What is emotional fitness?
What is emotional fitness?
Emotions are central to our lives and our mental well-being. They enrich our experience, motivate us and help us to respond to the world and to each other.
But when emotions like sadness or anxiety outweigh happiness and excitement, become frequent, stuck, or out of proportion, we experience distress and poor mental health.
Recognising, understanding and managing emotions is key to improving our well-being, self-confidence, relationships, and success in education and career. These skills in understanding and managing emotions make up our Emotional Fitness.
These skills are especially important for young people because they go through major life changes like leaving home, starting work, developing romantic relationships, and set up how they will respond the rest of their lives.
In recognition of this, the European Commission has funded ECoWeB project, involving leading Universities across Europe, to conduct important science to increase understanding of how emotions and emotional skills change over time and predict well-being, and how to best improve emotional skills and well-being in young people aged 16-22.
Our goal is to promote well-being and mental health in young people. To do this, we are using an app – the MyMoodCoach app (IoS or Android), powered by Monsenso, an app company, to monitor and learn about emotions in daily life and to improve emotional skills, coupled with web-based assessments over a year. All participants receive the MyMoodCoach app, which helps you to learn more about your own patterns of emotions in your daily life. For example, by using the Emotion Monitor and MoodTracker in the app regularly for a few minutes each day over several weeks you will learn what emotions you have most often and what influences when you feel better or worse (e.g., what you are doing, who you are with, where you are). This is really important so that we can learn about how emotions really work in the real world. We hope that you will find it fun, interesting and useful. Such self-monitoring improves Emotional Fitness, self-knowledge and confidence.
