How to Process an Emotion like a Pro
Processing emotions may seem daunting to you. But you can learn this skill to perform better psychologically. While our schooling hasn’t taught us how to handle emotions — as a result, it sparks off our mental and physical health issues in the long run. Thus, It’s crucial to develop the skill of processing emotions as it can help you manage challenging situations in a healthy manner.
Mastering this skill tends to make your life pretty light on your soul. Generally, Emotion is how we react to explicit stimuli, whether positive or negative.
Emotional psychologist Paul Ekman recognized five basic sorts of emotions fear, joy, anger, sadness, surprise, and disgust.
These emotions can be seen by a person's facial expression, but on the flip side, complex emotions don’t have many visible expressions, such as jealousy, regret, or grief.
Moreover, the complex one covers love, gratitude, pride, embarrassment, worry, envy, and guilt emotion.
When we bottle up our emotions, it leads to further problems and unhealthy behavior like eating too much and lashing out at other people.
To better understand this crucial skill, I’ll dig deeper into the steps involved in processing emotions. Let’s have a look at it!
Identify the emotions
The first step in managing emotions is to identify what you are feeling. It might sound simple but it can be tricky to identify your emotions, especially if you are feeling multiple emotions at once.
Take a moment to pause and reflect on what you are feeling.
Which part of the body do you feel that emotion affecting you?
Is it in your stomach, chest, or throat?
Is there any contradiction in your thoughts?
Why do you compel these emotions to hold back?
See what comes up in your mind and analyze it regardless of any judgment. Whether you experience emotion, good or bad, this pinpoint makes you understand yourself better.
Accept your emotions
Once you’ve identified your emotion, then accept it. If you resist emotion, then it’s going nowhere — it will stay in your head back like an unread significant message notification.
You may feel that opening this message has some risk factors, though if you open it and accept your emotions, it will give you peace of mind. Figure out these questions to accept your emotions;
Why do you think it’s an unacceptable emotion?
Is something bad happen if you accept this emotion?
What can you do to tolerate this emotional state?
Allow yourself to feel this emotion while accepting that it’s okay. Don’t judge yourself or try to suppress your emotions.
For instance, sit in a comfortable position and inhale air through your nose and count for 4sec and then exhale air through your mouth and count for 4 sec.
You can imagine inhaling positivity while exhaling negativity through your mouth. Repeat this breathing cycle 5 times.
Investigate the emotion
Take some time to investigate the emotion.
Ask yourself why you are feeling this way.
What triggered the emotion? Is there a particular event, person, or situation that caused it?
Is this emotional distress from your crooked thinking habit?
Understanding the root cause of your emotions can help you process them more effectively.
Take action
Finally, take action to address the emotion.
You may feel triggered by past experiences and childhood traumas. Or maybe your unmet desire or someone violates boundaries towards you.
Even though you can lose control over emotion when you suffer from sleep deprivation. So, what can you do to get out of this state? Calm down!
You have several ways to get out of this downward spiral — do relaxation techniques (breathing in & out), meditation, exercise, discuss your emotions with your trustworthy, and have a different perspective on what's happening or do some daily journaling.
However, socialization can promote the body's healthy physical response to emotions.
Ditch suppressing your emotion, and practice reappraising
We have two main emotion regulation techniques one is suppression, and the other is reappraising. Suppression is when you strive to prevent yourself from feeling emotions. Reappraising is changing the way you think of negative emotions before you respond, not react.
Sometimes, it’s only your distorted thinking; you need to express a concept differently in your thinking pattern to perform better psychologically.
Gentle Reminder
Processing emotions isn’t something you’re born with — it’s a skill that requires practice. So don’t beat yourself up if you don’t get it right away. Embrace the learning process, and take one step at a time. Trust me, with some effort and patience; you’ll soon be identifying, acknowledging, investigating, and reappraising your emotions like a total pro!
