5 tiny habits to improve your emotional health

Feeling better emotionally means making small, consistent changes, and over time, these will become habits that keep you mentally strong and emotionally resilient, says clinical psychologist Nick Wignall.

Here’s how to start:

1. Do your overthinking on paper

From worry and catastrophising to rumination and self-criticism, we can all fall into a pattern of overthinking.

The trouble is that thoughts happen really fast in our heads. This means you can do a lot of overthinking (and generate a lot of painful emotion) in a short amount of time. Instead, try to constrain your overthinking to pen and paper. You can’t write nearly as fast as you think, so if you force yourself to only overthink on paper, you’ll end up doing a lot less of it.

2. Validate before you analyse

Trying to understand why we’re feeling bad is perfectly natural. It’s also pretty unhelpful a lot of the time. Instead, try to validate the experience:

“I am anxious, and I don’t like it. But it’s okay. A lot of people feel anxious in stressful situations.

Just because I feel anxiety doesn’t mean I have to do anything about it.”

3. Build more space into your life

Although common, chronic stress is not normal. It’s certainly not good for your emotional health, and it almost always boils down to doing too much too often.

To counteract this, it’s important to build space or margin into your life and then protect it vigorously. No amount of mindfulness sessions or soothing incense will reduce your stress if you aren’t willing to make time for downtime.

4. Spend quality time with people that matter

Emotional health depends on social health and social health depends on quality time, not just more connection.

Try scheduling a regular call with a good friend once a month and treating it like an appointment, or writing a letter to your grandchild each week. Maybe it just means one night a week we turn off the TV and just talk with our partner before bed.

5. Set tiny boundaries

The ability to communicate and set healthy boundaries is fundamental for emotional wellbeing. But for most of us, the idea of assertiveness and boundary setting is understandably intimidating because it’s a skill we rarely practise.

So start small. Look for little opportunities to practise setting tiny boundaries like telling your co-worker you can’t get to that report today but will prioritise it tomorrow. If you want to feel confident setting big boundaries, start by becoming competent with small ones.

Adapted from an article written by Nick Wignall, originally published on Āki with permission from Nick and Synergy Health mas.co.nz/aki-wellbeing.