How Can I Understand My Emotions?
Do you ever have moments where you feel as if your feelings are about to swallow you whole and spit you out? Or are you constantly wondering how you deal with negative emotions? If you relate to any of these questions don't fret and read on. You are most definitely not the first or the last person to wonder, why am I always crying and sad? Why am I always angry?
What's keeping us stuck?
One of the big reasons why many of us have a hard time understanding our emotions is due to the fact that we live in a world where emotions have not been prioritized or even deemed as important. When we look around us it may be hard to notice, at first, that we live in a world surrounded by big shiny things. These big shiny things like our cell phones or our next big purchase keeps us entertained and keeps us in a state of chase. Constantly running around, constantly seeking the next big thing that will keep us entertained for a few hours. This has led many of us to sprint for the hills when we feel any type of negative emotion coming our way. Sprinting for the hills to avoid our emotions might look like the following:
Constantly scrolling social media
Binge drinking
Workaholism
Focusing (in an obsessive matter) on someone or something else
Overusing a drug
Excessive exercise
Did any of these stir something inside of you? Keep in mind that sprinting for the hills can look like overusing or focusing on anything outside of us in an excessive manner. Many of us avoid asking ourselves questions like, why am I always crying and sad? Or why am I always angry? Or what can I do to understand my emotions? Figuring out the answer to a lot of these questions might require a lot of scary changes or realizations. Having shiny things in our face constantly also doesn't help any. We might wonder why we should feel down in the dumps when Sally is living her best life on a beach sipping margaritas on Instagram.
So, how do you deal with negative emotions?
As we grow up and go through school, work, and relationships we often come face to face with messages all around us telling us to hide away our feelings, to put them in a box and store them away in a closet. As children, our parents constantly tell us to, “stop crying,” “stop throwing a tantrum, you should not be mad.” The messages to reject and make our feelings stop comes loud and clear resulting in us not knowing how to deal with negative emotions. This usually also leads us to be unsure of what to answer when someone that truly wants to know what's going on with us asks us what we might be feeling in the moment. So, how do we get to a place where we can somewhat identify our feelings and understand them?
Identify two of our go-to’s when stressed or overwhelmed
Increase our time sitting in moments of discomfort
Ask ourselves, why am I truly feeling this way?
One of the first steps when attempting to wrangle our emotions is identifying our go-to’s when we feel overwhelmed or stressed. Uncovering our go-to’s are great indicators of our inner world. Feeling overwhelmed and frustrated may be so common to us that we may not really notice when we enter this emotion thus identifying a couple of our go-to’s is helpful when trying to stop this. This also leads us to our next step, increasing the time we sit with moments of discomfort. When we are able to identify and stop that go-to tendency we are given the opportunity to sit with our feelings. Feelings are energy that wants to be acknowledged. Once we do acknowledge our feelings we are then able to ask ourselves the deeper question of why we might be feeling this way?
The next time you are feeling discomfort take a moment and follow the steps above. You might be shocked at what you discover.
