How To Keep Your Emotional Health Healthy
Your emotional health is vitally important as it impacts into every other area of your life – take it from me – I am one who has been to burn out and back. To ensure any level of longevity in ministry, you have to learn how to keep your emotional health healthy. You have to take care of your emotional health needs and shift them into a higher place of priority.
Imagine with me a large water container with a tap positioned near to the bottom, through which the water flows out.
Now let’s transfer that picture to the container being you and is filled with your emotional energy.
In ministry life, the tap can always be in the on position, where we freely, willingly and sacrificially flow ourselves out into the lives of our people.
This works well while our emotional level is high but what happens when it drops into the emotional depletion zone and you are running on the last drops in your container?
So let me show you how to keep your emotional health healthy.
You can keep your emotional levels high by:
1. Recognising, and acting upon, the warning signals your body and emotions are giving you.
2. Know yourself well. What depletes you and what energises you.
3. Have numerous streams of replenishment flowing into your emotional world that are recreational (walking, sport, movies); relational (friends, people you enjoy and laugh with); spiritual (God’s presence and His word).
4. Give yourself permission to be ‘busy’ looking after you.
Learning how to keep your emotional health healthy is a life long exercise so never stop being a learner.
How do you keep your emotional health healthy?