Revolutionize Your Self-Care Routine with 8 Emotional Intelligence Hacks

Emotional intelligence, also known as EI or EQ, refers to the ability to recognize and manage your own emotions, as well as the emotions of others. EQ is incredibly important in leadership and business, as it helps you make better decisions that aren’t rooted in emotion, and gauge and influence the emotions of team members, clients, and others around you.

Emotional intelligence helps you interact better with others and take better care of yourself. By understanding your emotions, you can make choices that reduce negative feelings and increase positive ones. This improves your health and happiness.

How can you get started? It all begins with learning to identify your emotions as they arise. Once you learn this element of self-awareness, you can make decisions to meet your body’s emotional needs. Here are eight ways to harness emotional intelligence to elevate your self-care regimen.

1. Treat Yourself with Compassion

Self-care and EQ are rooted in compassion. As you recognize negative emotions that arise, don’t beat yourself up for feeling stressed, angry, or sad. Instead, recognize those emotions and treat yourself with the compassion you deserve.

For example, if you’ve recognized that you’re stressed, acknowledge why and then implement healthy stress management strategies. Maybe you form habits around certain stress management techniques, such as going for a walk as soon as your workday ends.

2. Define Activities That Bring You Joy

Don’t inadvertently end up in the trap of making every decision in your life around what will make you most productive, most profitable, and most successful. Joy matters, too. As such, strive to incorporate activities that bring joy into your day; EQ comes in because you’ll need a certain level of emotional intelligence to determine what activities bring you lasting happiness rather than just momentary pleasure.

For example, healthy habits that might bring you joy include spending time outdoors, connecting with friends, or engaging in creative hobbies. Activities that might provide you with just momentary pleasure, meanwhile, might include winding down with a cocktail or satiating your sweet tooth with a treat. While these things aren’t negative by nature, they won’t provide you with true, lasting joy.

3. Regulate Your Emotional Energy

Learn to recognize when you’re beginning to feel drained. What’s causing it? Learning to identify this can help you properly regulate your emotional energy so you can avoid anxiety, depression, and other negativities. Avoid activities that drain your emotional energy and prioritize activities that increase it.

4. Manage Negative Emotions

Developing a high EQ won’t eliminate negative emotions from your life altogether, but developing a high EQ can help you to better manage your negative emotions, so you don’t suffer further physical issues or relationship problems.

For those negative emotions that you can’t prevent, learn to recognize them and find coping mechanisms that can reverse or prevent detrimental impacts, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, or diabetes. This might look like going on walks or participating in regular physical activity, meditation sessions, connecting with other individuals that increase your emotional energy, or trying new hobbies.

5. Journal to Reflect

Journaling can help you speed up your emotional intelligence progress. Consider journaling at the end of every day, reflecting on the emotions you experienced, their causes, and how you reacted to that stimuli. This can help you better identify emotional habits and triggers, as well as your progress as your EQ develops further.

6. Prioritize Nutrition and Exercise

Good nutrition and exercise go hand in hand with mental and emotional health. Harvard Health reports that eating lots of sugar can harm your mental health. On the other hand, a healthy diet can lower your risk of depression and reduce inflammation, which affects your mood and energy. Likewise, according to The Primary Care Companion to the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, “Aerobic exercises, including jogging, swimming, cycling, walking, gardening and dancing, have been proved to reduce anxiety and depression.” Do your best to prioritize nutrition and schedule movement into your daily routine.

7. Incorporate Mindfulness

The quiet reflection provided by a mindfulness routine can improve your EQ as you improve introspection. These practices are also shown to reduce stress, leading to overall better brain health and increased productivity. Consider scheduling short (even a few minutes helps!) mindfulness or meditation sessions into your workday.

8. Seek Help When Needed

Lastly, recognize that, even with all the EQ tactics, sometimes you need professional help. Recognize when you need support and contact family, friends, or mental health professionals. Asking for help when needed is a sign of strength and self-awareness, not weakness.

Need help with your overall health and well-being? A health coach can help you make small changes to improve your lifestyle significantly.

The Bottom Line

By integrating these EQ practices into your daily routine, you can leverage your emotional intelligence to foster a more effective and fulfilling self-care regimen. You’ll soon see why having a higher EQ results in not just better mental health but also better physical health.

Sign up for our upcoming Emotional Intelligence Panel on October 10 to learn more about developing your emotional intelligence.