What Is Emotional Wellness?
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 10 hours ago
10 Practical, Evidence-Based Ways to Improve Your Emotional Well-being
By Mark D. Lerner, Ph.D.
Principal Consultant and Creator, AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness
We’re living in a rapidly advancing technological world where people are infused with daily doses of streaming conflict and adversity—through news, social media, and digital communication.
At the same time, we’re being saturated with text messaging, email, apps, video games, and video conferencing, many of which are increasingly replacing genuine face-to-face human interaction.
This development is associated with a dramatic increase in mental illness. Anxiety is now the most common mental health condition in the United States, and depression is among the leading causes of illness and disability worldwide.
As our world focuses on addressing mental illness, the National Center has emotional wellness in its crosshairs. The Center defines emotional wellness as the awareness, understanding, and acceptance of our feelings—and the ability to effectively manage challenges and change. It also reflects our capacity to sublimate: to harness painful emotional energy from adversity and channel it into action—not merely to survive, but to thrive.
For four decades, I've focused on helping people harness painful emotional energy from adversity and use that energy to propel themselves to overcome and become. In many ways, this work clarified for me that emotional wellness is most clearly revealed—and most powerfully developed—during challenges and change.
As I sat down to write this article, I wanted to create a clear, practical framework that brings clarity to what emotional wellness is and, importantly, what we can do to achieve it. The following is grounded not only in theory but also in decades of real-world experience helping people navigate some of life’s most challenging experiences. Emotional wellness is not a destination—but an ongoing, evolving journey.
The following are ten things you can do toward achieving emotional wellness:
Recognize that your thoughts dramatically affect the way you feel. This is certainly not a profound statement. This principle dates back to the Greek philosopher Epictetus, who said that "people are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.” Simply put, our thoughts affect the way we feel. This philosophy provided the foundation for the widely recognized evidence-based approach, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Focus on your feelings—your emotions—and label them. “I’m feeling sad, mad, angry, depressed, anxious, nervous, scared….” Becoming aware of your feelings and consciously recognizing and labeling them is an essential early step toward emotional wellness.
Ask yourself, “What am I focusing on?” When you identify the thought—or pattern of thinking—that precedes your feelings, you gain insight into what's driving that emotional response—and, with that awareness, you begin to create the opportunity to shift it.
Choose your behavior—your actions. While we can’t change what happened in our lives, we can choose how we respond to those events. And as I often say, "Challenges don't define us. How we respond to them often does.”
Recognize that your emotional wellness is a result of your thoughts, feelings, and actions. This is an empowering realization that emphasizes the ability we have to influence the direction of our lives. It also recognizes that emotional wellness is not only a result of our thinking and behavior, but that it can also drive it. Our feelings can become the very fuel that propels us to take meaningful action—to overcome and become.
Recognize that physiology has an impact on emotional wellness. While it’s enlightening and empowering to recognize that we have a say, a choice, in what we do, biology plays a critical role in our thoughts, feelings, and actions. It was not until I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease that I fully appreciated how dopaminergic activity in the brain can profoundly influence our emotional and cognitive experience.
Embrace innovation and technology. The late and brilliant Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, took to the stage regularly to show the world how technology shapes not only the way we live but also how we feel and communicate. Instead of resisting Artificial Intelligence (AI), we should thoughtfully recognize and utilize its potential to improve the quality of our lives.
Understand AI-Integrated Emotional Wellness (AIEW). AIEW refers to the ethical and responsible interface between the cognitive abilities of artificial intelligence and the depth, uniqueness, and complexity of human emotion. While AI can provide accessible, evidence-based strategies, tools, and support to promote emotional well-being, AIEW recognizes a fundamental truth: authentic, face-to-face human presence remains irreplaceable—and essential—for emotional wellness.
Ask yourself, “What can I do to achieve emotional wellness in my life?” In the same way we focus on what we can eat to be healthy and what we can do to strengthen our bodies, regularly ask yourself, “What can I do right now to improve my emotional wellness?” Understand that the answer is not one-size-fits-all. For some people, it’s about finding inner peace; for others, it’s about discovering meaning and purpose; and for others, it’s about making large sums of money. Emotional wellness is, in many ways, in the eye of the beholder.
Choose your action. After determining your direction for emotional wellness, take meaningful, intentional steps toward achieving it. Recognize that emotional wellness is your journey and that taking action is how you bring that vision to life.
As I sat down to write this article, I thought that I would be turning to online sources to identify ten things that we could do to achieve emotional wellness. It was only in that moment that I fully appreciated something important: decades of helping people facing challenging life experiences had already taught me what emotional wellness truly means.
If just one idea presented in this article helps you on your journey toward emotional wellness, I’ve achieved my objective. I have long embraced the phrase from the Talmud, “Whoever saves a single life is considered by scripture to have saved the world.”
Let the work of the National Center for Emotional Wellness be guided by this profound and enduring principle.