HEALTH IMPACT

Emotions are one of the life’s gifts; they offer us a way to experience the full spectrum of what it means to be alive. Emotional detox is not to rid your body of what you may consider negative emotions, but rather to clear out the ones that have stagnated and gotten stuck, leaving you free to be able to process and experience all of your emotions in a healthy way. Just as a physical cleanse can help you digest food better, an emotional cleanse can help you digest your emotional experiences better.

Emotions can get stuck due to trauma, unhealthy attachments, or resistance to certain emotions — usually because we don’t have the tools to handle them. The body, mind, and soul can become overloaded. Similar to how you clear undigested foods and toxins from your body during a detox diet, an emotional detox clears unresolved and negative feelings. If you have ever gotten so tired of someone that you mentally say to yourself “I am over this person” or “I am done”, your mind may be telling you it’s time for an emotional detox.

An emotional detox pulls up all the repressed feelings of fear, anger, hurt, sadness, and frustration to clear them away, effectively hitting the reset switch or calibration process on your emotions.

WAYS TO EMOTIONALLY DETOX
If some of these symptoms of emotional overload resonate with you, it may be time to attend to your emotional well-being. Consider these four ideas to get started:

SPARE SOME TIME FOR SELF-CARE
Consider getting away, even if for just one night, to spend time alone and away from all the pressures that contribute to your overwhelm. A spa trip or weekend within the vicinity of nature is ideal. Use the time to analyze what’s troubling you. Face your worries so you can recognize and release them. You don’t necessarily have to do anything about the feelings and thoughts that come up. Simply accepting and recognizing your distress can help you release them.

CHANGE YOUR HOME ENVIRONMENT
Once you’re home and feeling refreshed, find ways to create a home environment that supports your mental health and gives you a sense of safety and well-being when you’re home. The physical and mental activity required to make changes to your home can be empowering. Creating a relaxing space that’s pleasing and soothing can be done by addressing the five senses:

Sight: Improve your home’s lighting by using lightbulbs in the temperature of natural daylight to reflect your circadian rhythm. Decorate your home with calming colors around the house.

Sound: Reduce outdoor noise by using a white noise machine, playing your favorite music, or by adding a water feature for the relaxing sound of water.

Touch: Use loungewear and pajamas, house slippers, rugs, pillows, throws, and blankets that are soft and inviting to touch and lounge in.

Smell: Invest in a quality essential oil diffuser and some of your favorite essential oils and diffuse the scent when you’re home. Citrus scents are refreshing and invigorating, while Lavender and Ylang Ylang can help with emotional healing and relaxation.

Taste: Feed your body with wholesome, nutritious food you love, and don’t forget to treat yourself with your favorite chocolate or a bowl of fresh fruit sometimes.

FOLLOW HEALTHY HOBBIES OR PASTIMES
Having hobbies or healthy pastimes is an essential outlet when you’re feeling emotionally out of sorts. Pick up pastimes in which you can involve your kids and your partner. This can improve the well-being of your family as a unit and provide valuable bonding time. Some wellness activities that you can do as a family include yoga, nature walks, arts and crafts, and caring for a pet.

CONSULT A HEALTHCARE PRACTITIONER TO MANAGE ANXIETY
An emotional detox can help with milder symptoms from the daily stresses of life, but, in some cases, your issue may be due to anxiety and not stress. If your efforts to relax aren’t working, you may be experiencing chronic anxiety and should consult with a doctor. Depending on the severity of your symptoms, your doctor may have more effective treatments.
It’s not easy to deal with painful emotions but it’s a key to good health and well-being physically, mentally, and spiritually. If we don’t deal with pain when it occurs, it will resurface as compounded emotional toxicity later on — showing up as insomnia, hostility, and anger, or fear and anxiety.

As a further complication, if you don’t know how to deal with feelings of anger and fear, you’re likely to turn them inward at yourself, believing, “It’s all my fault.” That guilt depletes our physical, emotional, and spiritual energy until any initiative or movement feels impossible. We feel exhausted and paralyzed, leading to depression so better to learn how to recognize painful emotions right away and how to effectively metabolize and eliminate pain and we can grow n learn from those experiences as we process them to become the person we want to be by turning to our inherent intelligence, harmony and creativity, we surely can create a positive outcome.