Emotional Awareness

The power of your emotions: It’s in your hands

Babies are bundles of emotion, experiencing intense feelings of fear, anger, sadness, and joy within their first eight weeks of life. As an infant, your emotions connected you to your primary caregiver in what was the first relationship of your life. Throughout life, emotions continue to serve this same purpose: connecting us to others.

Without emotions and an awareness and understanding of them, it’s impossible to build or maintain strong, healthy relationships—with yourself or others! The feelings of others will escape you unless you’re familiar with your own emotions. The more aware you are of your own emotions, the easier it will be for you to pick up on what others are feeling and accurately read their wants and needs.

Your emotions help you:

• Recognize who you are: what you like, what you don’t like, and what you need
• Understand and empathize with others
• Communicate clearly and effectively
• Make decisions based on the things that are most important to you
• Get motivated and take action to meet goals
• Build strong, healthy and rewarding relationships

Emotional awareness and communication

Whether you’re having an argument with your spouse or dealing with colleagues at work, your emotions influence the communication process. Over 95% of communication is nonverbal and emotionally driven. It’s the way you feel, not the way you think, that sparks your motivation and your decision-making, so the stakes in learning to harness your emotions are high. Say the wrong thing, or miss an emotional cue, and it can do a lot of damage.

How emotions and feelings affect communication and relationships

All our emotional responses affect our home and work relationships. Nonverbal emotional signals or cues, such as eye contact, facial expression, tone of voice, intensity of speech, body posture, or hand gestures, communicate far more to others about what we’re really thinking and feeling than our words. Very often people will say one thing but mean another, so emotionally driven nonverbal cues play a huge role in the way we communicate, both at home and at work. The way we react to these nonverbal cues affects how we understand other people, and just as importantly, how they understand us.

Since people with emotional awareness have developed the capacity to recognize and understand their own emotions, they automatically find it easier to recognize and read nonverbal cues when communicating with others. This makes them more successful at work and in their home relationships.

Negative emotional responses

Consider the emotional responses of Bernie, Rhonda, and Jim and how they affect their home and work relationships:

Like misfiring cylinders, Bernie, Rhonda and Jim are incapable of connecting with their strong emotions, the tools they need to communicate with themselves and others. This has restricted their emotional awareness and had a negative impact on their lives. Of course, your situation may not be as extreme as these examples. But if you’re having trouble experiencing and managing your emotions, self-healing can help.

Who needs emotional self-healing?

Whereas self-help offers ways to merely change the way you think, self-healing provides the tools to change the way you feel. Do the following statements ring true? If so, you might benefit from boosting your emotional wellbeing via self-healing.

• “My life is an emotional rollercoaster!” Life doesn’t have to be about high highs and low lows. Becoming more in touch with your emotions can help moderate the extreme up and down swings.
• “I often regret what I say or do.” If you often wish you could press an “undo” button—or you simply have a short fuse—you can gain emotional awareness by learning to prolong patience during times of stress.
•  “I have no energy.” Got the blahs? When there is nothing physically wrong with you, and you still don’t have any ‘get up and go,’ you might be depressed. When you are more emotionally aware, you can tune into these feelings and make a change for the better.
•  “The people I’m interested in aren’t interested in me.” Relationships are hard, but you can have an easier time meeting people and creating lasting bonds when you become more emotionally aware.
•  “I can’t seem to get ahead, even though I’m smart and work hard.” Sometimes, getting ahead at your career requires more than book smarts and effort. Becoming more emotionally aware can help you communicate better and advance your position.
•  “They call me a ‘robot.’” There is such thing as too much control over emotions. If you’ve reined yourself in so much that you show no emotion whatsoever, you might benefit from becoming more balanced with your feelings.

Evaluating your emotional awareness: how much do you know about yourself?

Although emotional awareness is the basis of emotional health, good communication, and solid relationships, many people remain relatively unacquainted with their core emotional experience. It is surprising how few people can easily answer the question: “What are you experiencing emotionally right now?”

Emotional awareness involves two basic abilities:

• The ability to recognize your moment-to-moment emotional experience
• The ability to manage all of your feelings appropriately

Common ways of avoiding emotions we don’t like

We are all born with a capacity to freely experience the full range of human emotions—including joy, anger, sadness, and fear. Yet many people are disconnected from some or all of their feelings. By trying to avoid pain and discomfort, their emotions have become distorted, displaced, and stifled. You lose touch with your emotions when you attempt to control them, rather than experience them.

Ways of avoiding strong emotions and feelings

• Distracting yourself with obsessive thoughts, escapist fantasies, mindless entertainment, and addictive behaviors in order to avoid emotions you fear or dislike. Watching television for hours, playing computer games, and surfing the Internet are common ways we avoid dealing with our feelings.
• Sticking with one emotional response that you feel comfortable with, no matter what the situation requires. For example, constantly joking around to cover up insecurities or getting angry all the time to avoid feeling frightened and sad.
• Shutting down or shutting out intense emotions. If you feel overwhelmed by your emotions, you may cope by numbing yourself. You may feel completely disconnected from your emotions, like you no longer have feelings at all.

