Dr Prem Life A Great Life Logo-R

Emotional hygiene – Live A Great Life Podcast by Dr Prem – Chapter. 16

Emotional hygiene - Live A Great Life Podcast by Dr Prem – Chapter. 16


Here is a quote – Life is 10 percent what happens to you and 90 percent how you react to it.

—Charles R Swindoll

Nobody likes to face failure, rejection, sadness, or loneliness. However, for us to be free from such feelings, the world must work the way we want it to, which rarely happens. As individuals, we hardly have any control over the world. At best, what we can do is try controlling ourselves. However, for that to happen, we ought to have complete control over our senses, which is difficult to achieve for most people.

Sometimes things go out of control

Let’s take a simple case. Suppose you have a good friend who calls you up one day and asks you to lend you him some money, as he is facing some sort of an emergency. Despite being somewhat low on funds, you lend the money to your friend, assuming that he really needs it. A few weeks later, you see that the same friend has bought a very expensive phone. You call that friend and ask him for your money back. He says that he doesn’t have the money in hand, but will give it back to you next month when he gets his salary. You look at the calendar. It’s the 17th of the month. You will have to wait at least two weeks for your friend’s answer, and you are not sure whether he will return the money or not.

In a situation like this, even though you know that pondering over it won’t help, that’s all you do. You can’t even vent your anger on your friend till the next month. So you just keep ruminating over the same thing over and over again, thinking all types of negative thoughts, thinking how kind you were to your friend, and how selfishly he behaved with you. You carry this negative attitude to your office and to your house, and it affects both your work and relationships. The next month, if your friend returns the money, your situation might become normal, but if he doesn’t, it would surely get worse.

Psychological wounds make you suffer

The above was an example of a single psychological wound. Deep inside, most of us carry many such wounds, some even going back to early childhood. Minor psychological wounds and bruises heal within a few days, but the deep ones take years to heal. Moreover, even after healing, they might leave a scar on our personality in the shape of a psychological disorder.

It isn’t merely for the sake of analogy that we call such psychological implications ‘wounds’ – they are actually very much like physical wounds. Just as it hurts whenever you touch or move a wounded body part, it hurts when something makes you recall a traumatic event. Just as you need to treat your wounds properly, psychological wounds also need proper treatment and care. Otherwise, those wounds might lead to psychological infections, which are nothing but mental health disorders.

Social stigma associated with psychological problems

If you have physical wounds, others can see them, and since they can imagine how it feels to have one, they offer their sympathy and care to you. On the other hand, nobody can peek inside your mental self and see your psychological wounds. You have to explain them to others, and more often than not, they will fail to empathize with your pain, since they have neither experienced it themselves nor do they know how bad it feels. Moreover, if you keep drawing attention to your pain, people will start sidelining you as a negative character.

This difference between physical and psychological wounds has led to significant suppression of the latter. While it is natural for us to seek immediate help for physical pain, it takes people years of suffering from psychological wounds before they take any action. By then, their wounds have usually fermented and turned into disorders.

Practising emotional hygiene

Over the last few years, through his books and speeches, eminent psychologist and author Guy Winch has popularized the concept of ‘emotional first aid’8. In one of his talks9, he expounded upon how human life expectancy improved subsequently after the introduction of hygiene. He asserted that the same could happen if we start practising something called ‘emotional hygiene’. It isn’t as complicated as the term might make it seem. You just have to include certain simple habits for the improvement of your psychological health, that’s all. Given below are a few ways of practising emotional hygiene.

  1. Stop misattributing your pain

We identify physical pain with absolute certainty. When it becomes too much to bear, we seek the help of a doctor, who might suggest ways of keeping it in check, and who, in extreme cases, might also prescribe some painkillers.

Psychological pain, on the other hand, lurks in the background. It isn’t that we don’t know that we are in pain. We just don’t rightly identify it. For example, those among us who grumble continuously about how bad everyone else is, or who get irritated very easily, carry many untreated psychological wounds inside them. Rather than dealing with their wounds, they try justifying them by misattributing them to others around them. This is a negative tendency. It further deepens our psychological wounds as we are constantly adding memories that trigger the pain.

Therefore, the next time you are feeling bad, don’t blame it on somebody else. Just close your eyes and observe the pain. If possible, you should try writing down your thoughts. Mindfulness meditation might help you with this. Note down the reason for your pain, and see if it is what you earlier thought it was. Don’t pass judgment too quickly. Repeat this process for as long as the pain persists. This will take you closer to the actual cause of your pain, and prevent you from misattributing it.

  1. Pay attention to other things

Distractions work for both physical and psychological pain. It doesn’t matter whether it is music, movies, or just a friend – if there’s something that helps take your attention away from the pain, you should give it a shot. Moreover, depending upon how well a distraction works for you, you should also make a note of it. Whenever you are in pain, you should have a list of workable distractions in front of you, out of which you should pick the one that fits the occasion. By taking your attention away from the pain, you prevent yourself from intensifying it by thinking about it repeatedly. This not only saves you immediate suffering,  but it also accelerates the healing process.

  1. Cancel negative thoughts

Negative thoughts occur in circles. One negative thought precedes the other, and together, they keep revolving in our heads, making us feel anxious and depressed. Sometimes, our thoughts are so intense that even distractions don’t help. At such times, it becomes necessary that we find some other way to quell them.

One simple method of doing so is by discovering the positive meaning behind the negative thoughts. It is something that doesn’t come naturally to most people, so you have to practise repeatedly to get better at it. For example, if you have just lost your job, you can either grieve over it, thinking about all that you have lost, or you can be thankful for the free time that you now have, and spend it not only searching for another job but also improving your skills.

Sometimes, you might find it impossible to change things outside  yourself, but you must remember that life isn’t about what happens to you, it is more about how you react to it. There are always two sides to a coin, and you should always try looking at the side that makes you feel happier.

Recent Articles:

Scroll to Top