Tips for Emotional Mastery: How to Increase Your Wellbeing by Being Smarter with Feelings
How can we navigate feelings more effectively?
By Joshua Freedman
Every person has emotions. They’re part of being human. But too often, we’re in a struggle against our own feelings – trying to suppress or ignore them. Our wellbeing suffers as a result. So what do we need to know in order to get a handle on feelings and feel more in control of our emotional wellbeing? Here are 12 tips from emotional intelligence practitioners:
1. We almost always have multiple emotions at the same time. This can be confusing and lead to overwhelm, but it doesn’t have to. Use resources like Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions to understand your feelings better, including how emotions combine to create entirely distinct feelings. Joy + Trust = Love. What about Joy + Anticipation? Check out the Wheel to find out.
2. Every emotion has a purpose. They give us messages about opportunities and threats. The Emotoscope Feeling Chart offers many examples of the purpose of feelings, which you can download in the Plutchik article. When we learn the messages of each and every emotion, we can navigate them more effectively and fuel sustainable wellbeing for ourselves. The most difficult part for many people is appreciating challenging emotions, like fear, anger and jealousy. This article is a great introduction into valuing all emotions: Decoding Emotions.
3. There is power in the ability to name emotions – “name it to tame it”. When we name feelings, we get a handle on our own experiences, and then communicate more effectively with others. Neuroscience research has found that “affect labeling” – or naming your emotions – increases the connection between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, which is key to building resiliency.
4. To identify feelings, remember: Emotions affect us physically. What is your body telling you? Are your muscles tight, do you feel pain anywhere, are you hands hot, cold, etc? Are you smiling? Frowning? Forehead furrowed? Physical sensations provide invaluable data about how we’re feeling.
5. Treat all feelings a neutral – data about your experiences. There are no “good” or “bad” feelings. Emotions are data. Most of us have been socialized that some feelings – or more likely, all feelings but happiness – are “bad,” To start unlearning this mentality, start with this article, Integrated Emotions: Treating Feelings as Allies.
6. Treat feelings as normal. Don’t apologize for your feelings, nor “show off” with them (“look how emotional I am!”). Don’t make a “big deal” about other’s feelings; neither reward people for being vulnerable, nor criticize – keep a neutral, curious, caring tone.
7. Remember that if you don’t pay attention, feelings usually escalate. The earlier you attend to this message, the easier it will be to handle the feelings.
8. When strong feelings come up, be an observer. “Oh, that’s interesting,” or, “What can I learn from this?”
9. Emotions ≠ actions. Notice emotions as sensations, and distinguish between that sensation and the way people act. Anger is an emotion, yelling is an action – but one does not NEED to yell just because s/he is angry. We have choice about how we use our emotions.
10. In different situations, different emotions are useful. For example, with loss it’s useful to feel sorrow; relaxing on the beach it’s useful to feel peace. When understanding feelings, think about what’s useful in the current context.
11. Validate feelings. Name them, acknowledge them. Start by assuming they’re valuable & useful.
12. Don’t obey feelings blindly, don’t lock them away: find the middle path. Feelings are signals saying, “Something interesting is happening!” Ignoring and suppressing emotions has actually been found to increase their intensity and lead to a host of problems. A lack of impulse control is similarly troubling. Find the middle ground!
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Joy, Trust, Anticipation, Surprise, Fear, Anger, Disgust, Sorrow
Are these the categories we need to slip emotions outside of these particular categories?
As eqtrainer had mentioned it would be helpful to be able to identify the emotion/s first then utilize all of the suggestions/skills thereafter.
Q: where does jelousy, hurt, frustration fall into the catagories listed above? I deal with these often and not just mine towards someone, theirs towards me and how am I supposed to react in a positive and constructive way?
Food for thought.
j.
Practicing decoding emotions is like learning to play music. For me, I learn to play notes by recognizing how different parts of my body feel and react to different notes or series of notes. This creates somatic memory pathways. Decoding is also like taxonomy for biological organisms. I have to walk through a series of questions in order to further refine what the word would be that best describe the feeling. A personalized key for feelings might be useful item. Does it exist already?
Hi Robin – I like these metaphors of music & taxonomy. I don’t think there’s a personalized key yet… but we did make this: http://6seconds.org/feel – kinda cool starting point 🙂
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the tips ….
For me particularly relevant is #7 .. so many times I have experienced the escalation of feelings in myself and others which has led to less than positive outcomes. How this could have been alleviated by pausing to consider the feelings and understanding them more intelligently
Thanks Josh – very clearly presented. I especially like the point on not acting the emotions out – though it is a balance because I think often when we feel angry we do have something to say – though it does not need to be shouted, we can use the energy to bring us forward and be self-assertive.
I am wondering about including some steps on integrating the emotional energy using presencing, mindfulness, somatic awareness, movement, sound and breath. If we do not process the emotional energy then it can easily drive us and lead to dis-ease.
About 10 years ago I wrote a little book called Keys to Emotional Mastery – You can download a 47 page extract if you interested to find out more. I have been conducting in depth emotional healing sessions for over 20 years now.
Thanks again for all the wonderful work you have been doing
Warm Regards, Nicholas de Castella: http://www.eq.net.au
Thank you Nicholas – I agree that finding appropriate ways to express, or actually USE, emotions is an important step too!
Very practical and helpful guidance. The only thing I would change is moving point 11. to 1. To deal with emotions we have to start with naming them properly. When I ask people to name quickly emotions – on average they come up with 20 emotions. Average language vocabulary has them over 500 and Buddhism apparently describes over 84 000 of shades of emotions. It seems that this an important area to expand our skills. Second skill would be to understand the mix and degree of intensity.
Also I would like to take this opportunity and comment on your excellent article (in point 10.) Maybe we should discuss also the correlation of emotions and value systems as value systems are derivatives of our real and perceived needs?
qtrainer. So agree. Accurately naming feelings is a major Emotional Fitness Skill or so I believe. My eBook Know Your Feelings seeks to improve feeling awareness and naming feelings. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CRRBTOU
Agree with all the suggestions. Want to add my efforts via an invitation to peek at and comment on my Easy Emotional Fitness Exercises. I think are emotions need a work out just as much as our bodies. Here’s the link to four of my exercises. http://emotionalfitnesstraining.com/eft-easy-exercises/
Happy to share all 12 for feedback and a possible a review.
Thank you Katherine, important point. Damasio says: Emotions are embodied. As Nicholas commented, somatic (body) awareness, breath, movement… are ways of tuning into and using this aspect of emotions-as-physical. We FEEL feelings, and they physically affect us.