How to become aware of your emotions

Many people wish to be more aware of their emotions and feelings in order to feel more in control of their life. Since having this understanding is an integral skill with multiple benefits. The good news is that emotional awareness can be built with practice. But first, it is important to understand important concepts related to emotions.

A Quick Guide

Building emotional awareness is a valuable skill that can bring greater control and balance to one’s life. Understanding the distinction between feelings, emotions, and mood is crucial. Engaging in exercises such as reflecting on daily emotions and their sources can enhance emotional awareness, helping individuals identify patterns, regulate their emotions, and develop effective coping strategies.

The difference between feelings, emotions, mood

The terms feelings, emotions, and mood are often mixed up. However, they have different meanings. These are stated as follows:

• Feelings: Feelings refer to your subjective or personal experience of an emotion. For example, you feel a surge of anger and think ‘I am angry right now’.
• Emotions: Emotions refer to the objective perception of an emotion/feeling. For example, someone looks at your facial expressions and body language and determines that you are angry. Even if you might actually be feeling sad in your subjective experience.
• Mood: This refers to your state of mind over a period of time. Particularly, your general thoughts and feelings. For example, you may have been in an irritable mood for the past week.

Strive for emotional balance

Emotions are central to life and add color to your experiences. However, having too many emotions and being emotional about the slightest of things can be quite draining. For example, people who frequently get emotional at not being constantly noticed. This can be quite exhausting for both the person and the people living around him/her. So, strive for a balance of emotions in your life. Notice the intensity of your emotions throughout the day and learn skills of managing or regulating them to keep them in check.

Emotional awareness exercise

Whenever you feel an intense emotion, take a few moments and reflect. Think back on all of the emotions you felt throughout the day. Write them down in a notebook. You may notice that minor or mild emotions may have gradually built up to the intense feeling you are experiencing at the moment.

To do an exercise to build your emotional awareness,

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What types of emotions did I experience today?
• What was the severity of these emotions? Were they mild, moderate, or intense?
• Were you able to identify them at the moment?
• What events or situations were the reasons for these emotions?
• What were your thoughts at the time?
• Did you feel any physiological reactions in your body?
• Did you do anything to manage your emotions? or simply let them be?

How will the emotional awareness exercise help you?

Recording down your emotions, thoughts, and physiological reactions by doing the exercise above will help you to be more aware of your internal state. Particularly, tracing each emotion to the situation will help you identify the source of the intense feelings you are experiencing at the moment. Labeling them will make you relieved and grounded. Finally, your strategy for regulating or managing it will tell you a lot about your overall coping style. Particularly, whether it was an effective strategy or not. And whether you need to adopt a different one in the future for complete management of your emotions.

The above exercise is only one of the aspects of emotional awareness. If you want to learn more about how to develop this skill, check out the related articles.