The dictatorship of constant happiness
Having good emotional health does not mean always being happy or only experiencing pleasant moments, but rather being able to identify, recognize and express our emotions, whether pleasant or unpleasant, learning to regulate them and also knowing how to seek help when we need it.
Experiencing emotional discomfort from time to time is a part of life and unavoidable, especially when we face difficulties or go through periods of adversity or stress. Feeling unpleasant emotions, such as anxiety, sadness, or anger, is sometimes normal . We must understand that while some emotions are unpleasant, they serve a purpose, and therefore we must understand ourselves in order to identify, manage, and express them appropriately, according to our age. It is also necessary to develop the social-emotional skills that will allow us to manage these emotions and locate social resources that can help us. We must be capable, then, of facing emotionally challenging and potentially demanding, even stressful or painful, situations without reacting impulsively or avoiding them.
Constant happiness and pleasure are neither possible, realistic, nor adaptive; they cannot be an obligation.
Living a real life means experiencing highs and lows, uncertainty, and everyday stress, and knowing how to cope with them. We must seek a deeper and more consistent well-being—one that is less explosive or reactive, authentic, personal, and sustainable—based on our own skills, needs, resources, and values.
Therefore, it is important:
To perceive, understand and interpret our environment through exploration and reflection on what surrounds us and every situation we experience.
To have, nurture, and maintain healthy relationships that support each other.
Do activities that are meaningful.
Knowing how to make decisions responsibly and creatively.
Adapting and learning from the circumstances and experiences that happen to us.
It's important to understand that each person can experience this emotional well-being differently and that it can change throughout life, but it should allow us to:
To feel, think and act fully in our daily lives.
To understand, manage and redirect, experience and express all emotions in a healthy and balanced way.
Managing unpleasant emotions and cultivating pleasant emotions.
Emotional distress versus mental health disorder
To begin, it's important to distinguish between emotional distress and mental health disorders , and to stop pathologizing and stigmatizing them. Emotional distress arises from experiencing difficult situations in our daily lives that cause us to feel unpleasant emotions, but it doesn't constitute a mental disorder. These are ordinary reactions to life and its situations, which we have to cope with. Therefore, emotional distress has a very important environmental component; in other words, the environment plays a key role.
Emotional distress is defined as a multifactorial state of a psychological nature –emotional, cognitive, behavioral–, social and spiritual, also influenced by contextual and physical elements, which can modulate our development in different areas of life.
In principle, this subjective experience of suffering or worry does not reach the intensity, frequency and duration necessary to meet diagnostic criteria for a mental disorder, which does not mean in any case that the person is not having a bad time.
Socio-emotional skills that promote resilience
Some of the most frequent manifestations of emotional distress are:
Fear.
The fault.
Dissatisfaction.
Despair.
The decline.
Lack of motivation.
Discouragement.
The anguish.
Loneliness.
In contrast, mental disorders are clinical conditions that do not have a single cause, but often involve components of innate biological vulnerability, and which at times can impact and interfere with a person's daily life and their environment. Everyone, whether or not they have a mental disorder, can experience emotional distress.
Therefore, emotional distress is a part of life and a common state; it should be normalized, but not trivialized or relativized. Instead, we all need to learn to understand it, identify its cause, and develop socio-emotional skills and social resources to manage it, give and receive support, and cope with the situations and emotions we experience. And, if something becomes overwhelming, we should be able to access and seek help in available spaces.
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