Mental Health

7 Lifestyle Factors to Gain Emotional Resilience and Vitality

No matter what we do, we cannot improve our physical and mental health unless we regulate our emotions intentionally.

Purpose of the Article

This article covers holistic mental and physical approaches that I made to healthy lifestyle habits to improve my emotional maturity and mastery giving me better physical and mental health for decades. Coming from my heart and mind, I offer practical and customizable tips for each key point based on years of experience.

Why do emotional vitality and strength matter?

I have researched thoughts and emotions within the cognitive science discipline for several decades. Emotional strength and vitality are tightly coupled with mental capabilities, health, and well-being.

For example, people with sharp intellect lacking emotional maturity might experience life crises. Life does not make sense to them as they cannot connect meaningfully with their inner world and others.

Emotions run the show of our lives. For example, people make decisions based on feelings rather than intellect.

Emotional vitality and strength mean that we can regulate our emotions and use them for our well-being and support other people in our circles.

When we gain emotional dynamism and strength, our relationships can naturally enhance. Thus, we become unflappable, and life becomes more meaningful.

I have been investigating the importance and mechanism of emotional maturity and mastery for decades as part of my studies in cognitive science.

Furthermore, my research and sensible experiments into gaining emotional vitality and strength helped me increase my emotional intelligence and improve my relationships with others.

In addition, I observed hundreds of emotionally mature leaders who were more productive and joyful, leading their followers with passion. Some of them were distinguished leaders.

I documented ten characteristics of them in an article titled How to Become an Emotionally Mature Leader.

I provide seven lifestyle habits that made me emotionally vital, resilient, and robust for many years. I hope you might gain perspectives from them and find ways to customize them for your needs.

1 — Gaining Cognitive Flexibility

I start with cognition, as our thoughts are critical in regulating our emotions. Significant evidence in the psychological literature shows that managing our thoughts can improve our emotional profile. I also experienced this in my life and in the lives of others.

Emotions involve both the body and mind. I start with the mind, as our thoughts play a critical role in forming our emotions.

Dealing with our thoughts and emotions can be challenging if we don’t know how to manage them. Life becomes miserable without conscious control of our thoughts and feelings.

After improving my cognitive flexibility, I noticed a significant enhancement in my emotional health. My negative feelings turned into more positive ones. I felt more joy, calmness, and satisfaction, replacing anxiety and depression.

As I wrote numerous articles about cognitive flexibility, I won’t repeat them. The recent piece summarizes my years of research on this critical item: Increase Cognitive Flexibility and Emotional Maturity with Five Habits.

Even though cognitive flexibility is related to the mind, our physical habits, like exercise and how we eat, affect it.

I summarize five critical points to improve cognitive flexibility.

1 — Develop a growth mindset and optimism

2 — Practice mindfulness in all walks of life

3 — Schedule fun activities, including exercise, and make the commitment

4 — Neutralize unpleasant emotions and replace them with pleasant ones.

5 — Feed and fast in specific windows

Cognitive flexibility allowed me to love myself and others more. I introduce self-love in the next section.

2 — Practicing Self-Love with Passion

Unless we love ourselves, we cannot regulate our emotions. Self-love and self-compassion for regulating our emotions can be invaluable. There is nothing wrong with loving ourselves.

Self-love is not egotistical. It is a practical way to connect with our higher self. Self-love allows the ego to dance with the higher self and find the sweet spot between the material and spiritual world.

By having self-compassion, we can also have empathy and compassion for others. Self-love and compassion for others can improve our relationships. With better relationships, we can have a better emotional profile.

When we practice self-love daily, we can also attract loving people to our lives, as I explained in an article titled How to Attract Loving People with Self-Love to Our Lives.

We can also activate self-healing with self-love, as I explained in an article titled Activate Self-Healing with Self-Love. This article covers both physical and mental health with a focus on emotional maturity.

3 — Regulating Emotions

This item is the heart of my article. Emotional regulation is a broad topic in psychology literature. I touch on this point in every mental health article due to its importance.

Emotions communicate to us what is going on at a deeper level. However, emotional toxicity can be detrimental to our health.

Psychoneuroendocrinology, a new discipline combining biochemistry, endocrinology, neurology, psychiatry, and psychology, has uniquely documented physical and mental health disorders.

This interdisciplinary approach focuses on how our emotions turn into diseases when not appropriately managed by individuals.

Management of our emotions refers to regulating them. By observing and understanding our feelings, we can regulate them. Emotional regulation can reduce our vulnerability to emotional situations, empower us in dealing with impulses, and reduce our suffering.

