Managing your emotions

How many emotions do you experience that you can identify as you’re experiencing them? And what are these emotions? This was the question asked to 7000 people*. And guess what they said? How many emotions could they identify?

3.

Yup.

3 emotions.

These ones...

😃 Happy
😔 Sad
😡 Pissed off

And living life with only THESE 3 emotions is like living life as a cartoon character with high highs and low lows.

It's a bit exhausting. It limits us. And it messes with how we connect with ourselves and with others.

Developing our awareness of our emotional range and our emotional literacy in being able to articulate “I am feeling X, or Y or Z” has huge benefits.

There are 3 stages to emotions:

1) We feel them
2) We use language to label the emotion
3) We fully experience that emotion

The second stage is powerful. When we label the emotion it shapes that experience.

Think about that for a moment.

How we use language to describe our emotions and the language we use about emotions has a big impact and it can make the difference between telling yourself:

😣 “I’m stressed”

compared to

🙀 “I’m overwhelmed and can’t function.”

How are you doing at identifying and labelling your emotions? And how’s that affecting how you connect to yourself and to other people?

*the study asking 7000 people was conducted by Brené Brown.