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Why Is Emotional Wellness Essential in Recovery?

Your emotional wellness is vital, as it affects your work, home life, relationships, and most importantly, your mental health.

What is Emotional Wellness?

Overcoming the stresses and strains of withdrawal and recovery requires some tools in your arsenal, and one of these is emotional wellness. Your health and wellness in recovery, including how well you can handle cravings when they happen, depends mainly on your emotional wellbeing, which can make your recovery more bearable.

There is no straight answer to how to achieve emotional wellness. But it can help to develop coping skills, resilience, social networks, and learn how to cope with stressful situations or avoid stress as best as you can. 1

Understanding Emotional Wellness

Emotional wellness is the ability to handle life's stress and adapt to change successfully, even in the most challenging times of your life. You may need to stay emotionally healthy to achieve happiness in recovery. How you feel and view the world affects every aspect of your life.

For example, your feelings can directly affect your daily performance, how you relate with others, how you relate to your environment, and your general mental health. 2

Indicators of Emotional Wellness 

Your ability to manage your thoughts, feelings, and your capacity to respond appropriately to adversity reflect how good your emotional health is, which is helpful throughout recovery from co-occurring disorders.

Other signs of emotional wellness that may facilitate your wellness and recovery, especially while in recovery, are:

  • Being able to talk with others about your emotions and participating in emotional wellness activities
  • Strengthening your social connections
  • Being able to relax
  • Feeling good about who you are
  • Being mindful
  • Getting quality sleep
  • Reducing stress
  • Building resilience
  • Being able to cope with loss

Why is Understanding Emotional Wellness Important?

The reasons why you should be able to understand your emotional wellness are varied. A crucial component of overall wellness is emotional health. An emotionally healthy person has control over their thoughts, moods, and actions. They can remain optimistic in the face of adversity and recover from potential failures.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) notes that emotional wellbeing is vital because it can affect how you carry out tasks and go through life. It can also affect how well you tackle demanding situations and problems, adapt to change, and react to complex life events. Emotional wellness can positively or negatively affect your relationships, work, and overall mental and physical health, such as making an illness’ symptoms worse. 3

Importance of Emotional Wellness in Recovery

Your individual needs, strengths, and experiences, including traumatic experiences, are significant in determining the setbacks and triumphs you may encounter in your lengthy recovery journey. Treatment for drug abuse and psychiatric disorders often focuses solely on alleviating the symptoms that people experience rather than addressing the root causes of their condition.

Emotional health is vital for everyone, but it is especially crucial for those in rehabilitation because it helps individuals pay attention to and make sense of their emotions and equips them to deal with the difficulties of everyday life in a more constructive way. It is why mental health professionals often stress the need for you to learn mechanisms for dealing with emotions during recovery. 4

Impact of Poor Emotional Wellness

If someone can't keep negative feelings in check, it could hurt their physical and emotional health. Chronic stress, which is caused by having persistently negative thoughts and feelings like helplessness and hopelessness, creates problems with the hormonal system, robs the brain of essential chemicals that make us happy, and lowers the immune system, among other things, including: 5

  • Increased illness due to poor self-management
  • Challenges at work, school, with friends, and at home
  • Trouble concentrating or focusing on important matters

How Emotional Wellness Affects Your Life 

Emotional wellness will inevitably impact many facets of your life – these will be detailed below for reference.

Relationships

Poor mental health is not suitable for relationships. You are more likely to lash out or act unfairly to your friends, family, and other loved ones if you are emotionally unstable.

To be able to maintain healthy relationships, you may consider looking into emotional wellness tips such as:

  • Listening to your children or other family members and creating time for them
  • Building positive routines geared toward recovery
  • Supporting and accepting support from your friends and family

Work and School

Poor emotional wellness may lead to poor performance at work or in school as well. You may end up losing your job or being expelled from school due to behavior associated with poor mental wellbeing. Having healthy mental wellness makes it easy for you to achieve milestones and perform at your best. It also increases your productivity.

Mental Health

When you hear someone talk about mental health, the first thing that probably crosses your mind is depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues, but this doesn’t encapsulate everything having to do with mental health.

Mental wellness affects all areas of your life and is very important in recovery for all the conditions you may be having.  Without mental health, it can be very difficult to recover from other health issues you may be suffering from.

What Does Emotional Wellness Involve?

You are said to be emotionally healthy when despite any challenges you may be going through, you can overcome them and persevere. Your emotional wellness may also involve:

  • Not judging yourself
  • Learning from experiences
  • Avoiding negative emotions
  • Allowing a full range of emotions

Benefits of Emotional Wellness in Recovery

Emotional Wellness

Your recovery from co-occurring disorders, among other mental health problems, can benefit from mental wellness in the following ways:

  • You may relate better with others
  • Reducing or avoiding stressful situations reduces illness
  • Maintaining a positive attitude enables productivity, making it possible for you to accomplish more.

This is especially true for those who have been diagnosed with co-occurring or co-existing health disorders.

How to Achieve Emotional Wellness for Successful Recovery

The good news is that a state of emotional instability is not permanent, no matter how difficult it may seem to get out of that state of mind. It is normal to feel that way, but it only hampers your recovery process.

The following tips may help you achieve success in your recovery by improving your emotional wellness: 6

  • Be kind to yourself
  • Practice gratitude
  • Connect with loved ones
  • Meditate
  • Use visualizations
  • Attend counseling or therapy sessions
  • Build healthy physical habits

Find Help with Emotional Wellness for Recovery at Anew Treatment Center

Your journey to recovery is a long and sometimes tedious journey involving your family. Therefore, your state of mind and emotional wellness is critical in your recovery process. 

Find help with your emotional wellness to recover fully from all your conditions at Anew Treatment Center today. Our professional team is ready to help you with a treatment plan, including therapy that can equip you or your loved one with the necessary tools and techniques to achieve and maintain long term emotional wellness. 

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Our team is ready to talk and determine how we can help. Rest assured your call is confidential. We're here for you.