Developing emotional awareness. Awareness of emotions as a way to regulate them

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It is difficult to overestimate the importance of emotions in human life; they give our lives meaning, unite us with other people, and are also the basis for understanding ourselves and our relationship to other people. Emotions, literally, determine the way of our being; thanks to emotions, we have the opportunity to be sad and cry when we feel bad, rejoice and laugh when we are in a great mood. Without them, we would not be who we are, we would not be people in the full sense of the word. Without emotions, we would turn into some kind of robots, endowed with reason, but devoid of soul. However, despite the enormous importance we attach to emotions, we must remember that we are the masters of our emotions, and not their puppets. Man, as the “crown of creation,” is one step above the entire animal kingdom. This obliges us from an early age to learn to recognize and control our emotions, to rise above them and be able to act contrary to emotional impulses when necessary.

A person who is able to recognize and control their emotions is able to think clearly and creatively, cope more effectively with stress and anxiety, communicate with others as equals, and express love, trust and empathy. Problems and troubles do not cloud his head, but are perceived by him as a challenge. He is ready to accept this challenge and easily directs his efforts to overcome the obstacles that confront him. On the other hand, losing control over his emotions, a person ceases to fully control himself and his life. He acts contrary to common sense, is quick-tempered, overly emotional, is often in a bad mood and tries to isolate himself from the outside world. As a result, life simply passes by. The benefits of controlling your emotions are obvious; it is unlikely that anyone will refuse the opportunity to learn this. In this article we will show you how to take one not very difficult, but infinitely important step towards controlling your emotions, we will talk about developing emotional awareness.

What is emotional awareness?

We all, by nature, tend to experience emotions. Good and bad, they appear in us in response to external stimuli and influence our way of thinking and acting. In fact, they control us, especially if we are not aware of them and do not resist the influence they exert. Well, we do this extremely rarely. We observe the appearance of this or that emotion, but we do not attach any significance to it - we simply act as we have always acted. Only occasionally do we ask ourselves questions:

• “What caused this emotion to appear?”
• “Does it correspond to the real state of affairs or has it grown due to excessive impressionability?”
• “Will I do the right thing if I do what I want to do at the moment?”

In these rare moments, we may discover that our behavior is dictated by our immediate needs and differs from the main life line that we have chosen for ourselves. But, unfortunately, these glimpses of consciousness are not enough to direct your life in the right direction. Being emotionally aware, we have full awareness of our feelings and emotions, as well as the feelings of other people and the reasons for their occurrence. Thus, emotional awareness involves the ability to identify and express emerging emotions. It is an understanding of the connections between our feelings and actions and the ability to predict and prevent unwanted behavior.

The benefits of emotional awareness.

One of the main benefits of emotional awareness is that you gain more control over your own emotions, and therefore over your entire life. Anger, depression, anxiety and worry, excessive impulsiveness, emotional instability and feelings of isolation are no longer powerful over you. There comes an understanding that it is our emotions, not thoughts, that push us and determine our behavior. Emotional awareness gives us many levers of control over ourselves and our circumstances, which most existing self-development techniques cannot provide. Of particular note are the following benefits of emotional awareness:

• Knowing yourself, your likes and dislikes.
• Understanding and empathy for other people.
• Open and effective communication.
• Making wise decisions that help achieve long-term goals.
• Motivation and high activity on the way to goals.
• Building strong, healthy and valuable relationships.
• Creating emotional balance, without sudden mood swings.
• The ability to be accountable for your actions and words.
• A high level of internal energy, which is no longer wasted.
• Resistance to stressful situations.
• High level of personal effectiveness.
• Healthy expression of emotions.

The list can go on and on, since along with the main advantages you get a lot of other benefits, directly or indirectly related to them. We may dedicate a separate article to the benefits of emotional awareness; it was not our intention to list them in this article. And, in the process of increasing the level of emotional awareness, you yourself will be able to discover positive changes in yourself.

What is your level of emotional awareness?

