Evaluate Your Emotions

As much as emotions and feelings are part of our daily life, we hardly spare our time or energy to know, understand or discuss them. Either we allow our emotions to take over our lives or we ignore them. Not being able to understand our feelings result in being in denial, shy away from expressing them or respond inadvertently.

In my opinion, it helps to not only to know and understand them but also evaluate them. Assessing or evaluating your emotions will help you understand the feelings you experience, the thought patterns, belief systems and your behaviour patterns better. Psychologists have identified that the emotions or feelings are an integral part of us and an essential function as human beings.

Analysing the cause of the emotion, the reason for your reaction and how you are linking your thought, beliefs and feelings will help you break down the chain of responses. Whereas bottling up your emotions might be detrimental to your health and wellbeing, to express all your feelings without understanding the effects on yourself and those around you might have adverse effects. 

As much as I agree, it’s essential to connect with your exact emotion; I equally believe it’s necessary to understand the cause and effect of them entirely. It’s worthwhile to learn the skill of how to evaluate your emotions effectively to be able to develop the ability to react to emotions appropriately. Besides, the research now suggests the feelings which were considered unhelpful or harmful such as anger are contextual.

While assessing your emotions for me, it helps to break them down into three things.

• What
• Why
• How

Take a moment the next time you identify an emotion. Analyse the feeling by asking these questions:

• What are you reacting or responding to (people, place, experience, event)?
• Why are you reacting in a specific way or Why are you experiencing this emotion?
• How are you experiencing it? 

For me, I would feel so nervous before my exams; I get a headache. My emotions affected the way I responded to the situations which were detrimental in many ways. I was surprised at the meantime, glad to realise I could influence how I responded by understanding my emotions fully.

When I evaluated my emotion in those situations, I realised I had such a high expectation of myself, combined with the expectations from others close to me. Due to the fear of not meeting my expectations made me feel uncertain, anxious. The fear made me not eat healthily, not slow down and take a break. I’m still learning every day, but knowing this has helped me to understand my reactions and the way I respond to a greater extent.

My suggestion to you is to take some time and energy to understand the reason for your emotions fully. Slowing down or stopping to take a step back and analysing your feelings will affect the way you respond to the feeling. The way you evaluate and respond will not only have an impact on your health, relationships but also on your professional careers.

Originally published in LinkedIn on April 04, 2020