YovinoMD Inner Beauty Series, Volume 1: Self Awareness & Emotional Intelligence

February is the month of love, and at YovinoMD Beauty, we emphasize loving yourself. Part of cultivating self love is self care - and that’s where our medical-grade skin care line comes in! However, we wanted to take the month of February to focus on another important component: caring for your inner beauty by developing emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence can be defined as the ability to perceive, understand, manage, and reason with your emotions. A high level of emotional intelligence (also known as a high EQ) is a major factor in developing high self esteem, improving symptoms of anxiety and depression, and learning important distress tolerance skills.

Research has shown that there are 5 key components to cultivating emotional intelligence: self awareness, self regulation, social skills, empathy, and motivation. In today’s blog, we’ll talk about component #1: Self awareness!

In the context of developing emotional intelligence, self-awareness means treating your emotions the same way. Self awareness is the “ability to recognize and understand your own emotions” (Cherry, Kendra). This essentially means being aware of exactly what you’re feeling, what provoked that feeling, and where it is really coming from. For example, if you find yourself feeling angry while stuck in traffic, having self awareness of those feelings could look like this:

1. Recognizing what you are feeling: frustration

2. Recognizing what provoked you: traffic delays

3. Recognizing what caused the root cause of that feeling: you feel you are wasting your valuable free time by being overworked and now being stuck in traffic.

In that example, you are recognizing the type of anger you’re feeling (frustrated), the trigger of that emotion (being stuck in traffic), and the root cause of that emotion (feeling a lack of work-life balance).

Once you are aware of the root cause of your emotion, you can effectively address the problem rather than the symptom. In the example above, the real issue is feeling a lack of work-life balance. If you were to only address the surface issue (the traffic), it might make you feel a little better in the moment. However, the root cause of your frustration would still be present in your life, and would just manifest itself in other ways - for example, if you were to eliminate the traffic problem, you might find yourself getting disproportionately angry about waiting in line at the store. Once you begin to tackle the greater issue, you will find that the little triggers no longer provoke the same big reaction. Our motto is that every problem has a solution. If you focus on the solution, tackling the problem becomes an attainable goal, capable of being solved with less anxiety and worry.

As previously mentioned, self awareness means being aware of your feelings and the root cause of those feelings. This is a great philosophy to translate into all aspects of your life - including your skin and skin care routine! Imagine that your skin is constantly breaking out in acne. You’re bothered to no end by the recurring breakouts - they’re embarrassing, painful, and don’t do your self confidence any favors. Your skin’s redness and irritation are the obvious surface-level issues here. So, would you just slap on a thick layer of concealer and expect the breakouts to stop? Absolutely not! The concealer may be a bandaid to temporarily hide the surface-level issues, but you know that the root cause of the acne is an imbalance in oil production and the clogging of your pores- and ignoring the root cause will only make the acne worse! You know that to really fix the problem with your skin, your solution will be to use products that increase cellular turnover, regulate oil production, and kill bacteria. Your solution is a YovinoMD Beauty’s Retinoid Complex, Wrinkle Erase Serum and Acne Defense Serum!