People with poor emotional self-awareness typically struggle in their everyday lives to cope with their emotions and feelings, so they prefer to bottle them up, which can lead them to erupt in the long term, resulting in health-damaging sensations such as stress, tension, rage, and/or worry.
Emotional self-awareness is the knowledge and recognition that individuals have about their own emotions, which is extremely beneficial for their mental health because it is a skill that enables individuals to understand what is occurring within them, thereby fostering the development of emotional intelligence.
In this article, we’ll look at what emotional self-awareness is and what role it plays in people’s lives when they have it.
Table of Contents
What is Emotional Self-Awareness?
When we talk about emotional self-awareness, we mean the awareness and knowledge that each individual has about their own feelings or emotional states. This is a challenging assignment to perform since understanding and observing oneself requires work and training.
Emotional self-awareness can be beneficial to one’s mental health as it allows people to know what is going on inside of them, favoring the proper development of high emotional intelligence.
This concept was introduced by Wayne Payne, although psychologist Daniel Golman’s book is mostly responsible for its popularity. It refers to the capacity of individuals to perceive their own and others’ emotions.
Developing emotional self-awareness enables us to be cognizant of our own and others’ emotions, enabling us to manage situations and respond appropriately.
Is Emotional Self-Awareness Important?
We must first comprehend our own emotions and emotional states in order to achieve emotional self-awareness. We must also understand why we experience these emotions and how they connect to our thoughts, feelings, words, and behavior.
We need to know how they might impact our everyday lives in a variety of areas, allowing us to be conscious of our most fundamental objectives and ideals.
Furthermore, it should be remembered that our emotional moods have a cascade of repercussions in various aspects of the human body, beginning with psychological and physiological alterations.
They, on the other hand, create subjective and behavioral impacts, as evidenced by feelings and those effects produced on a subjective level as a result of emotions, as well as those behaviors conducted by people in trying to modify specific states induced by some emotions.
All of this gives us a good notion of the numerous services that emotions might perform for people, but… What about the function of establishing healthy emotional self-awareness?
Emotional self-awareness helps you connect with your own emotions and therefore learn to regulate them, so that emotions do not rule the person in specific circumstances, but rather the person who takes the reins can control your emotions and your actions, all within normal bounds.
Emotional Self-Awareness Examples
As we all know, we encounter a wide range of emotions in our everyday lives, so we are accustomed to them. As a result, it is typical for us to be unaware of our feelings and, as a result, to be unaware of the reasons behind them. As a result, we shall discuss some frequent examples of emotional self-awareness in everyday life.
Consider the feeling of pleasure, which is a really pleasant sensation that is typically pretty straightforward to discern. This sensation is typically felt in pleasant and gratifying events, such as reunions with long-lost friends or relatives, when our favorite team has just won a trophy, or after we complete, among others.
The most prevalent feature in this sort of event is that we are aware that we are experiencing immense delight in these moments.
Let us now consider the feeling of dread. Assume we are frightened of flying and need to travel to the airport to fly to another nation for vacation. It is extremely possible that we identify with the emotion of dread that we are experiencing in this circumstance. So… Do we ever cease investigating the depths to which dread infiltrates us?
Have we paused to consider the ideas that arise in this sort of scenario and why they arise? In this sort of circumstance, are we conscious of our behaviors and physiological activation?
It is possible to develop proper emotional self-awareness with a thorough analysis of the situation that causes discomfort, to begin to develop skills that allow us to maintain self-control, to keep ourselves from becoming irritated, and to replace those thoughts that could change our emotional states that generates discomfort with others that help us feel better.
Finally, it should be noted that it is not always simple to maintain good emotional self-awareness in all situations because we might feel many emotions at the same time (for example, grief, frustration, and so on).
So it will be more difficult to detect them and thus more difficult to change them appropriately, so it will require more work to evaluate them thoroughly till you are aware of them all.
How to Improve Emotional Self-Awareness
Developing adequate emotional self-awareness does not happen overnight, and there is no set plan for how to do so. However, experts in the field have looked into this issue and proposed a series of guidelines that could help, although it is important to note that this requires a lot of practice and, above all, perseverance and patience.
As a result, it is critical for someone who believes he lacks emotional awareness and wants to improve this skill to follow the suggestions we will offer below.
The first step in establishing emotional self-awareness should be to connect with the feelings that occur in many everyday situations, giving them ample space to emerge.
Analyze them, recognize them, and finally try to determine the possible cause of their appearance, establishing a causal relationship between emotions and the situations that cause them, allowing a person to be more aware of their own emotions, which is the first step toward gaining greater control over them. An emotion diary routine might help with this.
It is critical to be conscious of our own emotions and to be able to master them, particularly in situations when a person may feel overwhelmed or overwhelmed.
That is why it is vital to begin by understanding how each emotion encountered in various scenarios impacts you and how you react to them, as well as assessing your decisions and actions in these situations.
It is sometimes important to decide when and under what conditions it would be beneficial to make a change, and it is vital to regulate the emotions that develop in these situations, being aware in advance and, if necessary, altering.
These gestures may be highly flattering in people’s lives, making it easier for them to deal with more difficult problems in their everyday lives, as well as any failure for which they may have been trained.
Finally, in order to acquire good emotional self-awareness, one must be aware of one’s own objectives and ideals, as well as be in touch with one’s emotions and therefore govern both emotional ones. As with your moods, as well as your thoughts and actions, it is critical that they are consistent with your goals or objectives, as well as your values.
Otherwise, cognitive dissonance will most likely emerge in your mind, causing internal tension in the system of emotions, ideas, and beliefs, resulting in internal conflict.
Now that we understand what emotional self-awareness is and what principles may help us develop it, it is time to start making use of this psychological competency, which can be extremely good for health, particularly mental health, and can help individuals improve their lives.
