This article helps you to understand your emotions and their connection with physical reactions, thoughts, and behaviour.
Your feelings help you do a range of different things:
- Handle challenging situations
- Communicate with others
- Fight, flight or freeze
- Enjoy life
So, in effect we have both healthy emotions and unhealthy negative emotions. It is common that people seek therapy for their negative emotions that cause them trouble. Examples typically include:
- Guilt
- Anger
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Shame
Emotions are usually described with one word. When your feelings become intense, long-lasting and influence what you do in unhelpful ways, you are likely to notice an adverse effect on your everyday life.
Learning to Name Your Feelings
Emotions motivate us to act. Different emotions lead us towards different kinds of action. Sometimes the actions that our emotions guide us towards can help us to survive. For example:
See a wild animal in the woods → feel fear → run away → don’t get attacked → survive!
Our emotions are not always a perfect guide to action, though. We can choose to listen to what our emotions are telling us, but we don’t always have to react in the ways they ‘want’ us to.
- Joy or happiness can motivate us to join in, take part, share.
- Fear can motivate us to stay away.
- Sadness can motivate us to withdraw, brood, ruminate, seek comfort.
- Anger can motivate us to attack, lash out, stand up for ourselves.
- Shame can motivate us to hide away, keep things secret, punish ourselves.
- Disgust can motivate us to withdraw, keep a distance, get clean.
- Compassion, empathy, or sympathy can motivate us to comfort, be with others.
- Embarrassment or humiliation can motivate us to hide.
- Confusion can motivate us to check things out (or paralyse us with indecision).
- Powerlessness can motivate us to give up.
- Indifference can motivate us to ignore.
- Affection can motivate us to give love, get close to others.
If you are not used to talking about the way you feel, you may have a hard time finding the words to reflect how you feel. It is possible to feel more than one emotion at a time.
The following is a list of common feelings that can help you build your vocabulary of emotions and express how you feel:
- Angry
- Anxious
- Ashamed
- Disappointed
- Embarrassed
- Envious
- Guilty
- Hurt
- Jealous
- Love
- Sad
Stressful situations can trigger strong negative emotions. Being able to name these emotions in your own life can be the beginning of learning to manage them better.
In CBT, we teach you to rate the intensity of the emotion on a scale of 0–100% (where 100% is the most intense feeling). Learning to rate emotions helps you to become more aware of small changes in your emotions. Our physical sensations can also be an important clue about the intensity of the feelings we are experiencing.
We can try to change our physical sensations, which can have a positive effect on how we feel. These sensations can come and go from day to day; others may stay the same for weeks. Examples include:
- Sleep
- Appetite
- Energy levels
Would you like to learn more about your emotions and how to manage them? Then please use the link below to contact IC Therapies:
