Bad Emotional Health Habits to Break

There are many healthy lifestyle habits that can improve your emotional wellbeing and 
help you to live a happier, healthier life. There are also some bad habits that might not 
seem terrible from a distance, but when done in excess could be causing you to lose 
some of that emotional wellness. For improved resilience and emotional strength, it is 
best to avoid these habits.


Hiding From Your Emotions

Pretending you don’t feel how you feel isn’t going to make your problems go away. If 
anything, this just prolongs how bad you feel. It can sometimes feel easier to hide from 
your emotions and pretend they aren’t there. This feels comfortable and like you don’t 
have to deal with them at all. But what tends to happen is they build up, and come out 
sooner or later, but much more extreme than if you just dealt with them in the first place. 

Not to mention that when you hide from how you feel, you aren’t really hiding. You are 
just covering them up with other unhealthy coping mechanisms. 


Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

Speaking of unhealthy coping mechanisms, it can also sometimes feel easier to just 
push those bad feelings aside and instead participate in unhealthy coping activities like 
drugs and alcohol, but if you aren’t dealing with them, they will keep festering. 

Plus, some of these bad habits actually make your emotional and mental health worse. 
If you have depression or anxiety, alcohol can make it much worse. While you are 
drinking and having a good time, it seems like everything is great. But once you sober 
up, that alcohol acts like a depressant, making you feel much worse in the long run. 


Reacting Immediately Before Sitting With Your Emotions

While you don’t want to hide from your emotions, you also don’t want to immediately 
react in a bad way. Give yourself a minute to feel how you feel, figure out why you feel 
that way, and then react once you have calmed down.

This typically happens in response to something that made you feel angry, sad, or 
defensive. You don’t want to just jump down the person’s throat who made you feel this 
way. In these moments, your emotions tend to be so heightened that you act irrationally 
and say things you don’t really mean. This can be hard to come back from. 

Strike a balance by giving yourself a minute to calm down, think about what you are 
feeling and why, and then work on processing your emotions in a healthy and 
constructive manner.


Judging or Feeling Shame Over Your Own Emotions

While you are in control of how you feel, outside circumstances can catch you off guard. 
This is no reason to have shame or judgment over how you feel. You are having a 
human experience, the same one everyone else on this Earth has gone through. There 
is nothing to be embarrassed about. There is no reason to ever judge how you feel 
about something, no matter what other people think about it.


Trying to Constantly Stay Busy

There is a difference between healthy distractions and just trying to stay busy for the 
sake of avoiding how you feel about something. Distractions like reading, going for a 
walk, meditating, or watching something funny on TV can be good for you. They allow 
you to rest a little and think on your emotions when you feel more prepared for them.

But when you try to stay busy with work and productive activities constantly, you might 
actually be trying to hide from emotions you just don’t want to deal with. This is when it 
turns into a bad habit for your emotional health.