Feeling and understanding emotions with intimate observations can be invaluable for physical and mental health.

Emotional regulation can increase our emotional intelligence and maturity and reduce emotional stress.

The critical point of emotional regulation is to express them meaningfully. Conversely, suppressing and avoiding our emotions can be harmful in the long run.

Here are six steps that I used to regulate my emotions.

1 — Scheduled festive and fun activities.

2 — Leveraged mindfulness practices (see item #7).

3 — Energized my body and mind with music, dance, and joyful workouts.

4 — Acquired joy with meaningful social connections.

5 — Performed expressive writing, therapeutic reading, and attentive listening.

6 — Rewired the brain for new and empowering habits.

I documented the details of these points in an article titled Regulate Emotions to Knock Chronic Stress with Five Powerful Tools.

4 — Working in a Flow State Intentionally

Work is part of our lives. Our behavior at work can significantly affect our emotional profile. The critical factor is managing our stress. Micro-stressors accumulated during our work pressure might turn into chronic stress.

Chronic stress is one of the root causes of every physical and mental health condition. From my experience, working in a flow state is a valuable tool to control our daily stress at work.

I refrain from multitasking to manage my work stress, as explained in an article titled My Three Reasons for Not Multitasking Anymore.

Here are the three tips for entering a flow state quickly and maintaining it as much as we want when working.

1 — Understand the meaning of “Now” and live in the moment

2 — Focus on a single task with full attention

3 — Trick the brain for self-chosen priorities

Working in a flow state daily allows us to rewire our brains for joy and happiness while gaining creativity and productivity.

5 — Establishing Solid Emotional Self-Defense

Like physical self-defense, we also need to create emotional self-defense. The purpose of emotional self-defense is to lower the risks of unnecessary suffering caused by unexpected emotional attacks from others and our own minds.

As our relationships with others significantly impact our emotions, we must improve them by creating healthy boundaries.

From my experience and research, emotional-self defense requires three critical mechanisms. They are:

1 — Awareness of emotional triggers and manipulators

2 — Neutralizing emotions by changing perspectives

3 — Setting emotional boundaries.

You might find the details of these three items in an article titled Create Emotional Self-Defense Using These Three Tips.

As item three is crucial, I documented my findings and perspectives on creating healthy boundaries in an article titled What Would Happen When We Set Healthy Boundaries for Emotional Maturity?

Here are the five critical points to set healthy emotional boundaries.

1 — Understand the importance of emotional boundaries.

2 — Define boundaries based on your goals.

3 — Communicate boundaries to involved parties.

4 — Implement boundaries with consistency and persistence.

5 — Review the health of boundaries and make necessary adjustments timely.

6 — Balancing Hormones and Neurotransmitters

Hormones and neurotransmitters impact both our physical and mental health. In addition, they play a critical role in the emotional profile.

Hormonal and neurotransmitter balance translates into a better emotional profile manifesting as good feelings. Hormonal imbalance and issues with neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin manifest as unpleasant feelings.

As hormones are comprehensive, I summarized my years of research in an article titled Hormonal Intelligence: Sharpen It to Achieve Optimal Health.

Here are six key points that can contribute to hormonal balance.

1 — Customize nutrition based on bodily needs.

2 — Personalize workouts.

3 — Create a rock-solid sleep regimen.

4 — Be mindful and meditate daily.

5 — Have meaningful connections.

6 — Get hormones checked regularly.

From a neurotransmitter's point of view, dopamine is the most critical, which impacts the balance of other neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, norepinephrine, and GABA.

Addressing the addiction problem was the best contributor to my emotional maturity and improving my mental health.

I documented my findings and perspectives in an article titled Depression Has More to Do with Addictions and Less with Economic Conditions.

7 — Leveraging Mindfulness Practices

I left this point to the end as mindfulness practices have been the best tools to improve my mental and emotional health.

One of the most common mindfulness practices is meditation. Billions of people reaped the benefits of meditation throughout history. In addition, it is part of almost all cultures and religions.

Even though it was a controversial topic in the Western world, meditation has become mainstream over the last few decades. As a result, scientists heavily research this topic and document their findings in credible sources.

Based on my experience and reviews, the compelling benefits of incorporating mindfulness practices and meditation into our daily schedule are:

1 — Resets the neocortex.

2 — Manages stress.

3 — Reduces anxiety.

4 — Increases cognitive flexibility.

5 — Regulates emotions.

6 — Balances hormones and neurotransmitters.

7 — Creates cognitive reserves.

