This is how to tell the difference between your emotions

If you want to learn how to cope with the adversity life throws your way, start by getting up-close-and-personal with your emotions.

by: E.B. Johnson

Life is stressful. No matter who you are, or what job you work, day-to-day living is full of challenges that can leave us feeling frazzled, exhausted and ready to call it quits. It can be hard to maneuver through life, but it can be made easier by coming to understand ourselves and how our emotions work. When we unlock the secret of our emotions, we often unlock the secret to a more happy and fulfilled life.

Our emotions are a core part of who we are, and they can affect everything from how we react to our closest friends and partners, to the kinds of professional decisions that we make. As humans, our emotions are a central piece of our identity, but they’re also an often misunderstood part of that identity. If you’re looking to unlock the true happiness and contentment you’ve been searching for all along, you have to learn how to differentiate between your emotions so you can master that authentic sense of self that’s dying to be free.

The reality of human emotions

If you’re on the hunt for one succinct definition of emotions, you might be hunting for a long time. Human emotions are complex things that cover a wide range of reactions, interactions, behaviors, physiological responses and general mental wellbeing. Emotions rule everything from the type of people we surround ourselves with, to the major decision we make for our lives. They’re a critical piece of who we are, but they’re also one of the most misunderstood aspects of the authentic self.

Though many fall prey to the belief that our emotions are cosmically ordained, there are 2 scientific ways of explaining emotions. The first is the cognitive appraisal theory, which claims that our emotions are simply judgements that address whether or not a current situation meets our internal goals and desires. The other explanation is that of perception, and the belief that our emotions are little more than our brain perceiving and reacting to the world around us and our place in it. In this view, happiness, sadness, and anger all fall under the umbrella of mental reactions to physiological circumstances.

How many emotions are there?

When it comes to emotions, we humans are dynamic creatures with a number of stunning emotional depths that even more layers to our organic complexity. Studies have indicated that our emotional layers comprise 27 total emotions, but most of our emotional reactions come down to 6 basics. Though these basic emotions can fluctuate and change over time, their cores stay the same and they impact everything from the way we interact to how we choose to live.

Happiness

Happiness is the most sought-after human emotion, but one we often seem to struggle to discover within ourselves. We express happiness through facial expressions, body language and even the turn of our voices. Being such a sought-after state of being, our perception of happiness is greatly impacted by the opinions of society, which can cause us to look outwardly for the contentment we should be seeking inwardly. When we’re happy, we’re healthy, but unhappiness can lead to both mental and physical health issues.

Surprise

Though we don’t always consider this emotion among the wide emotional spread that lives within us, surprise is one of the 6 core human emotions that impacts us. Surprise can be good, bad, neutral, negative or positive. It can cause you to grow, or trigger physiological responses that are detrimental to your physical and mental wellbeing. When we’re surprised, our fight-or-flight response can be triggered, and we can also react with both physical and verbal outbursts when we’re confronted with the emotion.

Sadness

We all know what it means to be sad, but we can’t always pinpoint where that sadness comes from or why we feel that way. This is because sadness is a transient state, and one that is characterized by a general feeling of disappointment, grief or hopelessness that can be both long-lasting or fleeting. Though we all experience sadness from time to time, we don’t necessarily know how to identify its causes in our lives, which can lead to further problems later on down the road.

Fear

One of the most powerful human emotions is that of fear. Fear is an emotion that has its roots in our earliest days, which it evolved as a means of protecting us from danger while helping us to survive. Today, this emotion still helps us effectively deal with threats in our environments, but it can also cause a number of complex issues in our professional and private lives when not addressed and managed appropriately. Some of the adverse effects of unaddressed fear include social anxiety or reckless behavior.

Anger

Another powerful basic human emotion is that of anger. Our anger can spur us on into some truly diabolical places if not identified and managed and — like a wound — it tends to fester the longer it is ignored. We display our anger through everything from our tone of voice to aggressive and passive aggressive behaviors. It can be helpful and righteous, however, when we learn how to use it for good and wield it in a way that empowers rather than detracts.

