Mental and Emotional health are two sides of the same coin and are inseparable for health and wellbeing.
Emotional health is the state of positive psychological functioning and involves expressing one’s emotions appropriately for one’s age. Emotional health includes our thoughts, feelings, and behavior internally and externally. It requires managing emotional actions and gauging the appropriate reactions to situations, preventing unnecessary and unhealthy stress.
There are three components of emotions:
Mental health refers to your ability to process information. Emotional health, on the other hand, refers to your ability to experience and finally express feelings which are based upon the information you have processed.
Mental health influences your thoughts and actions, and it covers three main types of well-being:
Psychological
Social
Emotional
Mental health is how well your mind processes and understands information and experiences. In contrast, emotional health involves your ability to manage and express the emotions that arise from what you have learned and experienced. An important distinction between mental and emotional health is that you can experience mental health issues while maintaining good emotional health, and vice versa.
In case of mental health problems, people are suffering from various problems in the absence of recognition, realization and awareness. Hence the duration of these disorders is small.
In case of emotional health disorders, people suffer from similar type of disorders as mental health disorders, but in this situation, people are recognizing and realizing with full awareness about the root cause, but because of unavoidable circumstances, the trauma lasts with these people for a very long period of time.
The impact of emotions on physical and mental health:
As we know the emotions, thoughts and feelings influence and contribute a lot on the status of the mind.
Thoughts and feelings generated within the mind, influence the production of hormones from the endocrine system, which automatically impacts the function of the body.
Many patients who go to doctors with physical complaints, actually have underlying depression.
People reporting symptoms of headache, lethargy, weakness, or vague abdominal symptoms to their doctors, often get diagnosed with depression, even if they may not have reported feelings of depression.
Whether unhappy or stressed, our thoughts may not directly cause poor physical health, but they may be a contributing factor and this can explain why some people suffer physically while others do not.
Chronic illness and depression: Depression can increase the risk for chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes. Depression puts people at a 41 percent higher risk for diabetes.
Depression and longevity: Depression is linked to shorter lifespan.
Physical symptoms of emotional health distress: Clinically depressed people often have physical symptoms such as constipation, lack of appetite, insomnia or lethargy.
Studies have also shown that poorly managed chronic depression is associated with brain shrinkage.
Researchers found that emotional vitality, i.e., a sense of enthusiasm, hopefulness, engagement in life and the ability to face life’s stresses with emotional balance, appears to reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.
Research has found that stress can produce a wide range of negative effects on the brain ranging from contributing to mental illness to actually shrinking the volume of the brain.
Chronic stress can lead to long-term changes in the structure and function of the brain.
Stress kills brain cells.
Stress reduces your memory, cognition and learning abilities.
References
https://www.everydayhealth.com/emotional-health/connecting-dots.aspx
https://www.sharecare.com/health/emotional-health/how-emotional-health-affect-physical
https://www.verywellmind.com/the-purpose-of-emotions-2795181