Overview of Emotional Awareness
One of the first points to address in emotional awareness is the definition. The term refers to a heightened recognition of your emotions.
Emotional awareness helps you better understand what you’re feeling. Your mindset is a part of this process.
Your emotions come from your thoughts. This article about emotional strength takes a closer look at the explanation.
When a thought pops into your head, it can be a trigger. It may cause a memory. This can readily create an emotion, often negative. To increase your emotional awareness, it’s important to understand this pathway.
When taking control of your emotions, there are steps to take to be successful. However, the first point is to learn to become more aware of what you feel and what thought(s) created the emotion.
This is not a once-and-done response or even an easy task. It takes practice to increase your emotional awareness but there are benefits when you have greater understanding.
Personal growth is one benefit of increasing awareness.
Let’s look at some points related to emotional awareness that are helpful when taking action steps.
In This Article
1) Understanding Your Emotions
The more you understand your emotions, the more it benefits you. While this seems like an easy enough point, the challenge comes in making it happen.
How often do you become angry at the thought of something and fly off the handle? Or decide that you won’t tolerate someone because you’re frustrated by them?
These are natural occurrences. Unfortunately, they are not usually accompanied with a look at what is really going on.
We frequently have a feeling and react to it without ever contemplating anything else. This is called emotional thinking. It’s a practice that often creates bad decisions and broken relationships. Yet, it’s very common.
Emotional thinking is contrary to understanding that thoughts come before emotions. With this type of thinking, we react to emotions rather than recognize the thoughts that cause them.
Emotional awareness is a first step in creating a healthier landscape for your emotions. It promotes rational results contrary to the possibility of leaving a bigger mess to clean up. It also helps you alleviate emotional thinking.
As with any concept, the more you understand it, the better your view is when planning to handle it. Emotional awareness is no different.
However, this is not the typical mindset when considering emotions. Usually there are feelings that happen and then we try to deal with the aftermath. You can try a different outlook though.
Instead, begin to think through emotional situations. As you collect information about your thoughts, feelings, and actions, it creates better understanding. Even if you’re not exactly sure what to do with it, the insight helps get the ball rolling.
We’ll continue by looking at another beneficial point.
2) Be Proactive Not Reactive
How often do you foresee that dealing with a particular person is going to make you frustrated because you have experienced the same in the past? In this example, we count on it because we pay attention to the emotion. The knowledge of the situation often gets lost in the emotion.
Instead, try thinking about this as valuable information that can bring optimistic change. Emotional awareness is helpful when learning coping skills too.
It’s important to spend time daily assessing your emotions. After all, you’re the only one that truly knows what they are. Instead of allowing them to take you for a ride, start by identifying how you feel.
A better understanding of this can begin to create a wider view of what caused the emotion and what you were thinking at the time. This is especially important for repeated triggers.
This mindset can also help you to become more conscious of what you do or say after you experience an emotion. It is an excellent way to assess behaviors when you pay attention.
It’s better to have a say in—or even predict—your reactions rather than be reactive.
In other words, using the right thought process when dealing with your emotions helps you plan how to handle situations. This is more helpful than an uncontrolled reaction.
It may seem strange because it’s acceptable to have grand reactions to our emotions. It is seen in posts about rants, complaints, and numerous other points of view.
While expression is important, it’s better to have forethought about your words or actions than be left to pick up the pieces from a detrimental reaction. Mindfulness skills can be beneficial for this.
Regulation is an important point to master by focusing on emotional awareness. View this article on emotional and mental healing.
3) Increase Communication
Along with understanding and control, comes the idea of better communication.
Emotional awareness brings with it a sense of maturity in dealing with situations. While this becomes helpful in developing coping skills, it also creates room for intentional conversations.
What if your days could be spent predicting and avoiding uncomfortable emotional situations rather than apologizing or feeling ashamed by your actions?
This is a realistic opportunity. It takes work but can be accomplished.
Learning the method of better communication helps with relationships, work-related experiences, situations with friends, and almost any occurrence in your life.
While it’s valid that there are other points to increase communication, better emotional awareness is a great start.
When you have a deeper understanding of what you feel and why you feel it, you can more readily formulate specific thoughts. If you understand your feelings and recognize their presence, you can also communicate them better.
Without intentional insight into your emotions, it’s easy to overlook why you feel the way you do. It’s difficult to express your emotions when you aren’t sure what’s going on.
This goes back to rolling with your emotions and reacting to them rather than being proactive as to next steps.
Relationships are challenging enough, and they often birth raw emotions. Using words rather than reactions can create a better foundation. This method can even begin to repair situations that have been broken.
While some are better communicators than others, practicing verbalizing your emotions is a necessary approach.
4) Benefits of Journaling
It’s one thing to understand what you feel, but it’s another to control it. When an emotion is raw, it’s challenging to stop and think through a better solution rather than react.
Emotional awareness helps to decrease the jumble of emotions that accompanies our daily situations.
