How Emotional & Behavioral Welfare Contribute to Healing
How Emotional & Behavioral Welfare Contribute to Healing
Struggles with mental and physical health arise from many different sources. Each can suffer due to physical illness, mental illness, or exposure to trauma. Depending on the individual and their unique situation, the impacts of any of these factors (or various others) will affect how quickly and how successfully they heal. Caring for your emotional and behavioral health are vital components in the healing process. Each impacts your overall wellbeing in unique and particular ways. Therefore, it is essential to address both facets of your mental health as you work towards healing. Failure to do so can lead to lasting complications, including illness, disease, and addiction.
What is Emotional Welfare?
Emotional welfare or emotional wellbeing is a state of mind or state of being that focuses on your ability to produce positivity. This can be in the form of positive emotions, thoughts, moods, or feelings. It is also the ability to adjust or adapt to adversity and stressful situations without turning to harmful or dangerous coping mechanisms such as drugs or alcohol.
A crucial factor to emotional welfare is the concept of resilience or “emotional resilience.” Someone who has a higher level of emotional resilience is often better able to manage the day-to-day stressors and challenges that come with navigating daily life. Additionally, someone with a higher level of emotional resilience will often possess the skills necessary to manage crisis or trauma more effectively than someone without.
Working on enhancing emotional resilience and emotional wellbeing allows you to focus on the positive aspects of life while managing the negative in safe and healthy ways.
What is Behavioral Welfare?
Behavioral welfare or behavioral health explains the connection between your behaviors and your overall physical, psychological, and spiritual health. Behavioral health is not just focused on actions but on habits such as healthy eating, healthy exercise, and other activities or “behaviors” that would affect your mental and/or physical health.
It is important to note that behavioral health and mental health are not necessarily the same things. Although the terms are often used interchangeably and seem similar, there is a subtle difference. Behavioral health is a blanket term used to describe how someone’s actions affect their overall health. This can include how their actions impact their mental health. When assessing your behavioral health, your provider will look at all factors that may affect all aspects of your health. For example, if you are overweight, your provider will examine all factors that may have led to your obesity. Although some elements may be mental health related, they are also physical.
Resilience, Recovery and Lasting Healing
Emotional and behavioral wellbeing or reliance are vital components in recovery. The more resilient someone is, the better they will be capable of managing and addressing the symptoms of a mental health disorder or addiction. Emotional and behavioral wellbeing help during treatment at a treatment center like Los Angeles Outpatient Center. Both are also vital aspects of maintaining lasting recovery. Fortunately, resilience is something that can be built and cultivate to ensure it can be called upon when needed most.
Unlike some human traits, resilience is not a “have or don’t have” quality. Although we are each born with a certain amount of resilience, we continue to develop more as we grow and experience life. Both the good and the bad we experience help to increase our resilience and make us better able to face trauma and stressors in the future. When you seek treatment to overcome addiction or manage symptoms of a mental health condition, part of the therapeutic process focuses on developing emotional and behavioral wellbeing or resilience. Once you have learned these skills, they will benefit you for years to come, especially when faced with relapse triggers outside of the treatment environment.
Practice Self-Care and Mindfulness
Mindfulness practices and self-care both improve mental health while promoting physical health, behavioral health, and emotional wellbeing. These skills can help calm the mind, relieve anxiety, and reduce the intensity of other emotions that may challenge your overall wellbeing. There are many ways to practice self-care. Some of the most common examples include exercise, yoga and meditation, and alternative therapies, including art in music therapy. These treatment opportunities not only help enhance the benefits of treatment during the “actual” treatment process, but they provide skills that can be used long term. Other examples of self-care include taking breaks to focus on yourself by watching a movie or reading a book. These simple yet essential things can allow you the time you need to disconnect from everything else and regulate your emotions and improve your overall health and wellbeing.
