5 Natural Ways to Improve Your Emotional Health

By Theresa Harding

If you struggle with managing your emotions, keep reading to learn 5 natural ways to improve your emotional health.   So many times, we experience setbacks in our life and emotional well-being, and we feel defeated when the solution is not readily available. 

We get so caught up in our emotions that we can’t use wisdom to improve our emotional health.  There are times when plain old common sense to judge what is best for us and when to seek emotional help is all that it takes. 

While some might think it’s best to load up on antidepressants or some other form of medication to “help us through” the challenge, others seek alternative solutions.  I’m going to share with you 5 ways.

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The emotional well-being of a person regarding thoughts or how they behave or feel contributes to the emotional health of a person.  Listed below are the 5 natural ways to boost emotional health.

1. Maintaining Healthy Sex Hormones

The drive for sex can be improved through natural means.  Sex drive is the desire or urges to engage in sexual activities. There comes a time when a person does not have the desire for sex.  Exercise is a proven natural way of boosting sex drive in that it helps in the flow of blood which is important in boosting sex hormones like testosterone and endorphins.

There are many reasons that your sex hormones can become out of balance.  Whether it be from childbirth, a poor diet, stress, lack of sleep, or medication, it’s easy to become out of balance with your sex hormones.

If you believe any of the points in the list above are affecting your hormones, just know that there is help available.  Those points should each be addressed individually to get back in balance.  In fact, an article written by the Wellness Mama gives some great tips to help you address your sex hormones.

2. Stress Management and Aromatherapy

Stress Management & Aromatherapy

Stress is a state of mind which is disturbing and might develop into depression if not properly managed. In the field of aromatherapy, essential oils have been found to be very effective in stress management and helping to improve your emotional health.  These include lavender essential oil which has been proved to improve moods as well as decreasing anxiety.

Citrus essential oils have also been found to work well on depression, as these oils help with boosting your mood.  This can give you an experience of positive mental health as you focus on the citrusy scents to help revive your mood and begin to feel better and happier.  I love these citrus essential oils when added to a diffuser. 

It helps to uplift my mood in the morning when I’m taking that quiet time to think about my day and just meditate.  If you’ve never used a diffuser, you’re in for a real treat!  Diffusers release the medicinal properties of essential oils to help you get great healing results from minor ailments like migraine headaches, congestion, and some aches and pains, to name a few. 

Give them a try!  Even my teens use them topically.  Just remember, all essential oils cannot be ingested,  so you have to make sure that the ones linked above are not for ingesting, but you can try others that can be ingested, like Young Living Oils.  They usually have to be purchased through a Vendor, but they are also sold on Amazon by some Vendors too.

3. Avoid Seasonal Disorders

Seasonal affective disorders (SAD) are associated with daytime heavy sleeping, isolation, being depressed in certain seasons as well as cravings for certain foods like carbohydrates. There are natural ways to control this disorder. 

For example, to help improve your emotional health, follow the right diet by reducing your intake of carbs and instead, increase your intake of foods with tryptophan. This is an amino acid which is highly available in seafood, broccoli, and poultry.  Its importance is that it is changed to serotonin which is a mood booster.

4. Avoid the Development of Depression

Depression is a critical condition which can develop into hypertension if not managed correctly. This condition develops through stages and among the stages is mild depression.  To improve your emotional health, natural remedies like having enough sleep have helped in managing mild depression.

You can learn more ways of avoiding depression as mentioned in an article by Dr. Axe in detail.  This may help you learn of holistic ways to heal from depression if you suffer from depression.

It is also better to focus on positive mental health as you find many positive ways to manage symptoms of depression when you feel down. Exercise is also important in that it promotes the production of certain hormones which boost mood.  I can say in my own personal experience, going through a season of severely losing sleep over a work project. 

I remember feeling very sleep early in the morning after waking up from about 3 hours of sleep.  This happened for about 3 months until I dozed off while driving my kids home from school one afternoon.  Luckily I didn’t run into anything, but that moment scared me straight! 

Once I realized that I needed to make more time for sleep and less time for the other things that prevented me from sleeping properly, I made some adjustments to my sleep schedule.   After making adjustments to my sleep schedule, the depressed feelings faded away.  Omega 3 fatty acids  were my solution in helping me with balancing my mood health.  

5. Avoid Emotional Eating Habits

Emotional Health

Emotional eating happens when one eats too much because they are undergoing chronic stress. This behavior is an unhealthy way of handling stress and managing your emotional well-being. A natural way of handling it is through guided meditation.

This is a great form of positive mental health when finding a better way to improve your mental health.  It is done by summoning all your thoughts on one thing as this is seen as an exercise to the brain and ends up relieving stress in the process.  For me, I avoid food when I feel any emotional stress. 

I once lost 5 pounds in one week from emotional stress.  As we always hear, “stress can kill you” if you don’t get it under control.  One supplement I started taking to help me manage stress was, magnesium.  This was effective in helping me relax before bed too.

A good habit to start is to keep a food diary. This can help you document what you are consuming so that you can look back on the list and see what you’ve eaten when you felt a certain way.  Sometimes, the wrong foods can contribute to your bad emotions.  You might think the foods you eat when you feel sadly emotional will make you feel better, but in truth, you will only feel worse! 

One tip from an article written by the Mayo Clinic is to document everything you eat each day, how much you eat when you eat, how you’re feeling when you eat and how hungry you are.  Over time, you may find a pattern that leads to your food consumption and the mood you’re in each time.  This may really hone in and help you find ways to avoid this happening.

SUMMARY

Everyone will experience some level of emotional stress at some point in their life, whether it be from the death of a loved one, the stress of a job, or the stress of parenthood.  emotional stress is inevitable.  How it handled effectively is what can make all the difference in the world.  You can either take a natural approach to heal from it or the conventional approach, through medication or drugs.

Of course, the safest way is the holistic approach since the side effects are minimal.  Always speak with a health care practitioner before changing your diet or trying new supplements.

The success of your health is always contingent upon which approach you take to reach your healing.  It can be done, just be patient. 

How do you manage emotional stress?  Is it effective?

References and Resources

Dolgin, E. (2018). Tracking down the optimum dose of exercise. Stroke, 13, 57.

Hoeger, W. W., Hoeger, S. A., Hoeger, C. I., & Fawson, A. L. (2018). 

Lifetime of Physical Fitness and Wellness. Cengage Learning.

Pattyn, N., Van Puyvelde, M., Fernandez-Tellez, H., Roelands, B., & Mairesse, O. (2018).

From the midnight sun to the longest night: Sleep in Antarctica. Sleep medicine reviews, 37, 159-172.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss/art-20047342

Sometimes your diet can influence how you feel and affect your emotional health.  If you want to improve your emotional health and eliminate toxic foods from your diet, I have a free Diet Makeover course that I used to help me improve the health of my family.  Click below to download.

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