Each of us, to one degree or another, has the ability to understand our emotions. Some more, some less, but you probably lack this skill if you haven’t deliberately developed it. Time and life experience only partially increases this ability, and not always and not for everyone. That's why it's so important to take the initiative into your own hands. But before embarking on the path of developing emotional awareness, it is advisable to determine how developed this skill is. For this purpose, you should take a closer look at yourself and ask yourself a few simple questions:

• Can you remain calm while experiencing strong emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, disgust and joy?
• Do you feel the presence of emotions in your body?
• Do you know how to listen to the voice of your mind, no matter how you feel?
• Do you trust your body's emotional signals?
• Do you allow yourself to experience negative emotions?
• Do you pay attention to changes in your emotional background?
• Do your emotions change throughout the day?
• Do you find that other people are generally understanding and empathetic towards your emotions?
• Do you feel comfortable when other people know how you feel?
• Do you sense other people's emotions and can you put yourself in their shoes?

If you can honestly answer “yes” to all questions, your level of emotional awareness is quite high, you can easily do without its further development. If you cannot answer “yes” to all questions, or “yes” is true for all questions, but not for all situations, you should work on yourself. Finally, if the answer to most of these questions is “no,” well, you are far from alone and should definitely consider developing your emotional awareness.

Keep in mind that the answers to these questions may not accurately predict your level of emotional awareness, so it may be helpful to read about existing classifications of these levels. So, doctors Richard D. Lane and Schwartz spoke quite interestingly about the levels of emotional awareness. In their work, they reflected the range of human abilities to understand their emotions at six levels. Briefly, these six levels of consciousness look like this:

• 1. Lack of emotional awareness.
• 2. Awareness of bodily sensations.
• 3. Awareness of behavior.
• 4. Awareness of the current emotional state.
• 5. Differentiated emotional awareness.
• 6. Mixed emotional awareness.

There is another version of the classification of levels of emotional awareness, found on the website of one of the missionary organizations in Spain. Knowing these levels will help you determine what level you are at and will serve as a good starting point for your further development.

Developing emotional awareness.

The first thing you need to understand is that developing emotional awareness is a long process that requires a lot of time and effort. People have been taming their emotions for years, and they don’t always cope with this task, especially if they don’t know which direction to move. This process may take you a little less time, but for this you need to follow the recommendations given below.

1. Learn to relieve stress.

Many people know that stress is a natural state of our body, which is in unfavorable conditions. It can be as harmful as it is useful. For example, it helped people of the Stone Age and slightly later periods of history - to activate the internal reserves of the body in order to cope with enemies or run away from them, quickly make decisions and catch prey. For most of us, in the civilized world, it only harms us, since we have nowhere to put excess energy. Stress clouds our consciousness and prevents us from acting adequately, and, even more so, when stress occurs, we are least able to recognize the presence of emotions in ourselves. You can learn how to relieve stress correctly and quickly from the articles on our website in the “Stress” section.

2. Gain knowledge about human emotions.

Study questions about what emotions exist, how they are created in our body and what effect they have on it. Find out how our environment becomes the reason for the emergence of certain emotions, what impact they have on our perception of the surrounding reality, on our thoughts and actions. The more knowledge you gain about your body, the easier it will be for you to manage yourself, and the higher your ability to understand your emotions will be. And no, you don’t have to get additional education or study a mountain of literature on human psychology and physiology; superficial knowledge – the basic ideas that matter most – will be enough.

3. Observe yourself.

Monitor the presence of emotions and try to determine for yourself what you are feeling. What does it feel like to be angry? How do you feel when you are angry at someone or something? What does it mean to you to experience sadness? How does fear affect you? How does your sadness manifest itself? How do you rejoice and laugh? What physical sensations accompany your emotions? How productive are you when you experience certain emotions? How long can an emotion last in you? Listen to yourself and try to develop the ability to identify the emotions you are experiencing. Find out how large and varied the range of your emotions is? How many types of emotions do you find in yourself? Along with observing your emotions, you will gain an understanding of yourself, and your level of emotional awareness will also increase.

4. Learn to accept your emotions.

There is no need to avoid or suppress your emotions; this can negatively impact all areas of your life. Thus, avoiding emotions deprives you of the opportunity to understand yourself. By suppressing negative emotions, you block positive emotions, and, among other things, this activity requires too much energy and prevents you from developing relationships with other people. But, allow yourself to experience emotions of any nature and the situation will change for the better. Just accept your emotions, let the emotions fill your body. Do not hold your attention on them for too long, do not attach importance to them, so as not to prolong their existence. They will leave you on their own, just as quickly as they came. Their place will soon be taken by other emotions, then another and another.

5. Trace the path of your emotions.

Having discovered any emotion in yourself, be it anger, fear or joy, try to identify the reason for its appearance, without missing a single detail. What in your environment caused this emotion to arise? What thoughts do you find in your head when you experience these emotions? In what ways do you usually express these emotions? Watch your facial expressions, gestures, voice, intonation and words. What conscious or unconscious actions can you identify? What do you usually do to get rid of or, conversely, prolong the presence of any emotion in you? How effective are your actions in eliminating or prolonging emotions? In the early stages of developing emotional awareness, taking notes can be helpful and will allow you to conduct better self-reflection.

Developing emotional awareness is one of the most important steps to managing yourself and your own life. As you improve this skill, you will learn to identify unwanted behavior and motives that drive you, you will come to understand yourself, and gain a complete understanding of what in your environment causes you to be happy, sad, afraid, angry and other emotions. In the future, emotional awareness will allow you to adjust your behavior, use your emotions and their energy as a source of strength to overcome obstacles, manage other people if necessary, and much, much more. Become the sole and rightful masters of your life and make it the way you want to see it, success to you and all the best!

Awareness is the ability to perceive current events without judging them, to remain ABOVE one’s own emotional center of gravity, that is, to be aware of one’s feelings, listen to them, but not merge with them.

Set a boundary between yourself and your emotions

Our psyche has a unique and not very pleasant feature - to respond to thoughts, feelings and sensations, merging with them; and to such an extent that they begin to define us. In other words, instead of separating our experiences (they come and go), we begin to consider them an integral part of our personality.

Instead of reminding ourselves that everyone has the thought “I’m worthless” or “I’m a coward” from time to time, we seriously believe that this thought reflects reality - I’m bad, a loser.

In psychology, there is the concept of “open expanded consciousness” - that is, the ability to look at a situation from different angles, to take into account different points of view - as opposed to a narrowed and reactive consciousness, when we concentrate only on failure and pour out a stream of harsh self-criticism on ourselves (by the way, it only increases feelings of loneliness and isolation).

Walk on new paths - the old ones will be overgrown

When you notice thoughts arising and get rid of them, you are practicing mindfulness. The task is not to monitor your breathing, but to realize what you are distracted by and calmly decide whether you want to spend your mental strength on it now or not.
For example, you keep thinking back to painful memories of a relationship with a toxic person (parent, partner, someone you considered your friend, etc.). Imagine that these thoughts are paths in the forest. The more often you make a conscious decision not to walk on them, that is, not to cherish the trauma in your mind, the faster the trauma will disappear (= the paths will become overgrown). In reality, this is what happens: neural pathways in the brain - the basis of our habits - arise and disappear under the influence of our repeated actions and thoughts. We can control them - create new neural pathways and allow the old ones to “overgrow.”

Don't avoid negative emotions

To experience pleasant feelings - love, joy, surprise - you need to be ready to experience unpleasant ones - sadness, anger, fear. No matter how careful we are, it is impossible to avoid negative experiences - that’s how life works.

Many of life's problems - breaking off a relationship or trying to save it, having a child or not, finding a new job or staying in the same one - do not have a “correct” solution. Trying to find it, we only become more entangled in a web of anxiety and stress.

