How Well Are You Really Doing?

People may ask how you are doing as a formality. They may or may not want to hear an honest answer. Whatever the situation is, what matters the most is how you answer that question – when you ask yourself.

What does doing well mean to you?

To me, there are two parts I consider. One is physical health, and the other is emotional health.

You are physically well when you have the energy to perform your daily activities, when you are equipped to do more than your usual activities. You are not feeling physical pain. I believe you can feel physically well even when you have chronic illnesses.

The part that many of us ignore is emotional well-being. Emotional well-being is not experiencing pleasant emotions all the time – it is impossible anyway. I think there are three ways to measure how well your emotional state is. Before talking about how to measure your emotional well-being, it is important to have awareness of how you feel.

First, it is how you process pleasant emotions. For example, when you feel joyful, how do you experience it? It is a pleasant feeling. The best way is to be present. Reflect on what is making you feel joyful. How does that feel physically?

One of my favorite things to do is to walk around a park. It is my usual routine on Saturdays, when I take my kids to swim practice. Instead of just sitting in the car for over two hours, I choose to brisk walk 3 miles around a man-made pond. When it is 6 am on a Saturday morning, I am usually the only one walking around the water. There I immerse myself in nature, as if I owned that place. The cool breeze brushes on my face, the ruffling of my windbreaker while I walk, the occasional turtle head popping out of the water – it is amazing that I get to enjoy all these and more. The walk in nature is a luxury to me. Calm, quiet, no phones – just the birds chirping, the squirrels running and dodging. The ducks do not even move when I am three steps away.

The second way to gauge your emotional well-being is how you handle unpleasant emotions. It is important to realize that you will always experience some unpleasant emotions, just not all the time. An indication of emotional well-being is that when you are experiencing an unpleasant emotion, you acknowledge and accept it. You do not push it away. Then you ask yourself why you feel that way. What are you thinking that is causing you to experience that emotion? You allow time to process your emotions, without judgment. You are not telling yourself that you should not feel a certain way. You are not “trapped” by your emotions, because you know that you feel a certain way from the opinion you have on a situation.

The third measure of your emotional well-being is your capacity to try new things. When you are not emotionally well, it is unlikely that you would want to try something new. Experimenting new things requires you to be out of your comfort zone. There is some degree of curiosity. When you are in survival mode, meaning that you are not exactly living with purpose but only getting by, there is little capacity to intentionally try something new. You may do something different out of desperation. In other words, when you are barely surviving, you will only do something new because you are forced to. When you are emotionally well, you choose to try something new to see if it can move you closer to your goal.

There is an important question to ask yourself all the time: why are you doing what you are doing? If I ask myself why I became a physician, my simple answer is to help people. Then you ask the next why – why do you want to help people? Because helping people brings me joy. Ultimately, we do things to make ourselves experience more pleasant emotions. Do not get me wrong – this is normal. While you are helping others, you benefit by feeling good about it. Understand what makes you feel great and do more of it. This will increase your emotional well-being.