Challenge: How Would You Make The World A Better Place?

We must have all wondered about this at some point - improving the state of the world, but the world is so vast that very few remedies would have immediate impact. Except one major one, I think.

Personally, I would make the world a better place by putting more emphasis on addressing emotional health. This sounds like common sense, but it isn't. Not being fully understood, this aspect of health has been lumped in with 'mental health', which prevents it being addressed in any singular way. Yet emotional health is the lynch pin which determines both physical and mental states, but is quite separate from them.

Emotional health is all about FEELINGS, STRENGTH, and SELF-LOVE (like confidence, self-esteem, emotions). How much we love ourselves and our perception of being included and valued by others. When feelings are negative, especially with youngsters and jilted lovers, they are likely to precipitate changes in mental and physical wellbeing, because feelings of inadequacy have to be transformed somehow, into feelings of power. We tend to feel a sense of injustice at such times and are virtual loose canons when we feel rejected, excluded and disrespected.

For example, depression is a mental state with all kinds of root causes, but its trigger is likely to be the degree of negativity and inadequacy the person felt at some key point, their emotional health, before they became depressed, which can lead to practical consequences like

• Sadness or loss of interest in activities you once enjoyed
• Fatigue or loss of energy
• Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
• Changes in appetite or weight
• Trouble sleeping or sleeping too much.

One state tends to lead to the other. It means you can be both physically and mentally at ease but emotionally screwed up, a situation most apparent in relationships, especially with partners or parents. Yet that element is seldom addressed, so the person keeps repeating the same detrimental emotional pattern of behaviour everywhere they go, then wonder why their relationships repeatedly fail, or give them the same results.

At the core of emotional health is personal value, confidence, self-esteem and inclusion. My belief is that if we focus on these in every human being to make them more positive and enabling, we would have an immediate answer to many of the world's ills, especially those who feel lonely, undervalued and emotionally excluded from their society/community, enough for them to become deviant and aggressive.

You only have to gauge someone's emotional wellbeing by asking them how they see themselves, and rating themselves out of 10. Most people will say 6 or under, because they have a desire to be perfect beings and, in their eyes, they fall well short of that. So they focus on their perceived weaknesses instead of their uniqueness and strengths, feeling truly inadequate in the process. Without the resources to change that perception, it is guaranteed to have a knock-on effect on other aspects - on health, jobs and home. Yet a little self-education, self-love and appreciation from others usually change such negativity.

Additionally, an enormous amount of money would be saved in dealing with the physical and mental ill-health that often results from feelings of exclusion and insignificance (especially by minority groups), not to mention stemming the level of crime that is always associated with emotional crises and a lack of self-love. Time to give emotional health its priority in human life and change the narrow way we deal with rejection, exclusion and deviance. I think the world would certainly be much better for it. At least, I hope so!

That would be my way to the world: greater awareness of nurturing self-love and feelings of value, to boost emotional health.

The challenge is over to YOU now. How would you make the world a better place?

Sources: livinghealthylist.com/womens-health/

www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/depression/what-is-depression

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