Remember that our emotional reactions are natural and not a sign of weakness or shortcomings. Living a fulfilled life means noticing pain and accepting it, rather than trying to make it go away. If you treat the symptoms of panic, stress, and nervous fatigue as natural bodily reactions that will pass over time, and do not react to their message of threat, you begin to be less afraid, and panic attacks decrease in frequency and intensity. By being present in a life situation rather than avoiding it, anxiety decreases over time.

End the stress cycle

If we rush to drown out unpleasant emotions in any way, we only strengthen them.

Let's say you are used to eating a “bucket” of ice cream or a whole cake in the evenings to release the stress accumulated during the day. This is your way of calming yourself down. What's really going on? You artificially slow down your reactions, do not allow yourself to fully understand your experiences and, thereby, complete the stress cycle. Instead of getting out of stress, you freeze in it - this is painful and unhealthy and makes an already stressful life even more difficult.
Allow yourself to feel the stress to the fullest, do not press the brakes ahead of time. Emotions are tunnels: you need to go to the very end, through the darkness, and come out into the light.
For example, instead of rushing to eat, stop and become aware of your inner sensations - breathe with them, accept them, allow them to exist and be as they are. You can say to yourself: “This is what I am experiencing here and right now. No matter what the feeling is, it’s already here and I accept it.” Ignore the tension and stiffness, focus on your breathing - take a few deep breaths in and out.

Rethink your “buts”

Often we tell ourselves that we want to do something, but there is a reason why we can't. For example, a person suffering from panic attacks may say to himself: “I want to go to the store/take the subway, but I’m scared.”

Try, when you catch yourself thinking or saying “but,” to substitute the conjunction “and” instead of “but.” “But” suggests that the second part of the sentence (I’m scared) is more important than the first (I want to go to the store/take the subway). "And" implies that both parts of the sentence are true.

Let your values ​​guide you, not your emotions.

Our emotional reactions provide us with important information about an unpleasant situation, but they do not always push us to take actions that will help us. We are accustomed to believing that feelings precede action and motivate it. In fact, we can do anything despite our emotions at the moment.

Imagine that you are a pilot and you need to land a plane that has crashed. Excited passengers are screaming around you in panic, and your assistant pilots are constantly offering different options. These images are your emotions at the moment. Your task is not to give in to them, remain calm (that is, watch your emotional center from above) and act as you see fit, do what you believe in.

To understand how best to act, you need to decide what kind of person you want to be in this situation - that is, choose what is valuable to you. One way to become aware of your values ​​is to imagine what you would do if you didn't feel fear, guilt, anger, or whatever negative emotion you're currently focused on.

For example, if you value a healthy lifestyle, you learn to tolerate when you want to indulge in chocolate, or overcome yourself and go to the gym on a cold rainy evening, despite the fact that you want to curl up on a soft sofa. We are willing to feel discomfort in order to truly participate in our lives, and values ​​are our guide. They fill our actions with dignity and meaning in every moment we live.

Values ​​are essentially preferences. There are no right or wrong values, what matters is what is dear to you at this stage of life, and you do not have to try to get someone else to accept your values.

A sign that you do not follow your own values, but someone else’s, and this makes you unhappy - when your values ​​sound to you like an immutable rule, an unconditional order that you should do something (no, you shouldn’t).

Practice curiosity and self-compassion

These are two most powerful levers in managing emotions – primarily anxiety.

When there is no certainty about the future, anxiety is a natural reaction. When mentally exhausted, avoidance is a natural reaction. The way out of these states is self-compassion. Take a deep breath and allow your consciousness to expand - observe and notice the full range of your reactions, but do not judge them, just acknowledge them.

Mindfulness allows us to look at a situation with new eyes - to explore our negative reaction with curiosity, as if it were an exciting adventure, a new experience. The sooner you notice anxiety and take a couple of minutes to write down your feelings on paper, the better. This way you will learn to recognize moments when your consciousness is distracted from the present and plunges into an imaginary frightening future or wastes your mental strength on a painful episode of the past. Mindfulness brings the focus to the present, and we can see new, hidden solutions...

Ksenia Tatarnikova