9 Powerful Tools that Can Help You Process Your Emotions

Free, quick, and accessible techniques for emotional freedom and peace of mind

Image Credit: Shaun Low, Unsplash.

I have a long list of useful skills I wish we were thought in school. However, skill #1 on that list is the processing of our emotions. Perhaps, instead of some trigonometry, we could include this life-changing skill into school curricula. What do you think?

Unlike the problems that involve sines, cosines, and unit circles, we are facing our emotions literally every day.

Our emotions often come up at most inconvenient times and demand our attention. When that happens, we do what we’ve been taught: we numb ourselves, shut our emotions down, blame ourselves, give ourselves crap, try to fix bad emotions, distract ourselves.

Alas, emotions are tricky and not so easy to get rid of. Unprocessed and suppressed emotions will haunt us down, show up again, and with a little more force, demand our attention. If we manage to avoid them for long enough, an unwelcome surprise may come as a seemingly sudden wave of anxiety, depression, panic, insomnia, or some other physical ailment- something a lot harder or even impossible to ignore.

In esoteric teachings, emotions are often described through the water element. Water wants to flow and move. When properly channeled, it can move freely, with productive energy and direction. Water that’s out of control is trouble: flood, hurricane, leakage, mudslide. When suppressed and ignored, the water will find its way out through cracks and crevices. We need to learn how to make friends with water. Small adjustments, regular processing, and maintenance of a good emotional flow are critical for health and well-being.

Imagine if, just like we do with food, we could digest our emotions, take in the useful components, and poop out what we don’t need.

Imagine if we could clean up our emotional states just like we wash our bodies or brush our teeth.

Imagine if we could coexist with our emotions, learn from them and stop perceiving them as an annoyance that slows us down and make us less productive.

OK, that sounds great and all but how do we do that?

How do people with packed schedules like yours and mine manage to process our emotions timely and regularly?

The trick is to expand your toolbox for emotional processing. The more tools you have in your toolbox, the more likely you will be to apply the right tool at the right time. The more you apply these tools, the more they will become second nature.

This list includes tools that came to my attention through psychotherapy, popular psychology, spiritual practices. It includes 9 easy techniques that we can all do on a regular basis to process our emotions and improve our overall well-being. My biggest recommendation for you is not to only read about these techniques but to actually try at least one of them today.

Let’s get started.

1. Name it to tame it

When we get emotionally overwhelmed, it feels like we’re in a fog. We can’t quite put our finger on how we feel, we just know something is off and we feel like shit. The nebulousness of our emotions makes us confused uncomfortable, and ready to escape into something else… whatever is available: email, chocolate, cat videos, you name it.

First, I want you to know that there is absolutely nothing wrong with feeling like shit. We all feel that way sometimes. I also wrote an article about 5 mantras that can help in that situation.

https://medium.com/the-ascent/when-you-feel-like-sh-t-these-5-mantras-will-help-3eecd89b91a0

We can acknowledge our crappy, confusing emotional state and try to go one step further.

And that is:

Name your emotion.

Are you anxious? Angry? Sad? Scared? Disappointed? Envious?

Martha Beck uses a simple scheme that contains just four baseline emotions:

• sad
• mad
• glad
• scared.

This simple schema is probably a good place to start.

Expanding our emotional vocabulary is the key element of our emotional intelligence. Verbalization helps us understand and express ourselves. Once we know the emotion we’re dealing, with we can learn what we need from it and move through.

2. Feel it in your body

Our bodies have evolved over millennia, well our minds, especially our neocortexes, are new from the evolutionary standpoint. Emotional responses are a lot older than our abstract thinking. Therefore, to disentangle the mess of your emotions, our bodily sensations are a great place to start. This requires some amount of practice because most of us spend more time in our minds than in our bodies.

Slow down, take a breath, and tune into your body.

Where do you feel the emotion in your body? Does it manifest as the pressure in the chest, tightness in the throat, heaviness in your belly? How are you breathing? Which body parts feel relaxed and which body parts feel tense? Is there pain, pressure, tension, tingling, a sense of movement, or a sense of blockage? Describe how is your body feeling no matter how silly it may seem.

