Understanding emotions: Awareness, causes, and coping tips

Understanding emotions is the first step in learning to control emotions effectively. Some people naturally have a more difficult time than others with emotional awareness, but nearly everyone can learn to identify and cope with emotions effectively.

Why do we have emotions – particularly negative ones like anxiety and despair? Negative emotions are useful, even though they can feel pretty unhelpful at times. If we never felt bad, we would keep doing things that are harmful to us. If there was no worry, everyone would make terrible, stupid mistakes because they didn't think of the consequences. It's important to recognize that emotional distress itself is not the enemy – emotions are just a part of you. It's their potential to disrupt or destroy your life that is the real problem. You can control whether they do that or not.

Photo credit zarajay

Here are some steps to understanding your emotions better:

• Just like with the way you talk to yourself, the first step in understanding emotions is to pay attention to them. Notice your emotions and how they change throughout your day. What are you actually feeling? Acknowledge the emotion (for example, say to yourself 'I am feeling hurt and rejected'). It might seem silly to say it to yourself, but it can be a real relief to have a label for how you're feeling
• If you're tempted to answer 'I just feel terrible!', try to narrow it down a bit. Are you angry, hurt, and sad, or some other combination of emotions? You definitely can be feeling multiple emotions at the same time. Be honest, even if you think the emotion is silly or excessive for the situation!
• Try to identify the cause of the emotion(s). It's really helpful to write this down, because sometimes a whole chain of events can be the cause, and no one is the sole cause. For example, maybe you feel angry and upset because you did poorly on a project at work right after receiving a negative evaluation from your supervisor, and were also criticized by a co-worker – none of these situations taken individually would make you feel quite as badly, but now you feel terrible because they all happened at once
• Think about how this emotion is impacting you right now. As just a couple of examples, angry people are more likely to see a neutral act as hostile, and depressed people are more likely to view others as evaluating them poorly. If you feel ill, or irritable, or think that everyone hates you, recognize these reactions as being caused by the emotion you're feeling. It's easy to get caught up in a feeling and make things worse for yourself
• Probably, after doing this, the emotion will have lost a lot of its control over you. Clarity really helps! Now you can think about what to do (if anything) about the situation that caused the emotion, or if you need to talk to someone about how you're feeling

Remember, they're your own feelings! Emotions are not the enemy, and running and hiding from them in the long run just gives them more control over you. Understanding emotions, acknowledging them, labeling them, identifying their causes, and identifying their effects will help you to understand your feelings better and be more prepared to deal with them in a beneficial way.

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