Tuning In To Your Emotion
Emotional Mindfulness/Sitting with Your Emotion
Mindfulness is a process of slowing down and focusing on your internal experience so you can better regulate your emotions, calm your mind, and make better behavioral choices. As you begin to feel your emotions, you can label them and learn to calm them. Then you will be better able to decide how you want to respond to feelings you are experiencing.
1. Breathe. Find a place to sit quietly and reflect upon what you are feeling. Take several deep breaths, inhaling and exhaling.
2. Scan your body for physical sensations. From your head to your toes, scan your body and see what sensations you find. Is there tension in your shoulders? A queasiness in your stomach? Tightness in your chest?
Don’t worry if you’re not good at this. Feeling your emotions might come naturally to you or it might take practice. Some people have been given a lot of room to experience emotion and express it. Others have had less experience or permission. No matter what your situation, if you give yourself time, you can get better at this.
3. Label your emotion. If you know the emotion you’re feeling, name it. “I feel sad,” “I’m angry,” “This feels like anxiety.”
Again, if this skill is not easy or natural to you, you can learn it. Some of us have been encouraged to experience emotion, label it and express it. Others not so much. Your ability to label your feelings accurately can depend upon your gender socialization, the family or culture you grew up in, or other experiences you have had. Your personal history, the professional training you have received, situations you have encountered and trauma you have been exposed to all impact your ability to feel and label your emotions accurately. The better you are at this, the more emotional intelligence you will develop. This is very helpful in managing your own life and your relationships.
4. Focus on these physical feelings and let go of any story or explanation. You might be having thoughts accompanying your emotion like, “I hope I don’t screw this up,” “This always happens,” “S/he doesn’t get me,” or “This isn’t fair.” See if you can get out of your head by focusing on the physical feeling of the emotion. This will help you feel less wound up and calmer. You can even think to yourself, “This is what sadness feels like; there is warmth and tightness in my throat,” or, “This anxiety feels like hot air in my stomach and a quicker heartbeat.” Be a scientist for a minute and observe the physical feelings of what’s going on.
5. Breathe into the physical sensations you are noticing. Inhale into the area (or areas) that you have noticed a change in. Breathe in and out for several breath cycles. If you can, try to release any physical tension you are feeling by breathing into the tension on your inhalation, and letting it go on your exhalation.
6. Accept what you are feeling. Accept what you are feeling as you breathe. Perhaps following these steps allowed the emotion you are experiencing to subside, or maybe to shift into a subtler feeling that is more manageable to you. Sometimes just being able to name and/or describe the emotion you’re feeling will give you a degree of control over it, making it more likely you can soothe yourself and recover from it. You might even discover that after practicing this tool you have new insight about what was upsetting you.
If nothing shifts for you, however, that’s ok too. Remember, the purpose of this tool is simply to tune in to the emotion you are feeling. Recognizing your emotions and becoming mindful of how you experience them deepens your sense of self and heightens your awareness, both of which will strengthen your ability to self-regulate.
Essentially, we are singling out the “E” part of your interaction. Asking you to sit with Emotion instead of letting it spur subsequent Thoughts and Behavior. This can keep you from spinning to a place of escalation or avoidance, and it can also keep you from building one distressing emotion on top of another, such as feeling sad, then getting angry about feeling sad, then feeling ashamed of feeling angry. These “secondary emotions” come up when we don’t really deal with the primary one.
Copyright Barbara B. White 2020
If you want to learn more about this process, you will find additional resources here.