Disgust

Disgust is one of the original emotions first described by psychologist Paul Eckman in his 1970’s study of the basic human emotions. Our disgust is a sense of revulsion which can come from something either tangible or intangible, concrete or abstract. We can be disgusted by anything from food to the behaviors of others, but most often this feeling comes from a place of pain or unfair judgement. Learning how to overcome our general sense of disgust often comes down to spending some time with our own experiences and reservations and peeling them back to open up our minds and our hearts.

Emotional differentiation and how it can help.

If you feel completely overwhelmed by your emotions, the good news is that there is a way to manage them. By engaging in a practice called emotional differentiation, we can come to know our emotions in a truly intimate way that allows us to tap into their power, while managing them in a way that provides the most benefit to ourselves. Mastering your emotions has nothing to do with brutally beating them back or down. It has everything to do with getting to know your emotions and spending some quality time with them.

When we find ourselves in a stressful event, we often feel a flood of emotions all at once which makes it hard to process and orientate ourselves. Though we are often told the best way to deal with these emotions is to ignore them, we actually gain more benefits by learning how to identify each emotion as its experiences in a technique that’s known as emotional differentiation.

Differentiation stops negative emotions from getting worse by building up our confidence in facing them. It allows us to identify what we’re feeling and (eventually) why we’re feeling that way, which leads to true resolution and clarity and, thus, higher levels of happiness and contentment. When we learn how to see our emotions for what they are — and where they come from — we can accept them and then get better at managing them. It’s like being a manager in a restaurant. If you really want to be effective, you have to get to know your staff and figure out what works best for everyone.

How to distinguish between your emotions.

Learning how to tell the difference between our emotions isn’t a complex process, but it’s one that takes time and commitment to master. Emotions are a funny thing, and they can change as swiftly and dramatically as the wind, so they have to be watched closely. Making sense of what we feel is the first step on a long journey to happiness, but it’s one of the most important steps we can tackle. Once you learn how to distinguish between your emotions, you’ll be able to use them as a force for good in your life and the lives of others.

1. Take your emotional temperature

Too often, we put our emotions on the back-burner and give little thought to how we’re actually feeling and why. Getting familiar with our emotions begins with taking our emotional temperature, and getting to the bottom of why we feel a certain sort of way, or why we’re engaging in certain behaviors or situational reactions.

Find a nice and quiet pace where you’ll be uninterrupted and take your emotional temperature. Ask yourself questions like, “What is the biggest emotion that I am feeling right now in this moment?” Describe it to yourself, and don’t hold back from any aspect of the emotion you’re experiencing. If you can only come up with vague answers like “fine,” dig a little deeper. More often than not, these cloudy or murky states of being come down to our own resistance to take an unflinching look at what’s actually lurking beneath.

The most important aspect of this exercise is not to rush it. Have a notebook to record what you’re feeling, and allow yourself the freedom to chip away over a couple of sessions if that’s what’s needed. Describe every single thing you’re feeling, and don’t just focus on the pleasurable things. Your emotions will lead you in a lot of different directions and none of them is necessarily wrong. Getting to root of how you’re feeling is often the beginning of a new and surprising adventure of self-discovery.

2. Figure out your triggers

After taking some time to assess how you’re feeling, you have to get to the bottom of your emotions by figuring out the triggers that bring them on or contribute to the stress that elicits those emotions. The way we feel doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that takes time and experience to develop. Part of getting to know your feelings is getting to know what causes them, even though that part of the journey might be fraught with painful memories.

Understand the origin of your emotions by identifying the triggers that bring them on. While our emotions are a programmed response from nature, our reactions to those emotions are our own learned adaptive techniques. If we’re feeling fearful, we have to identify what causes that fear in order to be able to remove it. Without knowing the cause, it’s impossible to neutralize the toxin in your life.

Both our negative emotions and our positive emotions contribute to our safety and happiness. Exclusion will do nothing to safeguard your wellbeing, but it will serve to alienate you from your truest and highest nature. Getting on a healthy footing with our emotions takes time, but it also takes some digging. Once we get to the bottom of why we’re feeling the way we are, we can move forward to make the most out of our emotions.

