What is Emotional Hygiene?

Hygiene refers to an inherited, learned practice we use to manage something that is often intangible.

We learn to brush our teeth and floss to maintain oral health although we can’t see the bacteria or the out of balance chemistry in our mouth that cause tooth decay or gum disease.  

Acquiring a hygiene practice requires both developmental growth and developmentally appropriate learning through social shaping and coaching in our rearing environments.

All hygiene practices have a survival critical physical health component. Neglected oral hygiene can lead to dangerous or eventually fatal infection. Neglected physical hygiene can lead to externally and internally sourced disease vulnerabilities of a wide variety. Neglected development of emotions can lead to stress-related health risks, heart disease or stroke, or failure to thrive-based health problems, among others.

Hygiene practices always have a survival critical social component for us primates. There is a social cost to us if we fail to engage in them such as reduced connection, censure or in the most dangerous case - abandonment.

There are social rewards for us if we successfully learn and maintain any hygiene practice - such as increased connection, acquisition of a social safety net from our family/tribe, and persistently sufficient safety  - which allows access to the uppermost, cortical parts of our brains where curiosity, creativity, knowledge, love and altruism (the components of humanness) happen. 

Hygiene practices therefore are not optional - the impact on our lives of not practicing them is too great.

A practice of emotional hygiene means:

1 - Understanding what emotions are: individually tailored safety tools

2 - Understanding what their individual purposes are

For example:

A. Raising the alarm when threat is detected (fear)

B. Providing protection (anger)

C. Shepherding us through successfully hurting when we lose something (sorrow)

D. Allowing us to rest, renew, repair, recreate, and experience new growth - all required for survival (joy)

3 - Learning to use emotions well so that we get the benefits we need from them, and no one is unduly harmed by them

We propose there are particular ideas, awareness skills, actions, and habits of responding that we all can develop in order to use emotions successfully, which together, amount to a practice of emotional hygiene.

Just as all people benefit from brushing their teeth, the need to develop a functioning practice of emotional hygiene applies to everyone, everywhere, regardless of culture or geography.