Emotions and Feelings in Wellness
An all-too-common misunderstanding with wellness is that it is primarily created through behaviors instilled, actions taken, and habits ingrained into our lives. It is often believed that through making lifestyle choices paired with setting and achieving goals, we build wellness envisioned and actively construct the life we desire.
However, key components frequently underestimated for their impact on wellness are emotions and feelings. Though typically associated with our response to life events, emotions and feelings are a significant part of our wellness stories. As core elements of the human experience, they influence the development of emotional wellness as well as the holistic wellness that allows us to thrive.
While the need to integrate emotion sounds simple, understanding the role of emotions and feelings in wellness is unexpectedly complex. One hiccup to understanding feelings is that we are often unable to recognize them and give them a name. Research demonstrates that on average, people are only able to identify three emotions – happy, sad, and mad. The recent science, though, points to the existence of 27 different emotional categories – a far cry from the three most known. As a result, we are challenged to not only think differently about how emotions and feelings influence our wellness, but we are also tasked with growing capacity in understanding emotions and feelings to fully build our wellness.
While the next step to creating holistic wellness, then, likely lies with learning to better recognize and name emotions and feelings, it is surprising how difficult this can be. Noticing emotions as they surface can be complicated, especially if you have never paused to notice them before. Not only can it be hard to recognize the emotion or feeling itself, oftentimes the word used to describe it does not accurately reflect the feeling being had.
So, what can we do?
Since there are high costs for avoiding or suppressing emotions, including impacts on health and wellbeing, learning to correctly recognize and name emotions and feelings must be the first order of business. We want to develop vocabulary as well as better recognize emotions both felt and faced. In doing so, we build emotional intelligence simultaneous with emotional agility, skills that help us better understand ourselves as well as others.
Ready to give it a try? Here are three simple strategies to consider for growth in emotion and feeling identification:
Expand your feeling vocabulary. Expanding vocabulary can be done by naming an emotion experienced with more than one word. When we describe experiences with greater breadth and depth, we capture a better emotional profile of the complex feelings at hand. We also find more accurate words to describe the emotion when expanding beyond a singular experience.
Fully consider an emotion at hand. It can be easiest to describe an emotion or feeling as the first word that pops into our heads. But what does that word mean to you? How deeply is that emotion felt? And what does it feel like to have that emotion? In exploring the emotion or feeling itself, even in the moment we are having it, we can decrease the emotional charge and allow ourselves room to reframe the experience.
Write it down. An incredible amount of processing happens when we write things down. Writing can be cathartic for working through an emotion as well as provide an opportunity to examine it from another perspective. This in turn leads to an expanded understanding of the full experience of an emotion and new insights about the emotion itself.
Learning to recognize and name emotions and feelings my often be underrated in importance but is truly a critical practice for building the wellness we desire. When we can label and name our emotions, we gain greater clarity, develop deeper understanding of ourselves and others, and can better see the possibilities for future steps. Through recognizing and naming emotions and feelings, we become more able to cope with all that life throws our way, and we build the self-awareness, internal resources, and ultimately the resilience that allows wellness to flourish and thrive.
How will you examine and explore your next emotion or feeling?