As I practice watching my emotions and what gives rise to them for my current cause, I started wondering about how we identify with them. We feel that emotions belong to us and define us but they are actually just signals from the body to warn us that something’s not quite right. It’s only the mind that attaches a story to the emotions so making us suffer because we hold onto them too much. So, how we can learn from emotions to become more balanced and content with life?
Learn from Emotions
As clinical psychologist Daniel Siegel says “inviting our thoughts and feelings into awareness allows us to learn from them rather than be driven by them”. As he continues to say in this interview, being conscious of our emotions and thoughts is the main approach so that we can learn from emotions rather than succumb to reactions.
If I asked you right now, what emotions are you sensing, would you know the answer? Most of us reply with a story about our day or this phase of life we’re going through. Few of us know how to tap into our bodies to truly connect with the emotion, bearing in my mind that we often have several going on at any one time.
Emotions versus Feelings
Interestingly, emotions are generated from the body’s neurotransmitters and hormones. On the other hand, feelings are the conscious stories and experiences we attach to those emotions. We often use the words interchangeably but I believe that’s part of the issue. Essentially, we never learnt how to differentiate between the signals from the body and mind doing its storytelling thing where you’re either stuck in the past or attached to the future.
How does understanding the difference help us? Through this understanding, you can create a distance with emotions such that you don’t become attached to them or overwhelmed by this. One technique is cognitive diffusion and another one is mindfulness. Of course, there are many therapy approaches for helping us manage our emotions more easily. Although, I confess that the only one that’s really worked for me is connecting to the present moment and learning to accept things as they are.
How to Learn from Emotions
As I wrote in a previous blog, you have to start by getting to know your emotions and observing what they feel like in your body before they reach your mind. Once you get a sense of what emotion you’re facing, then you can start to learn from the emotion and look out for the trends of the mind.
1- What triggers your emotions?
Our bodies remember more than we realise, including trauma, no matter how big or small. So, when you find yourself jumping at something, there’s a chance that your body and subconsciousness are remembering something that happened to you. Understanding that you have developed a learnt response can help you appreciate that it is just that, a response.
One option is to focus on the present and note that nothing bad is happening right now. Alternatively, if that annoying person has triggered you once again, can you imagine being that person with all their fears and insecurities? Try to think for a moment about their struggles in life. You’ll then find it much easier to emphasise with them and so lessen your anger.
2- What’s your emotional style?
There’s a great book called the Emotional Life of Your Brain that goes through how emotions work and how they can overwhelm us. The most interesting part is the emotional styles that we all apparently have. These are resilience, outlook, social intuition, self-awareness, attention and sensitivity to context styles.
These styles are based on research of affective neuroscience and can help predict how we interpret and react to situations. Knowing where you are on the scale of each of those styles can help you pre-empt your potential reactions and possible even downscale them. Of course, this takes a certain amount of awareness but we never said the work was going to be easy. Ultimately, that’s why coaches and therapists exist.
3- Awareness
It’s almost a magic word these days. We all want awareness and we all expect it from each other because that’s how people listen to us and forget about themselves for a minute. It’s hard though. Our minds are just not designed for it. They’re actually designed to keep us free from danger by making assumptions and judging the world around us.
So, how we can cultivate awareness so we can learn from emotions and be wiser? There are various psychotherapy approaches such as journaling to help you see how your emotions emerge and dissipate. This is a great approach of course.
Another approach is to look at how to cultivate positive emotions. I don’t mean forcing positivity. I mean cultivating the traits that dampen our darkest emotions. Joy is one of them and so is having a balanced approach to life. For instance, are you addicted to your negative stories? Most of us are but you can try to counter those stories with a positive alternative. Give it a go and see what happens.
How to Keep Learning from Emotions
Emotions are part of us and they’re not going anywhere. We can either resist them and wish them to be something else or we can practice accepting them and letting them go. Of course this doesn’t happen overnight but it always gets easier. So, note your emotions, be in the present moment and accept that emotions are just your body’s signals. Is there a message to be heard or is this just another repetitive cycle? If it is, move on to something else and let it be.
