Emotions are the manifestation of our experiences and the perception towards those experiences.
Positive emotions help us unify across cultures, strengthen healthy relationships, makes us feel good about ourselves.
But negative emotions can impact our confidence, lead to consequences of destroying a healthy relationships, etc. We typically try to address it by in-depth and repeated analysis, followed by judging and justifying. It doesn’t work that way, never. It just may make us feel safe about doing everything to express and justify our emotions within, but solution lies elsewhere. Another typical way we try to address it is by yelling and hitting out our head at something. This way of expression doesn’t work too.
You don’t always need to analyse and understand Emotions. It just needs careful consideration.
So, how do we deal with the unpleasant emotions ?
Well, emotion is ‘energy-in-motion’. Best time to deal with an emotion is when you start to feel and experience it completely. In three words – Identify, Express and Respond. Here are a few steps to handle emotions, effectively.
- Identify and label it – Learn to understand the kind of emotion it is. See what are you really feeling. Give a name to it. May be ‘Anger’, ‘Disgust’, etc.
- Acknowledge – As emotions are part of you hence, they need your appreciation. Denying or avoiding them will destroy the communication channel you have with yourself.
- Listen your inner voice – Emotions are alerts or notifications who delivers a message about what’s happening within you. Read that message. Understand and solve it where necessary.
- Express it out – Speak to someone who can understand it. You can also express it out by some activity, movement or exercise. May be through dance, workout, travelling, painting, etc. which would give it a path to come out of you constructively.
- Recollect – Recall of a moment when you last felt such an emotion and how you successfully handled it. This will give you confidence that if you handled it in past, you can deal with it now and in future as well.
- Take Action – Once you read the message of what you need to do to deal with such an emotion, get ready to work and solve it. Also check if you need to take any lesson from the root cause of the negative emotion and how you can prevent it from recurring. If as part of the solution, you need to let go of something, then be it. It will help you recover fast.
With so much love !
Piyush