We all learn to brush our teeth, bathe and groom as children. But good hygiene shouldn’t stop there when we become adults. Experts believe that you should also practice emotional hygiene.

Your self-esteem is like an emotional immune system—it can increase your resilience and protect you from stress and anxiety. Good emotional hygiene involves monitoring your self-esteem and boosting it when it's low.

To get you started, here are five tips for improving your emotional hygiene taken from psychologytoday.com

Pay Attention to Emotional Pain

If a physical ache or pain doesn’t get better in a few days, you probably take some kind of action. The same should be true of psychological pain. If you find yourself hurting emotionally for several days because of a rejection, a failure, a bad mood, or any other reason, it means you’ve sustained a psychological wound and you need to treat it with emotional-first-aid techniques.

Stop Emotional Bleeding

Many psychological wounds launch vicious cycles that only make the pain worse. For example, failure can lead to a lack of confidence and feelings of helplessness that only make you more likely to fail again in the future. Having awareness of these consequences, catching these negative cycles, and stopping your emotional bleeding by correcting them is crucial in many such situations.

Protect Your Self-Esteem

Our self-esteem acts as an emotional immune system (learn more here) which can buffer us and lend us greater emotional resilience. Therefore, we should get in the habit of monitoring our self-esteem, boosting it when it is low, and avoiding negative self-talk of the kind that damages it further.

Battle Negative Thinking

It is natural to think about distressing events, but when our thinking becomes repetitive we are no longer problem-solving, we are ruminating. Ruminating can be very costly to our psychological health, as well as to our physical health, and can put us at risk for clinical depression and even cardiovascular disease. We have to battle negative thinking and avoid falling into the habit of over-focusing on distressing events.

Become Informed About the Impact of Psychological Wounds

There is much more we need to learn about emotional hygiene and how to treat psychological wounds. Fortunately, much information is available in this blog as well as elsewhere on PsychologyToday.com. When you learn how to treat psychological wounds—and teach your children how to do so as well—you will not only build emotional resilience, you will thrive.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-squeak...

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• Emotional Health