By Dori Best, integrated behavioral health clinician
Love Connects Us: Emotional Health and our Relationships
This month we are focusing on ways we can take care of our emotional well-being, and an important way to do that is to pay attention to our relationships with other people. We are able to achieve emotional well-being when our relationships with other people are healthy, meaningful, and rooted in love.
How can we keep our relationships healthy? Three ways to do this are to spend quality time with people we care about, make a positive difference in other people’s lives, and remember to have fun!
Spending time with people we love is critical to our emotional health.
It turns out that we are actually wired to love. For thousands of years, one of the main goals of humanity was to find ways to stay connected to each other, both to provide safety and to have a sense of belonging. Love, compassion, and empathy are the tools that have helped us stay connected to each other and are important to our ability to stay healthy and create happiness for ourselves and others.
We can make a positive difference in people’s lives every day.
We can pay attention to what others need and reach out. We can offer to help others who are struggling. And one of the easiest things to do to make a difference in someone’s day is to smile. A smile is literally contagious, and we cannot help but smile ourselves when someone smiles at us, creating happiness and greater well-being for both people.
Children can teach us the importance of play and having fun.
Play is the first language of children and is essential to their well-being. This doesn’t change when we become adults. We still need to enjoy being playful with those we love to maintain a sense of emotional wellness throughout our lives. Remember to add playfulness and joy to your relationships with those you love to support your own emotional well-being and to help others do the same.
Remember that love connects us and that our relationships are important to our emotional well-being. Who can you connect with today?
Tip: Next time you feel sad or upset, think of someone you can reach out to for support. Share your feelings and remember to add something playful and fun to your time together.