Emotional Awareness

Why emotions and feelings matter

Babies are bundles of emotion, experiencing intense emotions of fear, anger, sadness, and joy within their first eight weeks of life. As an infant, your emotions connected you to your primary caregiver in what was the first relationship of your life. Throughout life, emotions continue to serve this same purpose: connecting us to others.

Without emotions and an awareness and understanding of them, it’s impossible to build or maintain strong, healthy relationships. The feelings of others will escape you unless you’re familiar with your own emotions. The more aware you are of your own emotions, the easier it will be for you to pick up on what others are feeling and accurately read their wants and needs.

Your emotions help you:

• understand yourself, including your deeply-felt needs
• understand and empathize with others
• communicate clearly and effectively
• make decisions based on the things that are most important to you
• get motivated and take action to meet goals
• build strong, healthy relationships

Emotional awareness and communication

Whether you’re having an argument with your spouse or dealing with colleagues at work, your emotions influence the communication process. Over 95% of communication is nonverbal and emotionally driven, so the stakes in learning to harness your emotions are high. Say the wrong thing, or miss an emotional cue, and it can do a lot of damage.

How emotions and feelings affect communication and relationships

Consider the emotional responses of Bernie, Rhonda, and Jim and how they affect their home and work relationships:

Bernie is a kind, steady, and dependable man whose emotional flatness inspired the nickname “Mr. Robot.” In his love relationship with his wife, Bernie remains emotionally uninvolved. His mood is always low key—nothing is too exciting, nothing is worth arguing about. It blindsides him when his wife files for divorce; he never saw it coming. Bernie likes his job, but his flatness has hurt his ability to advance. His bosses can’t imagine him motivating others.

Rhonda works hard at her marriage. Attractive, caring, and hard-working, she takes everything seriously and seldom complains or criticizes. But her lack of spontaneity, humor, and playfulness is taking its toll, as her husband contemplates romantic involvements with other women. Rhonda’s seriousness also limits her popularity at work. Her coworkers tend to forget that she is there.

Jim is admired for his kindness and generosity. Only his family knows of his extremely short fuse. After an unprovoked verbal outburst, Jim is predictably apologetic. When people tell Jim’s wife how lucky she is to have such a wonderful husband, she bites her lip, aware of how she and their children suffer in their relationship with him. His temper also keeps him from working well with others and has limited his choice of jobs.

Like misfiring pistons, Bernie, Rhonda and Jim are incapable of connecting with their strong emotions—the tools they need to communicate with themselves and pothers. They do not experience the full range of core emotions, or gut feelings.

Evaluating your emotional awareness

Although emotional awareness is the basis of emotional health, good communication, and solid relationships, many people remain relatively unacquainted with their core emotional experience. It is surprising how few people can easily answer the question: “What are you experiencing emotionally?”

Emotional awareness involves two basic abilities:

• The ability to recognize your moment-to-moment emotional experience
• The ability to manage all of your feelings appropriately

Unhealthy ways of dealing with emotions and feelings

We are all born with a capacity to freely experience the full range of human emotions¾including joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Yet many people are disconnected from some or all of their feelings. By trying to avoid pain and discomfort, their emotions have become distorted, displaced, and stifled. You lose touch with your emotions when you attempt to control them, rather than experience them.

Ways of avoiding strong emotions and feelings

• Distracting yourself with obsessive thoughts, escapist fantasies, mindless entertainment, and addictive behaviors in order to avoid emotions you fear or dislike. Watching television for hours, playing computer games, and surfing the Internet are common ways of avoiding dealing with feelings.
• Sticking with one emotional response that you feel comfortable with, no matter what the situation calls for. For example: constantly joking around to cover up insecurities or getting angry all the time to avoid feeling frightened and sad.
• Shutting down or shutting out intense emotions. If you feel overwhelmed by your emotions, you may cope by numbing yourself. You may feel completely disconnected from your emotions, like you no longer have feelings at all.

The consequences of avoiding emotions and feelings

• You lose the good, along with the bad. You either feel your emotions or you don’t. When you shut down negative feeling like anger, fear, or sadness, you also shut down your ability to experience positive feelings such as joy, love, and happiness.
• It’s exhausting. You can distort and numb emotions, but you can’t eliminate them entirely. It takes a lot of energy to avoid having an authentic emotional experience and keep your feelings suppressed. The effort leaves you stressed and drained.
• It damages your relationships. The more you distance yourself from your feelings, the more distant you become from others, as well as yourself. You lose the ability to build strong relationships and communicate effectively, both of which depend on being in touch with your emotions.

You can’t manage emotions until you know how to manage stress

The ability to manage stress is a prerequisite for emotional awareness. Raising your emotional awareness and emotional intelligence begins with the question: "What kinds of sensory input instantly make me feel relaxed, safe, calm, and focused?" Knowing the answer is especially important for people who have had overwhelming emotional experiences as a child. Once you have a safety net in place and know how to make yourself feel good quickly and dependably, you can begin to explore the emotions that seem disagreeable or frightening. The key to coping with strong emotions is knowing that you control of them¾not the other way around.

The ability to quickly reduce stress allows you to safely face strong emotions, secure in your ability to regulate your feelings and behave appropriately. When you know how to maintain a relaxed, energized state of awareness—even when something upsetting happens¾you can remain emotionally available and engaged.

Getting back in touch with your emotions and feelings

The process of raising emotional awareness involves reconnecting with all of the core emotions, including anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, and joy. As you start this process, keep the following facts about emotions and emotional awareness in mind.

Emotions quickly come and go, if we let them

You may be worried that once you reconnect to the emotions you’ve been avoiding, you’ll be stuck with them forever, but that’s not so. When we don’t stoke our emotions with thoughts about them, even the most painful and difficult feelings subside and lose their power to control our attention. 

Unrestricted, the core emotions of anger, sadness, fear, and joy quickly come and go. Throughout the day, you’ll see, read, or hear something that momentarily triggers a strong feeling of some sort. If you don’t focus on the feeling, it won’t last, and a different emotion will soon take its place.

Our bodies can clue us in to our emotions

Our emotions are closely aligned to physical sensations in our bodies. When you experience a strong emotion, you should also felt it somewhere in your body. By paying attention to these physical sensations, you can understand your emotions better. For example, if your stomach tightens up every time you spend time with a particular person, you can surmise that you feel unsafe in their presence. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you are unsafe, only that you feel that way.

You don’t have to choose between thinking and feeling

Once you have confidence in your ability to safely experience any of your emotions, you can think, plan, and engage in a wide range of intellectual activities without completely loosing touch with the physical sensations in your body that signal your emotional state.

Emotional awareness can be a background condition that functions like instinct. When it’s strongly developed, you’ll know what you are feeling without having to think about it. When your emotional signals become strong enough, you realize that something important is going on and shift your focus accordingly.

Emotional awareness is one of the five key skills of emotional intelligence

The ability to recognize and manage your emotions is one of the five key skills of emotional intelligence. Together, the five skills of emotional intelligence help you build strong relationships, overcome challenges, and succeed at work and in life. The good news is that the skills of emotional intelligence can be learned by anyone, at anytime. But there is a difference between learning and changing, or applying what you’ve learned to your life. To learn in a manner that produces real change, you need to engage the emotional centers of the brain in ways that connect you to others. The best way to do this is through interactive, nonverbal, sensory-based exercises.

Developing emotional intelligence: A free, online learning program

EQ Central, a Helpguide-affiliated website, offers a free emotional intelligence training course. The step-by-step, self-paced course includes six articles and six video lessons filled with real-world examples and hands-on exercises that will help you raise your emotional awareness and master all of the skills of emotional intelligence.

 

 

Related links for emotional awareness, emotions, and feelings

General information about emotions and emotional awareness

Mind/Body Connection: How Your Emotions Affect Your Health – Learn about the link between your emotions and your physical and mental health. Includes tips on improving emotional health. (American Academy of Family Physicians)

Emotions – Comprehensive guide to emotions, including their value and purpose and how they guide our decisions and behavior. (ChangingMinds.org)

Why Are Feelings Important? – Article on the importance of emotions and the role they play in promoting emotional health, social attachment, and personal growth. (PsychCentral)

What Are Emotions? – Provides answers from emotional intelligence experts on what emotions are and why they matter. (EQ Today)

Tips for managing emotions and feelings

How to Manage Negative Emotions: Tips for Controlling Anger, Fear, Sadness and Other Bad Feelings – Describes how to identify your emotions, determine the source, and channel your feelings in a positive way. (Suite 101)

Importance of Emotions – Learn about primary and secondary emotions, how to manage strong feelings, and express negative emotions. (EQI.org)

Jeanne Segal, Ph.D., Jaelline Jaffe, Ph.D., and Melinda Smith, M.A., contributed to this article. Last modified: April 2009.