How to Connect With Your Emotional Self

In today’s world, it seems we’re either too busy to pay attention to our emotions, or we believe that emotions are bad and should be ignored. Emotions are messages from our brain. The messages might be important or incorrect, but they are messages nonetheless. It doesn’t make sense to belittle or ignore them.
 
Acknowledging, assessing, and managing your emotions enables you to control yourself more effectively and make better decisions.
 
How to manage your emotions and gain control:
 
1) Learn what calm, relaxed, and content feel like. In order to have a full appreciation of your emotions, it’s necessary to know what good feels like.

Putting yourself into a relaxed and content state at least once a day gives you a baseline to work from. This can be accomplished via meditation or a relaxation audio program. Be fully relaxed each day for at least a moment.

2) Acknowledge your feelings. Some people just plow through their day paying little attention to their emotions. However, this can be a mistake. When your emotional state drifts from a relaxed, content state, notice it and give it your attention.

3) Focus on your feelings and name them. Emotions are ultimately body feelings. Identify the location of the emotion and describe the sensation. Where do you feel the emotion in your body? In your stomach? Your chest? Head or jaw?

Describe how it feels. Do you feel queasy? Hollowness? Pressure? How would you describe it to another person?

What would you name the emotion? How does that label affect you? For example, don’t intense excitement and fear feel similar?

4) Accept the emotion. You can’t fight it. You’ll always lose. However, you don’t have to react to it. Just sit with it and be accepting of it. Remember, it’s just a feeling in your body. You wouldn’t allow a stubbed toe or a scrape on your arm to change your course of action. Maybe a particular emotional reaction isn’t a good enough reason to change your plans either.

5) Neutralize any lingering negative emotions. Most negative emotions will pass by just by acknowledging them and staying with them. If this fails to work, it’s time to go to the next step.

Focus on the location of the emotion and relax that part of your body. Imagine a tube going into that energy and the pressure being released. Just let it all out. It might take a few minutes, but you should experience quick relief from the majority of the emotion.

The same process can be used to neutralize “positive” emotions that are luring you into doing something you know you shouldn’t. Eating an unhealthy food is a good example. That feeling you get when you imagine eating your favorite unhealthy food is a type of emotion.

6) Think about why you had an emotional reaction in the first place. Whether the emotion you experienced was positive or negative, think about what happened. Why did you respond the way you did? What does that tell you about yourself?

If the emotion was negative, is the situation that caused it something that you need to work on? If you had allowed yourself to be influenced by the emotion, would the outcome have been positive or negative?
 
How well do you know yourself? How well do you manage your emotions? Do you allow your emotions to lead you into making poor decisions?
 
Connecting with your emotional self is worth your time and effort. Consider how many poor decisions you’ve made in the past against your better judgement. Your emotions are to blame. Change your future by learning to acknowledge and manage your emotional state.