How Emotional Intelligence Can Improve Your Wellbeing

When it comes to happiness and success in life and your general wellbeing, emotional intelligence matters. Therefore, emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, use, and mange your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges and resolve conflict.

There are five categories of Emotional intelligence which include:

• Self-awareness: This is the ability to recognize and understand your own emotions and their impact on others.
• Self-regulation: This is the ability to manage your negative or disruptive emotions and to adapt to changes in circumstances.
• Motivation: This is the ability to self-motivate, not only yourself but also others.
• Empathy: This is the ability to recognize and understand how others are feeling.
• Social skills: This is the ability to manage the emotions of others through emotional understand.

An individual with high Emotional Intelligence has sufficient self-awareness to recognize negative feelings and reasons accordingly; so as to prevent escalation. This is a key ability in maintaining good wellbeing.

These three aspects of Emotional Intelligence; self-awareness, self-regulation and motivation, can effectively help individuals deal with negative emotional challenges; as they enable the individual to recognize and understand their own emotions and trigger points. Being aware of these is the starting point to building effective strategies to manage them and even replace them with more positive emotions.

However, emotional intelligence doesn’t just benefit mental but also physical wellbeing.

Feeling better mentally, makes people more physically active. Hence, they go out more, do more and thus move more. Their ability to self-motivate makes them more likely to build up a regular pattern of physical activity and follow it. During the activity, endorphins (chemicals produced naturally by the nervous system to cope with pain or stress) are released which improve emotions, energy levels and sleep.

The intelligent use of emotions is a fundamental mechanism in wellbeing and Emotional Intelligence. They enable an individual to effectively manage emotions and emotional information to cope with challenging situations resulting in improved mental and physical wellbeing.

Learning to use emotional intelligence is like learning to walk. When you have never done it before, there is a lot of stumbling, but once you get it down, you pretty much got it. You can get fancy once you learn to walk; dance, ski, run, ice skate or you can just walk. Emotional intelligence is the same kind of thing.

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