A Brief Taxonomy of Emotional Health

taxonomy of emotional health Wignall

A reader asks:

You often frame your writing as being about emotional health. But you also write about emotional intelligence, emotional resilience, emotional maturity, etc. What’s a simple way to understand the difference between all these terms?

Emotional health is a broad umbrella concept that refers to how healthy or not our emotional lives are.

It’s not a very useful idea on its own.

I mostly think about emotional health as a container concept that holds together a variety of more specific and helpful ideas.

3 Core Elements in Emotional Health

There are three ideas that make up the core of emotional health:

  • Emotional Intelligence. Emotional intelligence means understanding how emotions work and how to work with them in a healthy and productive way.
  • Emotional Fitness. Emotional fitness is a commitment to a set of habits and exercise that support and strengthen your emotional health.
  • Emotional Resilience. Emotional resilience is your capacity to respond to difficult emotions in a healthy and productive way.

These three ideas relate to each other in a particular way represented by a simple equation:

Emotional Intelligence X Emotional Fitness = Emotional Resilience

Here’s the basic logic:

  • Emotional health mostly boils down to emotional resilience or your capacity to respond well to emotions, especially difficult ones.
  • But how do you become emotionally resilient?
  • There are two key ingredients: Emotional intelligence (what you know) and emotional fitness (what you do).
  • Like anything in life, ability is a function of understanding + practice. To play piano well, you need to understand how the instrument works, how to hold your fingers appropriately, etc. But that’s not sufficient. You also have to practice doing the skill, often quite a lot.
  • Similarly, if emotional resilience is the ability or skill we want to cultivate, it requires a combination of emotional understanding (emotional intelligence) plus emotional practice (emotional fitness).

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Other Concepts in Emotional Health

A brief, non-comprehensive list of other concepts related to emotional health:

  • Emotional Maturity. Emotional maturity is a person’s capacity to prioritize long-term goals rather than immediate gratification in the face of difficult emotions. In other words, when faced with a difficult emotion, do they act like a child (impulsive and selfish) or like an adult (reflective and considerate)?
  • Mental Health. Mental health refers to the clinical side of emotional health. For example: emotional health is concerned with anxiety, while mental health is concerned with anxiety disorders.
  • Emotional Endurance. Emotional endurance is the capacity to be with a difficult emotion rather than avoiding it or trying to fix, cope with, or otherwise modify it. It’s the practical side of emotional tolerance. While you can understand theoretically that it is possible (and often wise) to tolerate an emotional experience, your ability to do so is a skill that you can be better or worse at.
  • Emotional Processing. Emotional processing usually refers to something like how to think about and work through difficult emotional experiences. It’s almost always poorly-defined, and consequently, unhelpfully deployed. I tend to avoid using it for this reason.
  • Emotional Strength. Historically, I’ve used this and emotional resilience synonymously. I’m trying to stick with emotional resilience going forward.
  • The Friendly Mind. The Friendly Mind is my own term for a relational rather than combative attitude toward difficult emotions. That is, instead of viewing difficult emotions like enemies to be avoided or eliminated, you view emotions as friends trying to communicate something. And however accurate or helpful the message, they are always well-intentioned.
  • Emotional Literacy. Emotional literacy means having a large, diverse, and nuanced vocabulary with which to describe and think through your emotional experiences.
  • Emotional Fluency. Emotional fluency is the ability to quickly and easily identify, differentiate, and express your emotions.

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If you’re interested in learning more about emotional health and related concepts, here are a few resources from me you might enjoy:

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