"Finally, as I learned the hard way, striving for physical health and longevity is meaningless if we ignore our emotional health. Emotional suffering can decimate our health on all fronts, and it must be addressed."

– Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity, by Peter Attia, MD and Bill Gifford

These Venn-like circles above are a first pass at approximating how I think about emotional health.

The circles are limited to four for illustration purposes. I selected exercise, breathing, and meditation labels because they are practices often recommended for emotional health. There are many other possibilities, of course.

The crude diagrams are meant to illustrate that exercise, breathing, and meditation might or might not be emotion skills. They might overlap with emotion skills or have nothing at all to do with emotion skills.

I think emotion skill or fluency – the ability to work skillfully with all of one’s emotions – is a category on its own.

These practice circles will vary and differ for each individual. For example, you might never meditate or rarely exercise and still have a large circle representing your emotion skills. So the different combinations might represent different people or one person at various times.

If meditation or exercise is your only emotion skill, if those circles largely overlap, you might be missing some emotion skills that would serve you well.

Some other possible circles might include art, music, nature walks, eating, sleep, reading, friendship, smoking, alcohol, games, work, ad infinitum. Any or many of them might increase (or decrease) one’s emotional health.

I think the essential circle for emotional health, though, is actual emotional skills. Perhaps even putting it at the center of your emotional health practices would be worth considering.

And the larger you can grow that circle, the better you understand and work with all of your emotions, without trying to suppress or eliminate any of them, the more likely you will live the life you want to live, with better odds for physical and mental health.

What circles would you draw, and how would you size and arrange them?

For more information on improving your emotion skills and emotional health, you can click here.