For many of us in life, being injured is part of our day-to-day struggle. However, the strongest and most damning injuries that we often face will be delivered under the skin. The physical torment of emotional pain, though, is often written clear as day on your face. When your injuries are emotional rather than physical, though, you can still use what is known as Emotional First Aid.

What is emotional first aid?

The term itself is quite an abstract term, but popular usage often stems from the work of Guy Winch, a popular psychiatrist who wrote the book on emotional first aid – literally.

This term is the equivalent of putting a tourniquet on a bleeding emotion. If you are suffering from a stressful lifestyle, then there’s not a splint or a cast that you can wear which will sole such an issue. Instead, you should look to practice this emotional form of first aid. Sometimes, putting a plaster on the injury won’t be enough: if your pain and anguish are deeper than a superficial injury, here are some ideas for practicing emotional first aid.

Recognizing emotional pain

First off, you need to actually know when you are in emotional pain rather than physical pain. Physical pain, though, could be related to your emotional torment. If you are going through a hard time with finding work, meaning or even love, then you might find that you are emotionally injured but believe it’s physical.

Just like a broken bone, you need to find some form of treatment. From making life-changing decisions to taking the right paths that life opens up for you, you need to recognize that you need help.

Creating self-compassion

You also need to be much more compassionate about yourself and your own personal failure. It’s easy to be your own worst enemy in life, and it will often make it easy for you to kick yourself when you are down. Emotional first aid teaches you to stop thinking that you suck, and will play a role in dragging you out from the gutter – at least for now.

Show yourself some personal compassion, and over time you will be able to see some personnel changes taking place. If you heard your mother or father insulting themselves, you would rightly correct them: emotional first aid teaches you to do the same for yourself.

The attitude of the highly emotional

Many of us find ourselves caught up in being extremely emotional, and always allowing ourselves to get too caught up in the moment. While emotions are something we all need, letting them be in total control is a dangerous game. We recommend that you spend some time trying to avoid such attitudes, and instead time moving on from previous scenes and events.

Do you sit and replay events in your head over and over? It’s a trait of the highly emotional. Instead of wishing you done something different, move on. It’s a key part of emotional first aid; to be able to leave behind scenarios that you wish you could have done differently. You can’t.

Building emotional resilience

By the same token, you need to be more resilient with your emotions. If you often find that you spend a lot of your time being shaken and not being able to take criticism, it will play a huge role in your negative mental health.

Instead, start thinking about what you can do and what you cannot do. If someone tells you that you cannot do something that you know you struggle with, take that as a cue that you need to get better. Emotional first aid is all about recognizing that we do have limitations and that it’s OK to acknowledge them.

When you accept that A) failure is possible and B) failure can be a positive in the long-term, from a developmental point of view, you are much more likely to build a more resilient mind which is ready to front up to change.

Avoiding negativity and increasing positivity

Following on from the above, then, you should stop seeing every criticism as a negative. Often, people tell us that we need to improve or change because they want us to do better, not to put us down. Allow yourself to use negative comments and criticism as an invitation and do more.

By the same token, don’t use praise and positive feedback as an excuse to stop developing. Emotional first aid is all about helping you to realize you are not perfect and that you shouldn’t expect perfection. This helps you to be more level headed in your decision making.

Crucially, it also helps you to see negative critique as a positive to improve, and positive praise as something to drive you to be even better again still.

Setting goals for personal growth

The best way to make the above possible, then, is to set goals. If someone tells you how to be better at something? Take their advice. Try it. make a note to improve. After criticism, your goal should be to improve upon the failure area to help show others – mostly yourself – that you can improve.

If you receive praise, then your next goal should be to do whatever you were praised for even better than before. Do that for long enough, and you will begin to see more meaningful results. Your goals, regardless of why they were set, should be built around self-improvement and development.

Set lifestyle habits for increased resilience :

Many will help you develop those desirable attitudes that people with good emotional resilience display

Creating art improves self-esteem and encourages creative thinking. It stimulates connectivity between various parts of the brain to build a healthier brain that is more psychologically resilient.

Regular meditation can improve emotional stability and resilience

Drinking water regularly does not make stressful situations like hectic hours in traffic, the pressure at work, financial stress and other various challenges and difficulties to disappear. While you are already coping with these, it is advised to stay hydrated regularly in order to avoid adding more to your stress level which dehydration can cause.

The bottom line

Paying attention to your mental health is as important as paying attention to your physical health. You will find it hard for a stressful and tumultuous lifestyle to help you to develop. If you are able to create more goals for yourself and use criticism as a driving factor, you will be much more likely to see lasting success.

From finding deeper meaning in the things we lose to turning criticism into a motivating driver for our own improvement, emotional first aid is all about helping to avoid mental scars becoming deeper than even the most significant of physical wounds.

If you were to undergo a risky physical experience, you would wear protective equipment to keep your body safe. Why, then, should the mind be any different? Protect your mind and your emotions, and your body will thank you for it.