How to Detect Negative Emotions

A Quick Guide

A lot of the time negative emotions get the best of us and adversely influence our behavior. Likewise, we may act in ways that we regret later. This does not mean that negative emotions should be eliminated from our lives. Since they play their own specific role. Some of them are in-built in us and help us to deal with life. For example, anxiety prepares us to deal with threatening situations.

So, the question is when are negative emotions not useful? It is when they interfere with our ability to accomplish our goals, get our work done at school or work, maintain our relationships, perform our daily chores, etc.

Identifying negative emotions

When negative emotions start to impair our functioning, it is important that you not only identify these but also work on regulating them effectively. Such emotions include those feelings that make us feel unpleasant sensations in our body and disrupt our ability to think clearly or deal with situations in an effective manner.

Hot and cold negative emotions

According to Steven J. Stein, if we think of emotions as a continuum on a temperature scale, they are either hot or cold. Hot emotions are extreme, and intense and accordingly change our mood and thoughts quite swiftly. For example, rage anger, despair, guilt, pessimism, anxiety, panic, fear, etc. Compared to them, cold emotions are also negative but less intense and unpleasant. For example, disappointment, regret, irritation, sadness, concern, etc.

Try to come up with synonyms of primary emotions like anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, and fear and add them to your emotional vocabulary which is explained in detail in our previous article. You may find that there are different words for expressing different intensities of emotions. When identifying your own emotions, make sure to use the correct term depending on the intensity you feel.

For example, irritability (mild), anger (moderate), and rage (severe) are 3 levels of the same emotion.

Getting feedback on our negative emotions

Although emotional awareness is developed more through a reflective process, you may take help from other people around you. A lot of the time, our emotions are quite apparent to others even if we are unaware of them. People can read how we feel quite easily especially if they know us. To utilize their input, do the following exercise:

1. First, identify which emotions you want to change or reduce in intensity. For example, anger.
2. Then ask someone close to you how you express this particular emotion.
3. What does your face look like? How is your posture? In which tone do you speak? Etc.
4. You can even ask them how they know you are experiencing this emotion. What do you say? How do you act? What impact does it have on others?

Getting feedback from people close to you can be quite valuable in adding to your overall emotional awareness. An external perspective can give you objective information about your emotional expression compared to your own biased view. It is important though that you accept this feedback in an open and flexible way rather than being defensive. And saying things like ‘Oh please, I don’t act like that at all’. Since such an attitude will not be beneficial for you in learning about yourself.

Hopefully, building your emotional vocabulary, categorizing your emotions by intensity, and getting feedback from others will build your emotional awareness. If you want to find out more about being emotionally aware, check out the related articles.