strain, stress and unhappiness. This might not be simple and easy, therefore, don’t be frustrated if you fail over and gain. Keep trying, and you will gradually develop this skill.
Your mental diet should not include thoughts of anger, resentment and envy.
Your mental diet should also keep you away from thoughts about the past, and fears about the future.
One of the main tools of the “Emotional Diet” is concentration. By improving your concentration, you gain the inner strength necessary to focus your mind on the thoughts of your choice. Well-developed concentration enables you to ignore thoughts that you do not want.