11 Steps To Expressing Emotions Correctly

Many people find it difficult to express emotions properly, whether it is too much or too little. Knowing how to express emotions correctly and proportionally will help in your personal, social and professional life in a way you never thought.

Many theories or techniques teach how to repress or control emotions, but it has been proven that this is not really effective, as emotions and feelings are something spontaneous and automatic that arise within us.

Avoiding and repressing your emotions can have negative physical consequences that are more than scientifically proven. Current therapies such as acceptance and commitment therapy and techniques such as mindfulness help us to accept our emotions and deal with them, sometimes as if we were spectators of them.

For example, if you have a lot of emotional distress, try to avoid it, and don’t know how to channel and express it, you may experience an increased heart rate, sweating, tremors, or breathing problems. When you repress feelings, it can cause tension in your neck, face, or various muscles and spine.

If, on the contrary, you hold onto feelings without expressing them, you may experience psychosomatic arterial diseases, headaches or stomach problems. The fact that our emotions influence our health is therefore a fact.

Know how to express emotions in 11 steps

With a little training and following a few simple steps, you will be able to better identify your emotions and express them accordingly. Below you will see these steps so you can practice them:

• Identify the emotion and sensation: when something changes in your organism due to some reaction to the outside or to your own thoughts, you should ask yourself “what am I feeling?”, “what physical symptoms am I experiencing?”, “what is the cause?”, “why does this appear now?”.
• Learn to recognize your feelings : once you have detected the emotions and sensations, you will have to analyze the feeling that this provokes in you. It will be helpful to know which signs indicate. Try to make a list of all these emotions and what it physically shows about them.
• Pay attention to your body’s reaction: emotions are governed by the limbic and autonomic nervous system, and are difficult to manipulate at first glance. Take a few minutes and let the emotion subside to think clearly about it and what you are going to say.

• Pay more attention to your response than to the situation: You think the situation that makes you nervous is the cause of everything, but the real problem is your emotional response. Observe yourself and you will find that your response is equally paralyzing. Only you can change your reaction.
• Express your emotions appropriately and proportionately: Once you understand the previous item, you can express your emotions in a more controlled way, although you can still learn a few more steps to understand what happens to you.
• Experience the experience with your body: when you have these emotions, indicate the part of your body where they happen. Give them a concrete color and texture, locate them in a specific place, and try to have a different relationship. You are the one who encompasses all these parts or emotions, they are not the ones who own you.

• Try to be honest with what you feel and what you do: if you really feel indifference to this person, why keep trying to get them to like you? Or if you’re irritable, uncomfortable, and upset, why avoid a conversation to try to get along with the other person?
• Choose the best situation to express yourself: It’s no use wanting to have a constructive conversation with your boss if you pick the wrong time. So examine the situation, the people around you, and yourself, and decide when the time is most convenient.
• Use a good form of communication: friendly tone, affectionate listening, looking the person in the eye and using phrases like “I’m a little stressed” instead of “The situation at the company has stressed me out”. You will safely avoid a confrontation, and as you explain what happened, implicitly the other person will understand that your stress has a clear cause, work.

• Use your body to express what you feel: in case you explain that you are stressed, placing your hand on your heart, head or stomach will demonstrate that you are experiencing unpleasant things, and that it would be good for you and the surroundings. let it not stay that way.
• Visualizing and locating your emotions is essential: you are the person in charge of dealing with your feelings, without repressing them or hiding them, just knowing that you must express them to relieve yourself and be understood.

How to calm your emotions and feelings in solitude

Sometimes emotional distress has nothing to do with a particular situation. We may be sad for memories, because we feel frail of health, or for any sad thoughts that are running through our minds. You can apply what we said earlier: accept them as part of you, accept that you are a living person who needs to harbor these feelings.

Emotions are part of our evolution as a species and also what defines us as different beings from other species that inhabit the planet. Emotions are natural, so don’t fight them constantly. Let them be, but in the meantime you can do an activity that you know can usually make you relax, like talking to a real person, writing, or taking a walk.

If overly intense emotions such as anger appear, a high intensity sport is highly recommended as it will allow you to vent all the anger and stress you have built up inside.

Image courtesy of Christian Schloe.