Ways To Better Understand Your Feelings
Emotions are essential to our human experience.
What we feel on a daily basis as we face a variety of people and different scenarios provides us with information about what we’re dealing with and lets us know how to react accordingly.
Emotional Awareness (when we know what we are feeling and why we are feeling that way) enables us to know what we need and want, or vice versa. This in turn helps us to connect with others and build better relationships with the people around us.
Despite being so vital to our social connections, emotions can be neglected, whether through our education systems or in professional environments. Yet when we get to the crux of it, when we know and understand our emotions and how to communicate them effectively, we are in a better position to avoid and resolve conflicts and create a conducive environment for growth to take place, whether in our personal or professional lives.
Although we might be used to speaking about positive emotions openly, we should also establish the norm of expressing negative emotions in a healthy way.
This might sound elementary, however, when we have been taught to suppress or ignore feeling or expressing negative emotions, it may be where we need to start. Some of us have been taught that intense emotions should not be expressed since young, as well-behaved children are a testament to our parents’ upbringing and reputation, and many of us might not even have the right vocabulary to articulate all our feelings. If that was the case for you, you would need to take time to unlearn that and relearn emotional awareness and how to express your emotions appropriately.
Here are 4 ways to start to build your emotional awareness:
1️⃣ Expand Your Emotional Vocabulary
Before we can begin to understand or express ourselves, we first need to have the words and the vocabulary to do so. ‘The Feelings Wheel’ will be helpful for this. If you are a visual learner, it might also be helpful to print it out and to paste it somewhere where you can see it often, (e.g. your bedroom, or your bathroom mirror!)
You can also keep a copy of this on your smartphone too, especially when you are pondering about an event, or a situation…
2️⃣ Make a Habit of Tuning into Your Emotions
… which leads to the 2nd point! At different times of the day, you can intentionally take a moment to tune into your feelings. This can be as simple as taking a pause from your day, noticing what you feel, and labelling that emotion (The Feelings Wheel might help!) For example, you might be feeling anxious and stressed before a test, or you might be feeling relieved after sharing your problems with a friend. You might have felt angry when someone overtook and cut your lane while driving this afternoon. You might have felt proud of yourself for achieving a good grade in your latest exams.
Regardless of whether it was a positive or negative emotion, you don’t have to judge yourself for feeling a certain way or not feeling a certain way. Just be present in the moment, and feel what you feel. Practice often and soon enough, you will be able to label your emotions accurately, whilst building your vocabulary at the same time.
3️⃣ Consider The Intensity Of Your Emotions
If you have the time and space to do so, or if a particular emotion concerns you, you might want to take the additional step of considering the intensity of that emotion felt. A simple scale (as shown below) could assist you in rating how strongly you feel on a scale of 1 - 10, with 1 being a mild feeling, and 10 being an intense, deep feeling. Paired with Step 4, this might lead you to greater insight about yourself even as you consider why you felt the intensity you did. You can also consider utilising a mood tracker to help you track your emotions on a daily / weekly / monthly basis to understand yourself better.
4️⃣ Share Your Feelings
Last but not least, it can be helpful and cathartic to share your feelings with a trusted friend, even as you go about your day. That’s the best and easiest way to practise labelling our feelings and be a step closer to understanding why we felt a certain way at a particular time or about a particular person or event.
The other way we can express our feelings is by writing about it. There has been research done by James Pennebaker on the link between writing and emotional processing, where it was shown that people who wrote about emotionally charged episodes in their lives experienced better physical and mental well-being. At the same time, it also helped them to gain insights about what the feelings meant, understanding them and their consequences more vividly.
You can journal every day, when you feel like it or when you are going through a tough time.
Here is an exercise that you might want to try to start you off:
⌛ Set a timer for 15 minutes
Write about your emotional experience. You can use either a notebook 🗒️ or a computer 💻.
Don’t worry about writing in a particular way or format or even perfectly. Follow your heart and write honestly.
May these steps help you find the words to help you understand and express yourself step-by-step, and may your relationships benefit abundantly from that.
Resources:
TeensHealth. Understanding Your Emotions. https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/understand-emotions.html#:~:text=It%20helps%20us%20build%20better,with%20their%20emotions%20than%20others.
Harvard Business Review. 3 Ways to Better Understand Your Emotions. https://hbr.org/2016/11/3-ways-to-better-understand-your-emotions
Calm. The Feelings Wheel: Unlock the power of your emotions. https://www.calm.com/blog/the-feelings-wheel
The Cut. You Can Write Your Way Out of an Emotional Funk. Here’s How. https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/journaling-can-help-you-out-of-a-bad-mood.html