Pillars of wellness: Emotional

  • Published
  • By Capt. Dahvyn Osher
  • 75th Air Base Wing Mental Health Clinic
HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah --  Potential sources of stress that threaten a sense of emotional wellbeing are everywhere in the Air Force culture. From longer deployments in theater to doing "more with less" mentality on the home front, there are no shortage of stressors in an Airmen's day to day existence. 

The Air Force is aware of the increasingly complex challenges that are faced by Airmen and has decided to address the problem through enhancing awareness of what can be done to prevent stressors from having a significant negative impact on their lives. These ideas are embodied by the Wingman concept and the Four Pillars of Wellness -- social, spiritual, physical, and emotional. 

The emotional pillar tends to be the most difficult dimension of wellness for people to clearly define largely because it focuses on a person's emotions, which are difficult for most to understand even on good days. 

Emotional wellbeing is more than just being happy and/or avoiding negative emotions. It is about the ability to be resilient, or to be able to bounce back emotionally after encountering difficult and stressful times in one's life. 

Most people at one point in their lives can experience a negative life event that could lead to a flood of powerful negative emotions that can include anger, anxiety and depression. Emotionally resilient people have a much better chance of being able to quickly bounce back to their normal emotional state after experiencing these emotions. 

This seems to be primarily due to having a clear set of attitudes concerning themselves and their role within the world that motivates and enables them to cope better with the ups and downs of life.

Some keys to developing emotional resilience are:
· Understand our own strengths and weaknesses.
· Set realistic and attainable goals, remain persistant and determined to achieve them.
· Be aware of and behave consistently with our core beliefs and values.
· Be assertive and effective communicators.
· Show compassion and empathy for others and engage in altruistic behavior (i.e., behavior that only benefits others in need).
· Feel good about ourselves.
· Find opportunities for optimism regarding life rather than pessimism.
· Adopt a flexible problem solving approach to life that allows us to learn from mistakes but not dwell on them.
· Direct our energy toward things that we can control in our lives and let go of things we have no control over.
· Find multiple sources of self-confidence/esteem (e.g., work, home, friends, creativity, etc.).
· Seek help and social support when our coping skills are not enough. 

These characteristics tend to allow emotionally resilient people to persevere through difficult situations long after less emotionally resilient people have become overwhelmed and given up. 

Emotional resiliency is only one of the four pillars of wellness and they work best together, so we should work at cultivating them all in order to better handle any crisis life throws our way. 


Other important information:

A Team Hill Wingman Expo will be held at the Hess Fitness Center, Nov. 9, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. 

A voluntary wellness survey is available starting Nov. 5. Team Hill members are highly encouraged to share their opinions via https://survey.afms.mil/wws07/survey.htm

Below are examples of questions on the Air Force Materiel Command Wingman Wellness Survey, available through Nov. 16. The survey is designed to gauge emotion, physical, social, and spiritual wellness both at personal and professional levels. Below are questions you may encounter on the survey:

1. Are you allotted time each week to meet your physical wellness?

2. My physical health has improved?

3. My quality of life has improved?

4. Do you feel supervision is aware of the primary safety risks of your work environment?

5. Are you given the authority to stop production/work activity if you observe an unsafe act/condition in the workplace? 

Tthe AFMC Wingman Wellness Survey is for YOU--the Wingman. It provides leadership with a snapshot of the work climate and the personal attitude of people within the unit. I highly encouraged you to help make changes for the betterment of all on Hill AFB--your opinion does count!