A year ago, I was applying to multiple universities for my Bachelor’s degree. I clearly remember the day when I received my first rejection from a university I had applied to. This was the moment I encountered a severe psychological battle. This was the first email I had received and it felt like it was setting a precedent for the rest of the responses yet to come. Even though I knew this was just the first response, I couldn't help but feel futile. “You’re incapable and worthless. You should have been smarter, worked harder, done more. You should just give up.”- these words kept replaying in my head like a broken tape recorder. I believed the voice inside my head and felt emotionally drained since my self-esteem had shattered. A month later, the same thing happened to a friend of mine. To my astonishment, I found myself telling her- “This does not define your worth. You are smart, capable and amazing.” I felt betrayed by myself and a hypocrite.
Why was it easier to offer advice to someone else but not to myself? Why are humans so emotionally weak when it comes to nurturing our own mental health? The answer to this is because we pedestalize our physiological fitness over our psychological and emotional health. We are always enhancing our bodily functioning by maintaining a balance between our body and the environments we live in i.e.- we take care of ourselves as well as thoroughly sanitize the places around us thus practicing physical hygiene.
But what about our mental health and hygiene? “Mental health too is a state of harmony between the individual’s various capacities and the strains that society places upon these capacities.” The practice of maintaining this harmony is called mental hygiene. However, this is not the same as emotional health. The difference between the two can be highlighted by this quote by Guy Winch- a psychologist and an expert in the science of emotional health. “Mental health is about diagnosable conditions like depression and anxiety. Emotional health is about common experiences like loneliness, failure, and heartbreak, the non-diagnosable stuff.” While mental hygiene is clinical and requires professional guidance at times, it can be prevented if we divert our energy towards emotional hygiene by focusing on the mentioned mundane hurdles first.
We face rejection, failure, loneliness and heartbreak throughout our lives but do not give it the same importance as physiological ailments despite them being equally threatening. Therefore, it is fundamental to practice emotional hygiene by using scientifically proven tools to strengthen our emotional resilience. Here are some ways that have been suggested by Guy Winch:
The emotional first-aid kit-
1. Pay attention to Emotional Pain:
If you are able to recognize signs of emotional pain- loneliness, sadness etc., it is the first step to treating it. This helps to ‘nip it in the bud’ before it snowballs into something harmful. If you feel a prolonged sense of these negative emotions, it means you have not been able to recognize and treat the problem. Once this awareness is developed, healing is the next step.
2. Stop Emotional Bleeding:
If we see a wound that is bleeding, we immediately know to disinfect it and put a Band-Aid. The same must be done with emotional wounds. When I was feeling rejected after the email response, I was emotionally bleeding. Instead of fixing it, I deepened the wound by berating myself and picking apart my flaws.
3. Protect your Self- Esteem:
If the voice inside your head is determined to break down your self-esteem, try giving yourself advice from a third person perspective. What would you tell your friend if they had recently gone through failure?
4. Battle negative thoughts:
When you feel yourself ruminating and replaying the painful incident in your head, distract yourself. This does not mean that you have to forcefully search for the silver lining since that can lead to emotional suppression. Instead, it is easier to take your mind off it by engaging in another task. Would you keep touching a painful wound that has not healed completely? So why do we keep revisiting our emotional wounds?
While emotional hygiene is a practise that may take years to turn into a habit, it is advisable to inculcate this from a tender age. This practise can be instilled by encouraging children to develop self-awareness and self-control through social-emotional learning. These skills coupled with the tips in the emotional first-aid kit can increase emotional maturity. Therefore, Flip too aims to play a role in creating an environment that augments emotional, personal and interpersonal skills as children interact over books. Through Flip educators can foster social emotional learning among children in a fun way.
References
Anderson, Harold H. “Research in Mental Hygiene.” Childhood Education 7, no. 8 (1931): 423–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/00094056.1931.10723662.
“Home.” Guy Winch, March 10, 2021. https://www.guywinch.com/.
How to Practice Emotional Hygiene | Guy Winch | TEDxLinnaeusUniversity. YouTube. YouTube, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rni41c9iq54.
Trisha Deb Psychology Major at Ashoka University,
Researcher at Flip
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