If you ever worked with a therapist, you’re probably already familiar with feeling emotions in your body, visualizing them, and getting curious about your visceral sensations. But you don’t need a therapist- you can do it on your own. Your body is your ally in emotional processing. Turn to it for answers.

3. What is the lesson/ message behind this emotion?

Our emotions don’t show up only to ruin our days and slow us down in marching through our to-do lists. Emotions contain valuable lessons and information that shouldn’t be overlooked. For example:

• when you’re feeling angry, someone has probably stepped over your boundaries.
• when you’re feeling sad, you probably lost something that meant a lot to you.
• when you’re feeling anxious, you are probably afraid of the uncertain future.
• when you’re feeling envious, someone has something that would really like to have.

These are just a few possibilities, you need to check in and see for yourself. Follow your bodily sensations and images you build around them. Ask your emotions what are they trying to reveal to you. Emotions are there for a reason. Make the effort to find out what it is.

4. Dance to it

An emotion is an energy in motion.

To process it, we need to express it. We need to move.

A trouble is that many of us don’t have the safe space to feel and express our emotions. We can learn a great deal from children who stomp their feet, yell, clench their fists, or simply collapse on the floor and cry in desperation even if that’s in the middle of the supermarket.

And sure, you and I probably can’t do these power moves during our team meetings and office parties. However, we can and should create a space for ourselves to express our emotions in completely silly ways while no one is watching.

Do you know what can be a catalyst for this practice? Music.

Choose a few songs and dance to express your underlying emotions.

• If the emotion is anger, stomp your feet, kick, punch, yell into the pillow. (Here is my Spotify playlist of angry songs- it’s super cool.)
• If the emotion is anxiety, shake, run, jump up and down. (This is my go-to anxiety song.)
• If the emotion is sadness, roll on the floor, move slowly, allow your muscles to relax and collapse. (This is my go-to sadness song.)

In a safe environment, far from everyone’s sight, express the emotion you feel or the emotion you have been neglecting in the past. It will look silly in the beginning, but it will feel healing and energizing once you’re done. This should be a practice so choose multiple songs and make many choreographies for your common emotions.

5. Shake it off

After facing a traumatic experience, such as running for life, animals shake. Humans probably used to do that too, prior to the social conditioning that commands us to be cool and pretend that nothing is happening.

Many cultures, especially in Africa, have rituals and dances that involve a lot of shaking. Shaking meditations are part of Kundalini yoga. The practice of shaking moves our energy around and it’s emotionally healing (remember: e-motion).

When we don’t allow the emotions to circulate through our bodies, they get locked as traumas. Typically, talking about traumas or emotions is not enough to process them, we must remove them from our bodies to set ourselves free. Shaking is simple, free, and generally available at any moment. Shake your whole body at least once a day. You’ll feel more energized, balanced, and realize that Taylor Swift was definitely onto something…

[For more info on how emotional and traumatic experiences get locked in the body, check out the work of Gabor Mate, Bessel van der Kolk, or Peter Levine.]

6. Breathe through it

Our breath can do magic for our health, energy, and, yes, our emotions. It has been brought back into popularity through yoga, meditation, and the recent work of James Nestor and fellow pulmonauts (people who tapped into the power of breathing). There is a myriad of transformative breathing techniques, many of which can help you alleviate anxiety and get calm: box breathing, alternative nostril breathing, 4–7–8 breathing, to mention a few.

One technique, however, that stood out to me and that I now practice regularly is two-part active breathwork (or pranayama breathing meditation). This technique entails mouth breathing in the following pattern:

• Inhale part 1: take a strong inhale into your belly
• Inhale part 2: take a strong inhale into your chest
• Exhale through the mouth

This pattern is repeated for a period of time (10 minutes to an hour), often with the music. The period of active breath is followed by equally important rest.

What happens in the process is nothing short of miraculous. You will literally feel the energy moving through your body. You may feel tingles in your hands, face, legs, your body temperature may drop, you may sense strong waves of emotions, you may cry, shake, yell, see visions, get new ideas, and completely shift your energy. The effects and benefits of this practice are similar to that of acupuncture.

Breathwork is powerful, so it’s good to start with shorter sessions and try it out with the facilitator. I included my favorite resources below. With time you can do it on your own and all you need is the music playlist and private space. This practice is simple, convenient, and doesn’t require particularly strong focus, because it’s so visceral and effective. Consider it as mental hygiene, wiping the dust of your emotional body, cleansing, and renewing.