3. Recognize how your decision-making is being impacted

We often think of our emotions as being more of a burden than a boon, and that can often lead us to the belief that the best method of dealing is detaching from them entirely. The problem with this tactic, however, is that it’s impossible. Our emotions are a core part of who we are, and they form a core part of the process by which we make the most important decisions in our lives.

When we make decisions, be they big or small, our emotions play a critical role in that. Emotions provide both value and weight to the things we consider, and they add bias to our decision-making abilities whether we realize it or not. There is no way to remove our emotions from the equation, but we can learn to recognize when they are getting in the way of choosing what’s really right.

Start small. Consider a relatively inconsequential situation in which your emotions made you choose something, whether it was good or bad. Recall how that emotion drove you toward that decision, and consider now what decision you might have made with the removal of time and high-strung feeling getting in the way. Is the decision you made the same, or is it different? Your emotions should always be along for the ride when it comes to decision-making, but they should never be in the driver’s seat.

4. Keep a record

One of the best ways to get in touch with your emotions (and thus their effects on your life) is to keep a feelings journal, which allows you to record — in real time — how you’re feeling and why. Such a mindful journalling practice is extremely helpful is helping us to identify emotional patterns and trends, which can further unlock our emotional mastery and empower us to make powerful transformations in our lives.

Take a few minutes each day to record a log of how you’re feeling and why. If you encounter an experience or decision that elicits a particularly strong emotion, jot it down, and ask yourself what made this feeling hit you so powerfully. Review this information weekly, and use it to increase or decrease the emotions you need in order to feel more content, engaged and plugged in to the world around you. You can’t take steps to fix what’s wrong until you identify the patterns that are leading you awry.

Once you’ve established a regular recording practice, you’ll be able to more easily identify your emotions in real time, and thus become able to better increase or decrease the adding or detracting emotions in your life. You’ll also be able to better identify the situations that bring out the best and worst in you, and better able to identify the triggers that send you down those negative spirals that undermine your ultimate fulfillment and happiness.

5. Practice radical self-acceptance

The final piece in learning how to understand and differentiate between our emotions is learning how to accept them (and ourselves) — radically and unabashedly. Once we’ve learned how to see our emotions for what they are, we can start to drop the judgements and reservations and with it our need to run from the way we feel. Part of being able to differentiate between our emotions is accepting them for exactly what they are and who they’ve shaped us to be.

When faced with an uncomfortable emotion, jump back and give it the space you need to name it. Sit for a while with the feeling, and pay attention to the physical and mental sensations it gives you. Now, close your eyes and imagine literally picking that feeling up and placing it 5 feet away from you. Give it a form. What does it look like? Is it as scary as you thought it was, or is it sometthing else? Is it bigger or smaller than what you expected? You might be surprised.

After you’ve had some time to observe the strange emotional creature from a distant place, open up your arms to it and let it return back to its home. Its a part of you afterall, no matter how strange an uncomfortable it might be. Once your feeling is back where it belongs, take some time to reflect on what you’re feeling now. Is is easier to accept that emotion as a piece of you when you see it for the creature that it is? Chances are, it will be. Repeat this exercise for 30 days, and record how your feelings change over time.

Putting it all together…

Our emotions form a core piece of who we are, and without them it is impossible to make the decisions we need to achieve happiness and contentment in our lives. In order to live happy and fulfilled lives, aligned with our inner truths, we have to learn how to differentiate between our emotions, and do it in such a way that empowers us to use them as a transformative power for good in our lives. Without our emotions, we are a ship without a rudder; directionless and searching endlessly without when we should be looking for within.

Spend some time getting familiar with your emotions, and the 6 basic emotions that fuel everything from the choices you make to the people you surround yourself with. Take your emotional temperature and get some time getting to understand exactly how you’re feeling in the moment. Figure out your triggers, and work hard to identify how and why your emotions are impacting the choices that you make. Keep a record of your emotions and reference it regularly to cultivate the radical sense of acceptance you need to thrive in this dog-eat-dog world. Part of facing up to the challenges of life is learning how to master our emotions. Master yours through the art of emotional differentiation.