The consequences of avoiding emotions and feelings

• You don’t know yourself. This is one of the most important consequences. It includes understanding why you react to different situations, how much or how little things mean to you, and the difference between what you want and what your really need.
• You lose the good, along with the bad. You either feel your emotions or you don’t. When you shut down negative feelings like anger, fear, or sadness, you also shut down your ability to experience positive feelings such as joy, love, and happiness.
• It’s exhausting. You can distort and numb emotions, but you can’t eliminate them entirely. It takes a lot of energy to avoid having an authentic emotional experience and keep your feelings suppressed. The effort leaves you stressed and drained.
• It damages your relationships. The more you distance yourself from your feelings, the more distant you become from others, as well as yourself. You lose the ability to build strong relationships and communicate effectively, both of which depend on being in touch with your emotions.

You can’t manage emotions until you know how to manage stress

Emotions are unpredictable. We never know what will trigger an emotional response, and when stress strikes, we can’t always temper it by taking time out to meditate or go for a run.

Emotional awareness requires the ability to manage stress as it’s happening.. Raising your emotional awareness and emotional intelligence begins with the question: "What kinds of sensory input instantly make me feel relaxed, safe, calm, and focused?" Once you have a safety net in place and know how to make yourself feel good quickly and dependably, you can begin to explore the emotions that seem disagreeable or frightening. The key to coping with strong emotions is knowing that you are in control of them–not the other way around.

The ability to quickly reduce stress allows you to safely face strong emotions, regulate your feelings, and behave appropriately. When you know how to maintain a relaxed, energized state of awareness—even when something upsetting happens—you can remain emotionally available and engaged.

Your emotional experience: Finding what was there all along

The process of raising emotional awareness involves reconnecting with all of the core emotions, including anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, and joy via a process of self-healing. As you start this process, keep the following facts in mind:

Emotions quickly come and go, if you let them

You may be worried that once you reconnect to the emotions you’ve been avoiding, you’ll be stuck with them forever, but that’s not so. When we don’t obsess about our emotions, even the most painful and difficult feelings subside and lose their power to control our attention. 

When our feelings are freed, the core emotions of anger, sadness, fear, and joy quickly come and go. Throughout the day, you’ll see, read, or hear something that momentarily triggers a strong feeling of some sort. But if you don’t focus on the feeling, it won’t last, and a different emotion will soon take its place.

Your body can clue you in to your emotions

Our emotions are closely aligned to physical sensations in our bodies. When you experience a strong emotion, you probably also feel it somewhere in your body. By paying attention to these physical sensations, you can understand your emotions better. For example, if your stomach tightens up every time you spend time with a particular person, you can conclude that you feel uncomfortable in their presence. If you are aware that you feel uncomfortable, then you can think about why that is and be proactive about what you can do to feel better.

You don’t have to choose between thinking and feeling

Emotional awareness functions like instinct. When it’s strongly developed, you’ll know what you are feeling without having to think about it. When your emotional signals become strong enough, you’ll realize that something important is going on and shift your focus accordingly.

When you can experience a range of emotions without feeling overwhelmed, you can engage in day-to-day activities without losing touch with the physical sensations in your body that help to signal your emotional state.

Building emotional awareness and understanding

The key to raising emotional awareness and emotional intelligence is practice. Like building muscles in the gym, the more you flex your emotions, the more " emotional muscle" you'll build. You wouldn't expect to be a bodybuilder after just five minutes. The more consistently you practice, the greater the change will be in the way you feel, think, and do. To develop your self-awareness and connection to others and incorporate this into your life, you'll need to retrain yourself through hands-on exercises and real-world practice.

How will you know when you practice enough? In general you should feel more energy, experience more positive feelings (as well as other feelings), and have a greater ability to focus your attention.

Emotional intelligence is based on emotional awareness

Being emotionally intelligent is a different kind of intelligence. A straight-A student might not be able to communicate effectively or understand their own or other people’s feelings. Emotional intelligence is a true survival skill—those who have it will succeed better in relationships and work and be happier in general. The ability to be playful, to read others, and to resolve conflict stems from the ability to remain emotionally aware.

In order to boost emotional intelligence we need to be able to deal with stress and experience our emotions. The ability to stay in touch with our emotions and be able to survive the tough ones is the basis for social and emotional intelligence.

Related articles

Related links for emotional awareness, emotions, and feelings

General information about emotions and emotional awareness

Mind/Body Connection: How Your Emotions Affect Your Health – Learn about the link between your emotions and your physical and mental health. Includes tips on improving emotional health. (American Academy of Family Physicians)

Emotions – Comprehensive guide to emotions, including their value and purpose and how they guide our decisions and behavior. (ChangingMinds)

Why Are Feelings Important? – Article on the importance of emotions and the role they play in promoting emotional health, social attachment, and personal growth. (PsychCentral)

What Are Emotions? – Provides answers from emotional intelligence experts on what emotions are and why they matter. (EQ Today)

Tips for managing emotions and feelings

How to Manage Negative Emotions: Tips for Controlling Anger, Fear, Sadness and Other Bad Feelings – Describes how to identify your emotions, determine the source, and channel your feelings in a positive way. (Suite 101)

Importance of Emotions – Learn about primary and secondary emotions, how to manage strong feelings, and express negative emotions. (EQI)

Jeanne Segal, Ph.D.; Melinda Smith, M.A.; and Lawrence Robinson contributed to this article. Last reviewed: August 2010