The Ultimate Guide to Help Express your Emotions
Emotional ups and downs are an inevitable part of life, and sometimes we can let negative emotions get the best of us. So, the ability to understand how to deal with and express these emotions, is much more important than you may realise. To become more aware of ourselves and understand our behaviour when we’re feeling a certain way, it is good practice to learn how best to express yourself.
We’ve put together some tips to help with emotion regulation, that you can start practising today:
Talk to someone & be honest
As the saying goes, ‘a problem shared is a problem halved’, and you’d be surprised how much weight can be taken off the mind by just opening up to someone about a problem you’re facing. Reaching out to a friend, relative, or colleague and being honest about what’s on your plate at the moment, will help you to gain a better understanding around what you’re feeling and in turn will help in managing emotions. They may be able to offer great advice and reassure you that what you’re feeling is ok, and it’ll help them understand your current emotional state.
Emotional awareness & practicing positive self-talk
Emotional health and wellness can start from within so it’s important to listen to your body and try to put a stop to any negative dialogue you may have in your head. It’s so easy to become wrapped up in our own thoughts, overthink things and speak to ourselves in a negative manner. Try and practice positive self-talk, replacing those thoughts with positive ones. Here are some ways to do this, as suggested from Healthline:
- Identify negative self-talk traps: Certain scenarios may increase your self-doubt and lead to more negative self-talk. Work events, for example, may be particularly hard. Pinpointing when you experience the most negative self-talk can help you anticipate and prepare.
- Check in with your feelings: Stop during events or bad days and evaluate your self-talk. Is it becoming negative? How can you turn it around?
- Find the humour: Laughter can help relieve stress and tension. When you need a boost for positive self-talk, find ways to laugh, such as watching funny animal videos or a comedian.
- Surround yourself with positive people: Whether or not you notice it, you can absorb the outlook and emotions of people around you. This includes negative and positive, so choose positive people when you can.
- Give yourself positive affirmations: Sometimes, seeing positive words or inspiring images can be enough to redirect your thoughts. Post small reminders in your office, in your home, and anywhere you spend a significant amount of time.
Practice empathy
Practicing basic emotions such as empathy, can help you understand your loved ones and even strangers better. Go beyond the small talk, ask them how they’re doing and what they’re daily life is like. Often, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes can help in seeking out new perspectives and experiences. Merely just listening, communicating, emotionally connecting and withholding without judgement can help in dealing with daily stresses helping with loneliness and even help with health issues.
Journal writing
Journals are a great way to record daily events for heart-warming memories, jot down to do lists or make a list of creative ideas. They’re also a wonderful way for us to pen down our emotions, and more specifically practice gratitude journaling to help with our emotional wellbeing and expressing ourselves. Take a few minutes each day to write down the positive things you’re grateful for in life. These could be big or small, being thankful for your health, family, friends or even a nice walk you took that day. This experience has been known to boost self-esteem, over-all wellbeing and is a great way to start engaging in self-improvement.
Welcome distraction
There are a number of things you can do to keep yourself distracted from your emotions and express your feelings in other ways. This could be creatively, through drawing, painting or gardening. It could be through exercise either doing a home workout or taking a stroll in some outside green space. Take shopping trip, go for a coffee with a friend, or even just doing household chores such as laundry or cleaning. Doing something to take your mind of what you’re thinking means you can immerse yourself into that activity as an act of self-soothing behaviour.
Using these tips in order to express your feelings, will help you become more self-aware and lead to better mental and physical health. You can often start to see improvements in your personal and professional relationships, as well as feeling more content and at peace with understanding why and how you’re feeling a certain way. Being able to acknowledge that you are feeling a certain emotion and that this is acceptable, holds a lot of power.
