11 Steps To Correctly Express Our Emotions
Many people have difficulty expressing their emotions adequately, either by excess or by default. Knowing how to express your emotions in a correct and proportionate way will help you in your personal, social and work life in a way that you have never thought of.
Avoiding and repressing your emotions can have negative physical consequences that are more than scientifically proven. Current therapies such as acceptance and commitment therapy and techniques such as mindfulness will help us accept our emotions and know how to deal with them, sometimes as if we were their spectators.
For example, if you have a lot of emotional anguish, you try to avoid it and you don’t know how to channel it and express it, you may suffer an increased heart rate, sweating, tremors or breathing problems. When you repress feelings you can cause tension in the neck, face or various muscles and spine.
If, on the other hand, you cling to feelings without expressing them, you may experience psychosomatic diseases of an arterial type, headaches or stomach problems. That our emotions influence our health is a fact.
Know how to express emotions in 11 steps
With a little training and following a few simple steps, you can better identify your emotions and express them properly. Here we point them out so you can practice them:
1. Identify the emotion and the feeling
When something is altered in our body by some reaction to the outside or to our own thoughts, you should ask yourself , what am I feeling? What physical symptoms am I experiencing? What is the cause? Why does it appear now?
2. Learn to recognize your feelings
Once we have detected the emotions and sensations, we have to analyze the feeling it causes in us. It will be useful to know what signs give you away. Try to make a list of all those emotions and what it is that physically gives you away from them.
3. Pay attention to your body’s reaction
Emotions are governed by the limbic and autonomic nervous systems, they are difficult to manipulate at first. Take a moment and let the emotion “roll down” to think clearly about it, and what you are going to say.
4. Pay more attention to your answer than to the situation
You think that the situation that makes you this nervous is the cause of everything, but the real problem lies in your emotional response. Observe yourself and you will realize that your response is just as paralyzing for not finding a paper, as for receiving a traffic ticket that you have not committed. You can only change your reaction.
5. Express your emotions appropriately and proportionally
Once you have understood the above, you will be able to express your emotions in a somewhat more controlled way, although you can still learn a couple more steps to understand what is happening to you in order to express it.
6. Make an experiential experience with your body
When you have these emotions, point to the part of the body where they occur. Give them a specific color and texture, locate them in a specific place and try to have a different relationship. You are the one that encompasses all those parts or emotions, they are not the ones that possess you.
7. Try to be honest with what you feel and what you do
If you really feel indifferent to that person, why keep trying to like him? , or if you are irritated, annoyed and angry, why avoid a conversation to understand each other?
8. Choose the best situation to express yourself
There is no use in wanting to have a constructive conversation with your boss if you choose the wrong time. Therefore, examine the situation, the people around you and yourself and decide when will be the most convenient time.
9. Use a good form of communication
Friendly tone, active listening, looking into the eyes and using phrases such as “I am somewhat stressed”, instead of “the situation at the company has stressed me out”. You will avoid a safe confrontation and as you explain what happened, implicitly the other person will understand that your stress has a clear cause, work.
10. Help yourself with the body to express what you feel
In the case of explaining that you have stress, placing your hand on your heart, on your head or on your stomach, you will imply that you are experiencing unpleasant things, and that it would be good for you and for the environment if this does not continue.
11. Visualizing and locating your emotions is essential
You are the person in charge of managing your feelings, without repressing or hiding them, just knowing that you must express them to vent and be understood.
How to calm your emotions and feelings in solitude
Sometimes our emotional distress has nothing to do with a specific situation. We can be sad because of memories, because we feel weak in health or because of any sad thoughts that are in our head.
You can apply what we have said before: accept them as something of you, let the discomfort be, accept that you are a living person who must harbor those feelings.
Emotions are part of our evolution as a species and also what defines us as beings different from other species that inhabit the planet. Emotions are natural, so don’t continually fight them. Let them be, but while you can do an activity that you know can usually relax you such as talking to a specific person, writing or taking a walk.
If too intense emotions such as anger appear, a high intensity sport is highly recommended. Since it will allow you to download all the anger and stress that you have accumulated inside.
Images courtesy of Christian Schloe