As documented in an article titled Why I Meditate Every Eight Hours for Decades, I have been meditating three times daily to improve my health and happiness for many years.

Summary and Key Takeaways

I firmly believe that no matter what we do, we cannot improve our physical and mental health unless we regulate our emotions and gain emotional maturity.

Unaddressed and accumulated emotional traumas are associated with the manifestation of severe physical and mental disorders such as neurodegenerative conditions, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic syndrome, type II diabetes, and cancers.

The key mechanism is chronic stress which has epigenetic effects. Unpleasant emotions can trigger our stress hormones and cause emotional eating making the body insulin and leptin resistant, leading to metabolic imbalances.

By improving my emotional intelligence and aging emotional maturity, I solved my 12 entangled health issues. For example, emotional mastery helped me defeat brain fog, lowered chronic inflammation, melted my visceral fat, and made me feel younger as I got older.

We can increase emotional intelligence and gain emotional mastery by changing our lifestyles unless we have underlying mental health conditions. In addition, we can enhance our intuitive capabilities by gaining emotional mastery.

Our healthy habits can contribute to our emotional profile and improve our relationships with others. Emotionally intelligent people not only understand their emotions but also gain clues about other people’s emotions.

I conclude my article with these ten practical takeaways that significantly enhanced my emotional intelligence, mastery, and maturity for decades.

1 — Set emotional boundaries and establish rock-solid emotional self-defense.

2 — Feel various emotions, understand them with intimate observations, and express them rather than suppress them.

3 — Practice mindfulness techniques, especially meditation daily.

4 — Balance hormones and neurotransmitters with healthy lifestyle habits.

5 — Refrain from multitasking and perfection, and intentionally work in a flow state.

6 — Enhance cognitive flexibility.

7 — Meet bodily fundamentals like restorative sleep, regular exercise, and rest.

8 — Lower chronic stress and inflammation with healthy lifestyle habits.

9 — Forgive your mistakes and love yourself passionately.

10 — Seek help when needed from professionals and loved ones.

I hope you might customize and incorporate these proven principles into your life that might contribute to your physical and mental health.

Please also pass along these simple yet critical messages to your friends and loved ones. We need more joyful people to enjoy our short life on this problematic planet.

It is never too late to take control of our thoughts and emotions. And the good news, we can rewire our brains for happiness and joy at any age, thanks to the power of neurogenesis that nature gave us as a blessing.

Thank you for reading my perspectives. I wish you a healthy and happy life.

If you find this article valuable, you might check my holistic health and well-being stories reflecting my reviews, observations, and decades of sensible experiments.

I write about various hormones and neurotransmitters such as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, GABA, acetylcholine, norepinephrine, adrenaline, glutamate, and histamine.

One of my goals as a writer is to raise awareness about the causes and risk factors of prevalent diseases that can lead to suffering and death for a large portion of the population.

To raise awareness about health issues, I have written several articles that present my holistic health findings from research, personal observations, and unique experiences. Below are links to these articles for easy access.

Metabolic Syndrome, Type II Diabetes, Fatty Liver Disease, Heart Disease, Strokes, Obesity, Liver Cancer, Autoimmune Disorders, Homocysteine, Lungs Health, Pancreas Health, Kidneys Health, NCDs, Infectious Diseases, Brain Health, Dementia, Depression, Brain Atrophy, Neonatal Disorders, Skin Health, Dental Health, Bone Health, Leaky Gut, Leaky Brain, Brain Fog, Chronic Inflammation, Insulin Resistance, Elevated Cortisol, Leptin Resistance, Anabolic Resistance, Cholesterol, High Triglycerides, Metabolic Disorders, Gastrointestinal Disorders, and Major Diseases.

I also wrote about valuable nutrients. Here are the links for easy access:

Lutein/Zeaxanthin, Phosphatidylserine, Boron, Urolithin, taurine, citrulline malate, biotin, lithium orotate, alpha-lipoic acid, n-acetyl-cysteine, acetyl-l-carnitine, CoQ10, PQQ, NADH, TMG, creatine, choline, digestive enzymes, magnesium, zinc, hydrolyzed collagen, nootropics, pure nicotine, activated charcoal, Vitamin B12, Vitamin B1, Vitamin D, Vitamin K2, Omega-3 Fatty Acids, N-Acetyl L-Tyrosine, and other nutrients to improve metabolism and mental health.

Disclaimer: Please note that my posts do not include professional or health advice. I document my reviews, observations, experience, and perspectives only to provide information and create awareness.

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