One way to determine and assess your emotions is by journaling. This also creates a concrete way for you to revisit past experiences and remember what emotions you had and how you handled them.
Our brain processes visual information differently than auditory information. Recall of situations after time has passed is also challenging.
Journaling allows greater and more prolonged feedback than simply hearing or thinking about something. It also allows a way to focus on additional comments or plans as you recognize a repeated pattern of emotion.
If you take note of what triggers might be the culprit, you can formulate ideas of how to act. It’s also possible to make a plan that creates a better outcome than a previous action or reaction.
Although it takes more effort, the concentration and intentionality that goes into journaling can pay off by increasing your steps toward gaining emotional awareness.
5) Teach Children Emotional Awareness
We already know children are impressionable and repeat what they see and hear. Since setting a good example by modeling correct behavior is our goal, teaching emotional awareness at a young age is beneficial.
Children often react by showing emotion to express themselves or simply to get what they want. They quickly learn manipulation of situations based on their behaviors, sometimes undesirable ones.
Addressing emotional awareness by encouraging children to verbalize their feelings creates a healthy method for everyone involved.
Modeling the method of discussing emotions, with child-friendly phrases, pictures, or gestures, teaches them the early stages of understanding their emotions. It’s also important to have children attempt to tell you what created the emotion not only how it feels.
With repetition, steps for emotional awareness in children can decrease tantrums, manipulative behaviors, and even lay groundwork for better communication as they grow.
It should not be assumed that children are unable to understand their emotions. We can coach them through the process by asking questions rather than stepping back while they react.
Also, your vote of confidence in their abilities promotes trust.
It’s even possible to use situations when a child misbehaves as a productive opportunity to explain how you feel. This models awareness and displays the method for recognizing and increasing communication.
Children shouldn’t be taught to avoid having feelings, but rather shown ways for expression in a healthy manner. Some examples are coloring, drawing, or playing through their feelings rather than throwing tantrums or being destructive.
As adults, even with our own children, we often don’t give them enough credit. Small efforts and ideas when they are young set the stage for development of more appropriate reactions as they mature.
Each child is different, as is every relationship, but with some planning, you can create ways to help your children express themselves and gain emotional awareness.
6) Encourages Empathy for Others
Once we develop greater understanding, predictability, and reactions for our own emotions, it helps us see the same in others also.
Imagine feeling frustrated based on an action by someone. You have the choice to express the sentiment by snapping at them.
Instead, you could choose to use your newly learned emotional awareness skills to assess your feelings and the reason behind them. Rather than reacting poorly to the other person, you can see the situation in a different light.
With a deeper recognition of your own emotions comes the ability to empathize with others. This is the difference in reacting versus developing a mature plan.
It’s even possible that you will encounter a situation where you can recognize what someone is going through and can relate although they don’t even understand the situation.
When you understand what is taking place, it’s often easier to show more compassion to others. It doesn’t seem as important to express your disdain toward them because your feelings are more defined by reasons and predictions.
Stress from unforgiveness, dealing with others, and fielding our emotions leads to decreased whole body health. There are many illnesses born from stress and time spent worrying.
The truth is our situations with other people readily contribute to the state of our health.
The decision and conscious effort to show empathy creates more patience, tolerance, and even acceptance of others.
While we each may have different situations and battles, we all have something in common. Emotions. We can try to run or hide from them, but gaining emotional awareness allows a much better way to handle your situations and circumstances with others.
7) Conjunction with Mindfulness
Mindfulness involves time intentionally recognizing those things around you. Embracing your part and using all your senses to identify every detail helps with mindfulness.
It’s a great way to intentionally identify your role and take note of your presence in each area.
Mindfulness helps create better steps in recognizing emotional awareness.
Once you have gained the ability to seek out the details with your senses, your mind becomes more primed to identify your emotions.
This method is beneficial is all areas of life but is especially helpful in the emotional realm.
Other areas such as physical and social are often more obvious, but emotional awareness takes practice to recognize and then change. Especially since it’s so personal.
Success with mindfulness sets groundwork for progression with steps for gaining emotional awareness.
Practice is necessary. Time spent increasing your focus on awareness of your feelings and recalling previous emotional reactions sets the stage for desired change and creates hopefulness.
Final Thoughts About Emotional Awareness
We’ve discussed emotional awareness and why it’s important to identify and understand your emotions.
Awareness can create better control of emotions, as well as help predict and plan appropriate actions.
Increased communication and empathy for others are great benefits you can gain from improving awareness of your emotions.
In addition, intentional steps teaching children how to recognize and work through emotions are excellent for encouragement of mature and controlled actions rather than emotional outbursts.
We also looked at how journaling creates a concrete method for assessing and learning more during emotional awareness. This allows a review of any situation that has been journaled and can help identify areas that may need to be changed for a better outcome.
Success with increasing emotional awareness is important for better health and should be addressed for greater overall wellness.