Tips for a Healthier You: Learning about Emotions
Taking care of your mental health is as important as taking care of your physical health. If you’re looking to really improve how you feel, paying attention to mental health is likely where you’ll find the biggest improvement. The first step in moving forward is understanding emotions.
Emotions and Feelings
There’s a lot of confusion as to the difference between emotions, feelings, and thoughts. In essence, emotions are very basic impulses that help instruct us how to move through the world. Positive emotions, such as love and happiness, help us understand that situations are safe and it’s OK to move toward them. Negative emotions, such as fear and anger, help us understand that the situation we’re looking at may be dangerous and we should consider staying away. Emotions are very, very basic impulses, so we feel them in our bodies; if we are able to tune into that sensation, we literally have a physical sense whether to move toward or away from any given situation.
Feelings are a higher order brain function that help us, as human beings, make sense of our emotions. The emotion may be readying us for a fight at the level of the amygdala, but higher areas of the brain can help us understand, “Oh, I’m really angry right now, but I don’t have to actually hit this person. Instead, I can say that I’m angry.”
Being able to recognize our emotions and articulate them through the language of feelings are key skills that make it much, much easier to navigate the world around us. When we consider what helps us manage emotions and feelings, I normally say there are four main keys to doing that.
First, we must be able to acknowledge that we have emotions, because we’re human beings. Emotions do not make us bad, mean, unstable, or anything else. All human beings have those impulses, and the impulses are just trying to help us understand how to move though the world. Understanding that this is a universal experience is helpful and useful.
Second, once we recognize that we have emotions, it’s helpful to sort out what they are. In Lisa Feldman-Barrett’s wonderful book, How Emotions Are Made, she jokes that her husband could only identify three emotions when they first met: happy, sad, and hungry. In truth, though, many of us have limited emotional vocabularies. Feldman-Barrett’s research has shown that simply increasing emotional vocabulary can pay significant dividends for both mental and physical health. I will frequently assign patients to find a list of emotional words, like this one, or an app like this one and then spend time just becoming comfortable with using feeling language with others and with yourself.
The third step in being comfortable with feelings is giving ourselves permission to have those feelings once we’ve identified them, which author and psychologist Marc Brackett goes over well in his book Permission to Feel. One of my clients came in one day and said her depression had gotten acutely worse. When we tried to sort out why, we realized that she had thrown a baby shower for a friend but then felt jealous as my patient was trying to get pregnant as well. When she realized she felt jealous, she immediately began a savage self-attack, stating to herself that friends don’t get jealous of other friends and she may as well not have any friends if she was going to treat them like that. Once we recognized what had happened and gave her permission to feel what she felt, the acute episode lifted and she went back to baseline.
We have feelings because we’re human. We don’t have them because we’re bad people, because we’re impolite, mean, or ungrateful, or for any other similar reason. Having the entire spectrum of feelings is part of the human experience; we can’t escape that. The better we understand that, the easier it is to deal with them whether or not they make sense.
The fourth step is to be able to use those feeling words to describe our experiences both to ourselves and to other people. Studies have shown over time that being able to label our emotional experience (technically called affect labeling) helps significantly calm emotional pathways and areas in our brain such as the amygdala. The calmer the amygdala, the calmer we will tend to be—and, interestingly, the less physical pain we will experience as well.
This means that whenever we’re angry or ashamed or scared or thrilled, by recognizing and acknowledge the feeling, it becomes much easier for our brain to relax and help us deal with the situation. Next time you feel anxious or out of control, see if you can come up with a feeling word to describe how it’s going. You may notice that your mind starts to calm ever so slightly when you do.
The last, and hardest, part is to then use the feeling words to share your experience with other people. Most of us were trained to keep our feelings to ourselves and were taught that our feelings were bad, mean, ungrateful, inaccurate, or inconvenient. It turns out, though, that none of that is actually true.
I recently, sadly, attended the funeral of a friend’s wife, who passed away at a relatively young age. I did not know her nearly as well as I knew him, yet at the graveside portion of the service, I just couldn’t stop crying. As I approached him to offer my condolences, I tried to control my tears and told myself I needed to stop crying, that being so upset just made it worse for him, that I didn’t even know her that well, and so on. Despite my inner protestations, though, I just sobbed.
Interestingly, though, he messaged me later to tell me how touched he had been by my tears. Rather than making things worse for him, the tears showed him how loved and cared for both he and his wife were and are. It was actually helpful for him for others to see and acknowledge the depth of his grief and even share it with him to a small degree. It was a small and important reminder to me that our feelings are not bad.
Feelings are gifts of our experiences to share with others and help deepen the relationship with them. The more we remember this, the easier it is to deal with strong, complex, and powerful emotions. When we express them and share them, we become healthier in mind, body, and spirit.
Would you like to learn more about understanding feelings and their place in your life? Contact us through our website or by calling us at 312-489-8890 to set up an appointment with Dr. Stracks, Dr. Schubiner, Michelle Grim, or one of our therapists and coaches.