(Newswire.net — October 8, 2019) — Emotional intelligence is a concept that covers a broad range of skills that can help you navigate daily situations like workplace politics, improve attention and motivation, and enhance decision-making skills, but did you know that emotional intelligence can also improve your physical health? It’s a simple link, an extension of how meditating or exercising to manage stress can improve your health, yet most people don’t ever learn how to enhance their emotional intelligence. The good news is that it’s never too late to learn.
Emotional Management
Emotional intelligence can be broken down in a number of different ways, but two of its core components are self-awareness and self-regulation. Together, these allow an individual to determine how they’re feeling, why they might be feeling that way, and to manage those emotions responsibly. People with poor self-regulation may be impulsive, have a hard time making commitments, and struggle with accountability. This can also be described by the Trait Meta-Mood Scale, which measures an individual’s ability to notice their emotions, understand those emotions, and work to manage negative moods as necessary.
A high degree of emotional intelligence can help improve an individual’s physical health in a number of ways. For example, the ability to differentiate between boredom and hunger or distress can prevent an individual from eating mindlessly and gaining weight, or from ignoring signs of depression because they think they’re just tired or stressed. While some people are naturally good at this kind of introspection, others can benefit from taking a course to build emotional intelligence.
Stress, Mood, And Well-Being
Emotional intelligence’s health benefits don’t stop with an improved ability to understand one’s physical or emotional needs and to differentiate between the two. In fact, one of its most significant benefits is from overall stress reduction, which can improve overall physical health. Stress can cause insomnia, impair the immune system, and increase inflammation and chronic disease. As a result of their lower stress levels, individuals with greater emotional intelligence take less medication, have lower insurance costs, and have shorter hospital stays.
In addition to reducing overall stress levels, individuals with a higher degree of emotional intelligence also tend to have better social relationships – and this is important to physical health, as well. That’s because social relationships play a significant role in everything from diet and exercise to the risk of heart attacks, certain kinds of cancer, and wound healing. In order to have abundant and well-maintained social relationships, though, you need to display empathy and properly recognize and respond to emotions in others. Physical and social health are closely interrelated, and they hinge on emotional intelligence.
The Ruler, Not The Ruled
At the end of the day, emphasizing emotional intelligence is about demonstrating that you are in charge of your emotions – you are the ruler, not the ruled. In fact, some experts even used the acronym RULER to identify emotional intelligence skills; the concept can also be understood through the idea of “wise mind,” a dialectical-behavioral therapy principle that balances emotions and rationality to arrive at interpretations or decisions. Whatever way you want to think about it, the point of focusing on your emotional intelligence is to improve all aspects of your life, not just your mood. When you know how you feel, how others feel, and how to respond judiciously, you improve both your emotional and your physical health, making this a skill well worth learning.