Focus on your Health
There are many studies that point to a connection between diet and exercise and emotional wellbeing. A 2010 study in the American Journal of Psychology found that women who ate more processed, fried, or sugary foods were more likely to experience anxiety and depression than those who focused their diet on healthy options such as meat, fish, whole grains, fruit, and vegetables. Another 2016 study showed that those who increased their daily intake of fruits and vegetables reported feeling happier and satisfied with their lives when compared to those who maintained their current diet.
Focusing on your overall health through dietary health will not only benefit your emotional wellbeing but your overall physical and behavioral wellbeing as well. When you take care of your health through a diet, it improves many vital body functions. When you eat well, your cognitive functioning will improve, as will your self-image and self-esteem. This can lead to reduced feelings of anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns.
Reduce Negativity
Negative emotions or negative outlooks can have significant, detrimental impacts on our overall wellbeing. It is natural to have some degree of negative self-talk or negative emotion from time to time. In many cases, we are unaware of the depth of our negativity towards ourselves and how this negativity translates to harmful effects on our ability to manage stressors and challenges (resiliency). It is essential to consider how negativity, especially negativity towards or about yourself, can affect your ability to heal during recovery. Consistently tearing yourself down limits your ability to safely and successfully manage relapse triggers, stressors, trauma, and other challenges you face each day. Changing how you talk to or about yourself can increase your self-esteem, resiliency, and your ability to overcome current challenges.
Get Help When You Need It
Suppose you struggle with addiction or mental health symptoms. In that case, you may find it challenging to build resilience and focus on your emotional and behavioral wellbeing while still under the control of drugs, alcohol, or any number of mental health conditions. Often, these conditions can break your will or spirit, making it feel impossible to overcome daily struggles and focus on your overall health. Fortunately, you do not need to find ways to forge ahead and build resiliency on your own. A member of our treatment team here at Los Angeles Outpatient Center can work with you to learn healthier coping skills, which can improve your resiliency, emotional and behavioral wellbeing, and, inevitably, your overall health.
The most common therapy model used to address wellbeing concerns is called person-centered therapy. The idea of person-centered therapy is to work from the inside out because once you feel whole and happy inside, it will show on the outside and in your day-to-day actions and interactions. Popular person-centered, evidence-based therapy models, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), help you examine the root emotions and feelings behind negative self-talk. Once you understand the source of negative emotions, it is possible to change those emotions into positive, beneficial emotions. Another effective therapy model is dialectical behavior therapy or DBT. Using elements of the dialectical behavior therapy model, you will work with your treatment team to learn a healthier, useful approach to steps you can take each day to improve your self-esteem. Cognitive-behavioral therapy and dialectical behavior therapy are highly effective treatments in both addiction and mental health treatment programs.
If left unaddressed, the adverse outcomes of poor emotional and behavioral wellbeing can be far-reaching. The challenges often extend beyond today and can have a lasting impact on your long-term physical, psychological and spiritual health. By seeking help at the Los Angeles Outpatient center, you learn more about the roots of your emotion and how to change them for the better. Through therapy, you can identify and understand the sources of reduced resiliency and other challenges to your wellbeing that impact successful and lasting healing.
If struggles with emotional and behavioral health or reduced resiliency are having a negative impact on your relationships, work responsibilities, social interactions, or other everyday situations, seeking help from the team at Los Angeles Outpatient Center can help you start your journey to positivity and improved wellbeing. Our caring and compassionate team is here to help you learn more about our programs and how an individually designed treatment plan can help you better understand the roots of your struggles.
If you or a loved one would like to learn more about how emotional and behavioral health can improve healing and your opportunities for lasting recovery, contact Los Angeles Outpatient Center today. A member of our admissions team will work with you to answer any questions you may have about our treatment centers and how our programs can help. Building resiliency and improving health through positive emotional and behavioral wellbeing is possible. Although it may seem challenging to change your outlook and learn new ways of thinking about feelings and emotions, it is important to know you do not have to do it alone. The team at Los Angeles Outpatient Center is here to help. Contact us today to learn more.
https://academic.oup.com/her/article/19/4/357/560320#8934675
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20048020/