Resources:

• David Elliot
• Amy Kuretsky’s Mini Morning Breathwork- excellent for the beginners
• Chauna Bryant
• Sandra Kermode

7. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

EFT is also known as tapping and it involves… well, tapping on different energetic points on your body and face. Simultaneously, you’ll be talking about your emotions (or whatever else is the focus of your tapping session) and processing them both intellectually and viscerally.

I stumbled upon EFT so many times in the past and it frankly seemed woo-woo. I didn’t give it a try until I read Gabby Bernstein’s book Judgment Detox. It was an audiobook so I was able to follow through her tapping exercises end I enjoyed them. What I like about EFT, in particular, is that it includes powerful messages of self-love, acceptance, compassion and helps us gently shift our perspective while acknowledging where we are. You can find many tapping videos on YouTube and once you get a grasp of it you can do it on your own whenever you want.

Resources:

• Brad Yates- he has over 1000 free YouTube tapping videos on all topics
• Tapping Solution on YouTube

8. Feel it all

In Untamed, Glennon Doyle said:

“I did not know, before that woman told me, that all feelings were for feeling. I did not know that I was supposed to feel everything. I thought that I was supposed to feel happy. I thought that happy was for feeling and that pain was for fixing and numbing and deflecting and hiding and ignoring. I thought that when life got hard, it was big ’cause I had gone wrong somewhere. I thought that pain was weakness and that I was supposed to suck it up. But the thing was that the more I sucked it up, the more food in booze I had to suck down… I keep the note stuck to my bathroom mirror: ‘Feel it all’.”

Ultimately, that is what your feelings are for: to be felt. Yes, that means that on some days you will be happy and bubbly, on some days, you’ll be sad and you won’t be in the mood for small talk and social activity. On some days, you’ll be angry and only interested to run or punch someone in the face.

And you know what? That’s OK. That’s what it means to be human.

We are here to feel a full range of emotions and experiences, not only to pay bills, post on Instagram, and die.

We need you to feel your anger because it will ignite you into action.

We need you to feel your fear because it will direct you to protect yourself, stretch yourself, or run away.

We need you to feel sadness because without knowing sadness, you can’t know true love.

Allowing yourself to feel your feelings as they arise is the biggest gift you can gift to yourself and probably also to the world. We love you because you’re human, not because you’re a robot. Your feelings make you relatable and irresistible.

9. Let your emotions go

However many spiritual books we read, green juices with drink, however many times we watch “Frozen” and sing along, letting go still remains the uttermost spiritual challenge for most of us.

We just love to grasp and hold onto things, people, accolades, titles, money. We love to control and obsess. Ironically, we behave similarly with our emotions, whether we realize it or not. We become addicted to our problems, we cling to our pain, depression, sense of victimhood, nervousness, chaos, righteous anger. Even though on a conscious level, we’d love to let go of these emotions, it’s much easier said than done.

Letting go is another critical skill we were never taught in school. Letting go requires humbleness, curiosity, and most importantly TRUST.

You would not let your alcoholic friend who doesn’t have their act together take care of your cat while you’re on vacation, would you? You choose people you can trust for the tasks you care about and then you can relax. Letting go in general is based on the trust in the higher power (God, Universe, the Source, however you want to denote it) that is your friend and that knows what to do. Then you can let go.

We still function on a material plane so it is really useful to accompany your intention to let go with a ritual. For example:

• Break a coconut (or an egg or a walnut) as a symbol of your willingness to let go. I learned this trick from Tosha Silver. These enclosed round objects can represent the codes we can't crack (pun intended). When we break them open, we allow the resolutions to come in and something that was trapped inside to come out.
• Write a note to the higher power and ask them to help you process the emotion and let it go. Keep the note in a box. Once you materialize your emotion and your intention around it, it is not your concern any longer.
• Write about your emotion on a piece of paper and burn it or flush it down the toilet. Fire and water both have healing and cleansing capacities and help us let go.

Your turn. What is your favorite tool to process your emotions? Which one of these tools did you find interesting? Which one will you try today? Let me know in the comments below and let’s keep the conversation going.

Before you go…

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