How to build your emotional strength

How to stay emotionally strong when dealing with the roller coaster of life? Sometimes it may feel that life is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at you; ups and downs of family life, ?social pressures, challenges at work, ?economic and environmental impacts, to name but a few. It is not an easy task, but you can build resilience and improve your emotional strength to help you thrive. Nick Wignall wrote an impressive blogpost on the 4 habits of emotionally strong people, which I would recommend reading. Here’s a short summary to get started.

First and foremost emotional strength isn’t about getting rid of difficult feelings, ?it means you know how to respond to them in a healthy way. For example, being emotionally strong when you’re grieving means being willing to feel your sadness and accept your loss instead of distracting yourself from it. “Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.” Charlotte Bront?.

To build your resilience and become emotionally strong, try cultivating these 4 habits :

1. Control your attention, not your emotions. Our automatic response to difficult emotions is to try and control them — usually in an attempt to escape them or “fix” them. Instead of controlling them, acknowledge how you feel and choose what you focus on. For instance if you made a mistake, stop focussing on what you did wrong. Instead focus on how to fix the problem and what you have learned from it. ?Practice holding your attention on what really matters.
2. Practice compassionate self-talk. Most of us learned as a child that if you want to be strong, you need to be hard on yourself to achieve. However this approach doesn’t work well with difficult emotions as the harder you are on yourself for feeling bad, the worse you will end up feeling. Instead, be compassionate and understanding with yourself. The same understanding and compassion you would give to a friend or family member in need. ?Be kind to yourself. True emotional strength comes from gentleness, not criticism.
3. ?Use values, not feelings, to make decisions. It’s good to listen to your emotions, but don’t take orders from them. Emotions are a survival mechanism that adapted over hundreds of years, and in many cases – particularly in immediate danger – very useful. However emotions can easily lead you astray as often as they will guide you. Therefor spend time to discover and clarify your values to be able to make decisions that are good for you in the long-term, rather than acting on impulse on whatever feels easy in the moment.
4. Set (and enforce) healthy boundaries. Set healthy boundaries and stand up for yourself, your own needs and wants. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to say “no” to a friend, ?family member or your manager. For instance it may be hard to say what you really want in a relationship, or scary to say no to taking care of someone else’s work. To build your emotional strength, practice communicating your wants and needs assertively and have the courage to set (and enforce) healthy boundaries. ”No” is a complete sentence.

I hope you will find this helpful in building your resilience to help you thrive. You can find more examples and advice in Nick Wignall’s blog.