4. Be emotionally flexible

Firstly, you need to understand that things don’t have to go your way in order for you to be okay. And becoming flexible, means you have to be adaptable to every situation without getting stuck in it. It means you allow your emotions, whether joy, peace, happiness, pain, sorrow and anger to flow, but not allowing these emotions to control you. You deal with them right there and move on, because at the end of the day, you can’t really turn off your emotions.

Life will crush you. You will be rejected and broken, but being emotionally flexible means allowing yourself to feel without letting these emotions control you or even create a home for it.

Here are some steps toward emotional flexibility.
1. Surround yourself with resilient people, those who will support and have fun with you.
2. Know that it’s okay to not have all answers.
3. Take care of yourself.
4. Cultivate self-love. Jennifer Rollin said, “An integral component of being able to cope with emotions is the practice of self-compassion, which is simply treating and responding to yourself the way you would a loved one who was sad or struggling.”
5. Get out of your head. If you would ask someone who knew me few years back, they would tell you that I was a kind of a person who would spend most of her time in her thoughts. While this might not seem harmful, it usually leaves a negative impact on the individual. You would not be present most of time and will lose focus when needed. Staying in your head could result in other issues such as over-thinking and over-analysing situations unnecessarily or even losing focus on your goal. You need to stay present at all times to have a healthy lifestyle.

5. Avoid getting triggered

Maybe for many, this might be the very difficult one as we live in a world where cultures, the education system or even religions are not that open about mental health, not forgetting how most see it as a curse. This makes it very difficult to live without being triggered by anything or anyone. But you can only successfully pass this phase if you heal your receptor fields so that you don’t easily get triggered. And one way of doing this is by asking yourself these four questions as Diana Wais, a clinical psychologist, put it:

– What’s getting triggered in me?
– What am I afraid of?
– What lies underneath that?
– What do I need to heal in myself?

I have a very good friend and I remember there was a time he tickled me and my reaction caught him off guard. I became angry at him and brushed him off when he asked about my reaction. Him being the most annoying and crazy friend I have, he decided to take it as a joke and used every opportunity he had to tickle me. Honestly hating him was an understatement, in fact if eyes could kill, I would have been sentenced to life. But for some reason this kind of worked and contributed to my emotional stability. As time went by, I wasn’t triggered by that and I could watch movies with PTSD characters without being triggered. And I thank him for being the most stubborn friend.

Tell us: Do you take care of yourself emotionally and physically in order to promote a healthy state of being?