Emotional Well-Being
You Are What You Eat Emotionally
Why You Might Feel So Down All the Time — And How to Feel Better
We’ve all heard our friends and peers talk about how important it is to get our dark leafy greens and our organic fruits and our ground flaxseed and our chia seeds. Yes, these are important for our bodies, about a healthy diet for our emotions?
It’s startling to realize the extent our friends and family have over our emotional life and our energy moment to moment. Have you ever noticed when you have a frustrating morning, it so often turns into a frustrating day? A happy morning, a happy day?
This isn’t an accident — we prime ourselves with our morning routines with how we feel. “Our thoughts become our actions, our actions become our habits, our habits become our destiny,” something like that anyway.
See, we tend to take in the emotional soup of our daily lives — positive or negative. Stewing in negativity even externally can cause us to absorb it in harmful ways.
Some of this we can’t always avoid, but we do have control over who we spend time with — barring a prison term or being joined at the hip with someone. Yes, we become our friends. And this is the mechanic that drives that effect.
But here’s the important part — we don’t need to even be around positive people to feel positive. We can be happy all on our own, through our physiology and our psychology.
A simple daily practice of gratitude, goal-setting, and physical energy can enormously help us to create this sense of happiness and positive attitude.
We can take special care to be around people we want to be like, and not be around negativity of any kind. Because what matters are those people we call our best friends and family. They are the ones that have such an impact on us throughout our lives.
Unfortunately, I think that we as a culture have terrible emotional nutrition. Social media, loneliness, anti-depressants, stagnation, 9 to 5 jobs — this is the world that we live in currently. Similar to physical nutrition, I think we need emotional nutrition.
What’s your daily emotional diet? Do you hang out with negative people because “hey, we hang out together” or do you have a significant other who “you know, isn’t the best, but I’d rather be with them than alone”? Or does your morning involve a great deal of frustration or anger in any way?
A morning routine of gratitude, goal-setting, and physical movement can change your whole day, week, year, lifetime. We can change our thoughts, our actions, our habits, and ultimately our destiny.
Take care to improve or maintain beautiful emotional nutrition — practice happiness, practice gratitude, and know that you are what you emotionally eat.
