Is It Time to Redesign Your Emotional Environment?
I don’t watch horror movies.
It’s not really because I’m scared, although that does happen. I used to watch them, with friends, with my dad. I have seen plenty of gory, creepy stuff, and I survived. Some I even kind of liked.
But a few years ago, I decided to stop watching them altogether. Avoiding horror movies is one of the many ways that I intentionally shape my emotional environment.
By “emotional environment,” I mean the overall context of your life as it affects your things like your mood, mental health, and behavior. Your emotional environment is shaped by many things: your physical space, the communities in your life, the culture of the industry you work in, the content you consume, and more.
All of these factors have the power to affect your thoughts—and your thoughts become your reality.
“You are participating in creating your reality whether you know it or not.”
So, how do you design an emotional environment that gets you the results you want? Start with the things you can control.
You can’t control the billboards you see on the highway (unless you own the billboard company, I suppose). You can control your actions toward others, but you can’t control their reactions.
To some extent, you can often control your physical environment. Plenty of articles describe ways to create happy spaces, calm spaces, energizing spaces, and more. Your clothes, your dishes, your notebooks and pens—all of these contribute to your physical experience, and in turn create thoughts, associations and feelings inside you. Unless you’ve got celebrity money, you can’t redo your entire physical environment to suit your mood, but generally there are at least a few choices you can make.
Sure, some things are outside your control. Life will always come with outside context.
But some things are entirely yours to control. Like the content you consume—which brings me back to horror movies.
For many years now, I have stuck with a strict personal rule: I don’t watch movies or TV shows with gratuitous violence, creepy images that will haunt me into insomnia, or excessive depictions of dystopian pessimism and existential fear.
Yes, I get flak for this. People often think I’m soft—that I should grow up.
But in this case, I’m moving from an extremely grown-up place inside myself. Taking care of myself means managing my C-PTSD, chronic depression, paralyzing anxiety and sometimes life-threatening insomnia. For me, consuming harrowing content is playing with fire. If I leave my mental health up to chance, I could lose my ability to work, communicate, and show up for my loved ones. That’s a risk I’m not willing to take.
Everyone is different. I don’t expect everyone to be just like me and avoid all horror movies.
The point here is to challenge yourself: have you examined what you’re consuming and how it makes you feel? Are you making choices about what to read and watch based on intention? Or are you allowing your notifications and social media feeds to control it for you? Are you choosing things that bring joy, confidence and compassion into your mindset? Or are you numbing, escaping, subconsciously feeding your deepest fears?
These days, all of my phone notifications are off. All of them. I choose what apps I open, which stories I read. I choose to look at social media when I feel ready, when I’m grounded in a sense of my own value and less likely to play the comparison game. If the people around me want to watch something that will harm my mental health, I excuse myself, or explain my boundary and see if we could watch something else.
Life is hard enough. It makes me sad to see valuable, creative, joyous minds weighed down with scarcity, anxiety and fear.
Noticing the inputs you consume (and how they make you feel) is a great first step in designing an emotional environment that will stabilize your mental health and help you achieve your goals. Inputs shape your thoughts; your thoughts shape your beliefs; your beliefs shape your actions, and your actions shape your reality. You deserve an emotional environment that strengthens and inspires you, instead of weighing you down—and modifying the content you consume is a great step in that direction.