The Importance of Processing Your Emotions

I have talked a lot about increasing your self-awareness and about our emotions. This blog will focus on emotions themselves.

What are emotions?

Emotions are bodily reactions to our perceptions. We have no control over our emotions. They are dictated by our life experience and formed by what our culture has taught us. They are controlled by our cognitions, mainly what and how we perceive our surroundings. That is what is known scientifically about emotions.

What I know about emotions is that we can experience them, and although they are based in our cognitions, I can have absolutely no idea why I am experiencing a particular emotion. This is why a lot of people will seek out Therapy, to find out what cognitions are there that are making them emotionally react in certain ways. The connection is not always known or understood and it takes exploration of the past to find the connection.

Again, I want to emphasize that we have no control over our emotions. But I mean more in the immediate sense. If you want to stop feeling anxiety, it's going to take changing your experiences to change your cognitions to change your emotional reaction. But in the meantime when you experience anxiety, you experience anxiety. Your body reacts and the control we have then is how we express our emotions.

It is the expression of our emotions that we have control over. Just because you are angry does not mean you have to express your anger. Of course we all need an outlet for our emotions sometimes. That is where we can learn healthy alternatives to expressing our emotions. It is never ok to express our anger by being physical or putting someone else in danger. That is the culture we live in here.

But I suggest an alternative to needing an "outlet" to express your emotions.

A lot of times when people begin to feel depression, fears, nightmares, anxiety, or have obsessional thoughts, it is the body's way of dealing with suppressed emotions. It is compensating for the brain's inability to process the emotions. This is usually because that connection has been lost for so long that we then begin to not allow ourselves to feel the emotions because we don't understand them so we try to suppress them. When that happens the emotions will reemerge in another way, usually a way that becomes dysfunctional. That is why it is so important to understand that we have no control over our emotions; we need to learn how to process them.

In order to do that, we learn to be more self-aware. When you experience anger, sadness, guilt, shame, happiness, love, fear, anxiety, excitement, and the whole host of the emotional range, try to feel what is happening in your body. Are you experiencing a drop in your stomach, tightness in your chest, your heart drop, is your heart beating faster, do you feel light, light-headedness, do you feel hot, tingling in your arms and legs, etc. What is your body doing as its emotional response. Listen to your body. Next it is important to label that emotion. That is for your brain. Put a cognition on that emotion. Ok, my heart is beating faster, my chest is getting tighter, my breathing is getting faster, my face is getting hot, I am angry. When I get that drop in my heart first, and then I feel anger, that is usually because initially I was scared. Usually people get angry or mad because they were in danger. Anger is about protecting ourselves. So a lot of times, anger is really just fear. Most of my examples are anger just because that seems to be the most common, but you can substitute any emotion in there.

When that connection gets lost, we let our emotions take over. That is to say, it becomes a positive feedback loop where we react emotionally to a situation, we don't understand why, so we express our emotions reactively, changing our cognitions to this situation, then we react emotionally to another situation, not understanding that it originally started with the first situation, but now we express our emotions even more reactively, etc. and it gets worse and worse.

Again, it's all about self-awareness. We have the power to stop, breathe, and relax. Just look at ourselves and inward at what is happening to our bodies. That would be processing your emotions. Feel what your body is doing, put a label to it, and then try to be introspective and ask yourself why you are experiencing the emotion. It's important to do this with all of the emotions. Of course certain ones are more critical as they can lead to depression, anxiety, trauma, fear,and obsessions.