Can You Name Your Emotion?
how do you feel today?
“Hello my friend! It’s been a while!”
“How are you? How do you feel today?”
These may be two kinds of default questions asked from friends I haven’t seen in a while. And the default (also expected) response is:
“Fine! How about you?”
It’s the most classic pleasantries on earth.
No, there’s nothing wrong with it. In fact, there are actually tons of benefits of engaging in a small talk. However, if we dig deeper, those questions may be the key to understanding ourselves.
Respond, not react
Many people (including myself) often do something unaware of their own emotions. And as a result, they tend to react to a particular situation improperly and may end up posing a toxic behavior without realizing why they do it.
In this case, they may be reacting rather than responding to the circumstances.
But why isn’t reacting preferable?
It turns out that reaction is based fully on emotions while respond is based on reason as well as emotions. The only different here is just the reasoning.
To reason something, we need to put some thoughts in the situation. And first of all, we need to know what do we feel.
Well, that’s kind of obvious.
What I want to say is that only after we know what do we feel, we will be able to decide the best response to give.
Let’s take a look at these examples.
- If I am angry, I will take a deep breath and ….
- If I feel inferior, I will remember that it is me, not him or her, and then ….
- If I feel empty, I will try to be compassionate and commend myself, then ….
- etc
As we can see, every emotion usually needs different coping strategy. So when we don’t know our emotional state, how can we do a proper reasoning?
Or let’s say we just know two kind of emotions, which are: sad and happy, what do we do when we are actually feel indifferent? If we consider this as a negative emotion, we will most likely choose our sad-coping strategy to deal with our indifference.
Well, it may work, but it would be better if we know that indifferent and sad are not alike. Therefore we will have a much proper coping strategy.
This is why the ability to naming our emotions is crucial.
The Emotion Wheel
As a highly sensitive person, I once believed that the capability to feel intensely was one of my weaknesses. Furthermore, the problem was amplified since I used to blindly follow my emotions (to react).
That was tremendously catastrophic.
Now I try to make a habit to be skeptical of my own feelings. And by using my sensitivity, I can finally take the benefits to perform a much deeper investigation on what is really happening inside my mind. How I managed to break the illusion of my own feelings is written in this story.
To master the emotion-naming, I found a good story showing how to use the Emotion Wheel as the tool. I found this to be a very helpful and practical suggestion, and it is actually fun thing to do!
It is the emotions that allow us to understand
The more sure we are labeling our emotions, the more likely we are to know how to cope with various stressors or any stimulus that precedes the emotions. Thus we will perceive more control and understanding of a situations.
When we understand the situation better, we will allow ourselves to respond appropriately. And finally, we may be able to build deeper and more meaningful relationships with working mates, friends, family, and loved ones.
That’s it for now buddy! So, how do you feel today?
