Why is it important to be emotionally literate? What happens to unprocessed emotions and how to prevent it? How to regulate feelings? How well do you know your emotions?
Emotions are a system for navigating through life. If we want to regulate them, we must first know how feelings arise. They come from our thoughts. So if we change the way we think, we will also change how we feel.
Why is it important to be emotionally literate?
Emotional literacy is to mental health what the alphabet is to conversation. In order to be able to regulate our emotions, we must first learn to recognize and understand them.
Every emotion tells us something about us
If we could decide, we would all be happy, preferably permanently. But that would mean that we are also happy about sad or tragic events in life, which we certainly do not want.
The first lesson to accept is that life is beautiful and ugly. Therefore, we do not want to be happy all the time, but we want to learn how to cope with difficult life situations. Properly naming and understanding the role of emotions gives us back control in our lives (rather than emotions controlling us).
The role of emotions
Man constantly strives to establish a balance between the external and internal worlds. The role will be better understood if we compare emotional health with physical health. What a reflex is to the body, an emotion is to the psyche.
We breathe during sleep due to reflexes. We automatically move our hand away from the hot surface also due to reflexes. Their job is to protect our body. In the same way, emotions have the function of protecting our psyche. Grief protects us until we gather the strength to deal with a difficult situation. Boredom stimulates our creativity. Desire motivates us to act, etc.
Each emotion plays an important role and therefore each one is positive for us
There is a positive psychology that emerged as a counterweight to the then focus on mental illness (rather than individual strength). However, with the name of the branch of psychology, there was confusion in the division of emotions (into positive and negative instead of pleasant and unpleasant).
There are no positive and negative emotions
There are pleasant ones and unpleasant ones, but they are all positive. How is boredom positive? If it weren't for boredom (which encourages creativity), we wouldn't have electricity today. We need unpleasant emotions.
Are emotions irrational?
From the modern division of man into emotional and cognitive beings (irrational and rational part), it follows that emotions are something irrational that must be resisted so that it does not dominate us. Because we believe that emotions are irrational, we are ashamed to feel a certain emotion. Consequently we hide our feelings. That emotion that we have hidden is called raw emotion. It does not disappear, but settles down.
Ian Keefe/Unsplash
To better understand, imagine a backpack with stones - because they are - the burden we carry on our backs. Over time, they remind us that they are there. Reminders arrive in the form of insomnia, headaches, anxiety…
Concealment of emotions is ubiquitous today
People began to take antidepressants (without consulting a psychiatrist) like candy. And by doing so, we actually stop the life energy and the possibility of pleasure. By suppressing these unpleasant feelings, we also suppress pleasant emotions.
An unpleasant emotion carries a message - "Something is wrong, change"
Think of emotions as a traffic light. Pleasant emotions would be a green light (keep going) and an unpleasant red light (stop, something is wrong). For example anxiety tells us that we have not been satisfied with life for some time (our inner and outer worlds are out of balance).
Emotions are the result of the stimulus of the value system, because we only respond to what we think is important. People do not respond to a stimulus as such, but rather to the meaning they attach to that stimulus.
Manage your emotions so they don't control you, use them as allies and not as opponents.
