Emotions color every aspect of our lives, yet understanding and managing them can often seem impossible. This guide is designed to offer research-backed, insightful, and empathetic guidance to help you recognize, feel, and manage your emotions effectively.
The Essential Role of Emotions
Emotions are not just fleeting feelings; they are vital signals from our body and mind. Scientific research has shown that emotions evolved as survival mechanisms, aiding in decision-making, indicating our needs, and fostering connections with others.
• Signal of Threat or Reward: Emotions like fear or joy act as immediate signals of potential danger or benefit, triggering the fight-or-flight response which prepares our bodies for appropriate action.
• Motivational Drivers: Certain emotions motivate us to take action. For example, anger can motivate us to address injustices, while love can inspire us to nurture our relationships.
• Decision-Making Guides: Emotions often help us make decisions when rational thinking alone is insufficient. They can provide a gut feeling or intuition about what is right or wrong in a given situation.
• Regulators of Social Behavior: Emotions help regulate our social behavior, ensuring that we act in socially acceptable ways. Guilt, for example, can prevent us from doing something that may hurt others.
• Enhancers of Memory and Learning: Emotional experiences tend to leave stronger memories, aiding in learning and recall. This is why emotionally charged events are often more memorable.
At Healium, we’ve produced a meditation app that syncs with biofeedback devices like the Brainlink Lite EEG Headband so that you can actually see your feelings as they arise. Your feelings take the shape of brainwave data that is overlaid on top of VR meditation experiences, finally giving you the agency to see, feel, and even influence your own feelings and brain patterns.
The Consequences of Suppressing Emotions
Ignoring or suppressing our emotions doesn’t make them disappear. In fact, studies have shown that this can lead to increased stress, physical health issues, and long-term mental health problems.
• Increased Negative Emotions and Stress: Chronic emotional suppression can lead to intensified negative emotions and heightened stress levels.
• Physical Health Impacts: Ongoing emotional suppression can disrupt emotional harmony, potentially leading to physical health issues.
• Increased Risk of Premature Death: Habitual bottling up of emotions is linked with a higher risk of premature death.
• Influence on Mental Health: Suppression of emotions can exacerbate symptoms of mental health conditions, including posttraumatic stress disorder in specific contexts.
A 4-Step Guide to Feeling Your Feelings
1) Identify Your Emotions
Begin by identifying and naming your emotions as they arise. Labeling emotions can calm the brain and body, helping in emotional regulation. Naming an emotion creates a psychological distance, allowing you to understand it without being overwhelmed.
• How to Do It: Take deep breaths to center yourself, and then articulate what you’re feeling. Use phrases like “I feel [emotion]” or “This is [emotion]”. This practice affirms that while you experience the emotion, it does not define you.
2) Observe and Acknowledging Your Emotions
Practice observing your emotions without judgment. Mindfulness exercises and body scanning can be powerful tools for connecting with the physical sensations that accompany your emotional states. These exercises also help in recognizing the transient nature of emotions, reducing their intensity and impact.
• How to Do It: Engage in mindfulness or meditation exercises where you focus on your emotions objectively. Notice where in your body you feel these emotions and describe the sensations without attaching any narrative to them. If you’re using Healium with an EEG headband your aura will likely glow green during this process.
3) Understand the Message Behind Your Emotions
Reflect on the messages or needs conveyed by your emotions. Emotions often signal unmet needs or values. Understanding this can lead to more effective emotional management. Reflective practices help you understand what your emotions are trying to tell you, whether it’s a need for rest, connection, or perhaps setting a boundary.
• How to Do It: Use reflective techniques like journaling to explore the root causes of your emotions. Ask yourself what these feelings might be indicating about your needs, desires, or boundaries.
4) Process and Releasing Emotions
Once you’ve identified and understood your emotion, find healthy ways to process and release it. Processing emotions in a healthy way prevents them from being bottled up, which can lead to increased stress and anxiety. This might involve creative expression, physical activity, or relaxation techniques like deep breathing or visualization.
• How to Do It: Engage in activities that allow for emotional expression, such as creative arts, physical exercise, or talking with a trusted person. Techniques like deep breathing, visualization, or progressive muscle relaxation can also aid in releasing these emotions.
Integrating Emotion-Focused Practices into Daily Life
Integrating emotion-focused practices into your daily life involves creating routines and habits that foster emotional awareness and processing. This commitment can significantly enhance emotional well-being over time.
Start by setting aside a few minutes each day for mindfulness or reflection, allowing yourself to check in with your emotions. Incorporating activities like journaling, meditation, or even simple breathing exercises can be effective.
How Healium Helps Feel Your Feelings
Healium is a VR meditation app that lets you see your feelings as biofeedback data throughout the experience. This combination is especially powerful because it grants you the agency to not only feel and recognize your feelings in a tangible way, but also to self-regulate and influence those emotions moving forward.
Using an EEG headband, our experience overlays your brainwaves onto each meditation experience. As you go through the meditation, the experience itself adjusts if your brainwaves fall out of an acceptable range, making Healium an effective way to practice neurofeedback at home.
To learn more about how Healium works, watch the video below!
About the Author
Sarah Hill, a former interactive TV news journalist at NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliates in Missouri, gained recognition for pioneering interactive news broadcasting using Google Hangouts. She is now the CEO of Healium, the world’s first biometrically powered VR/AR channel, helping those with stress, anxiety, insomnia, and other struggles through biofeedback storytelling. With patents, clinical validation, and over seven million views, she has reshaped the landscape of immersive media.
How to feel and process your feelings
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