Everything You Need To Know About Emotional Anorexia

You’ve probably heard of anorexia. It’s one of the world’s most common eating disorders and involves a person starving themselves even though they feel intense and painful hunger. As the term ‘emotional anorexia’ implies it can also leave you starving – but it’s not for food, it’s for emotions. The term is not as well-known, but feeling emotionally and spiritually starving is increasingly common and is more serious than you might think.

Being emotionally anorexic is a state being just like physical anorexia. In fact when your emotional hunger is ignored, neglected, denied, shamed, blamed or misunderstood it can leave you even ‘hungrier’. Personal and professional setbacks can leave you feeling tired and empty. This can have serious negative consequences for your wellbeing.

Some of the signs of emotional anorexia include suppressing your emotions, lacking the ability to cry, starving and neglecting needs, diminishing desires and denying all of this to avoid further emotional pain. Emotional anorexia can even manifest itself in a physical way, with symptoms like fatigue, insomnia and irritability. And of course the longer they’re ignored, the worse the situation will get.

The only way to overcome emotional anorexia is to face it and challenge what is making you feel this way. Pay attention to your real desires and ask yourself what you are really hungry for. The hunger for emotion is not something to ever be ashamed of, but it is something that you have to nurture and respond to.

Once you’ve established what it is that you’re looking for, you can use that information to build up a healthy, rich and satisfying life that will replace your emotional cravings with fulfilment.

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Everything You Need To Know About Emotional Anorexia

Categories: emotion, emotional anorexia, hungry

How To Use Emotion On Social Media

There is one universal truth about engaging with your audience on social media: you have to use emotion. With businesses it can often be overlooked in a rush to push the sales message of the brand first. But in social communications emotion works and it needs to be a major part of what you’re saying.

The emotions can be positive or negative emotions. Happy thoughts like fun, enthusiasm and intrigue can be very effective, but so can anything that makes you angry, frustrated or feeling challenged. The massive majority of people who use social media are not the ‘trolls’ that we are constantly reminded of on the news. Generally they are happy to offer help and advice – they just need to be asked in the right way.

This is very evident in the small business social networking space. In this environment many social groups’ members jump in and help out to support other small business owners. It is the strength of these emotional bonds that will improve your standing within social networks and the business environment that you work within.

Once you have made a social connection that is tied based on an emotion it will lead to a stronger connection that is sustainable in the long-term. Although it’s possible that weak ties can form in both communities and social networks, a strong tie is built up in business communities only through a powerful emotional connection.

That means that often your most valued and strongest ties will have started from a weak tie, pulled together through a shared emotion or a set of values. This is where looking at the psychology of social networks can give the insight to the depth of what and why is really happening in social media.

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How To Use Emotion On Social Media

Categories: business, emotion, Social Media