Being mindful of your emotions is very important, and our daily life could feel busy, and it is not a bad thing but we sometimes neglect to manage ourselves internally, which means we feel negative emotions the majority of the time instead of a 50-50. So you have to get a better grip on your life.
What is mindfulness and why is it important?
Being mindful means paying attention to what is happening in the mind, the body, and the immediate environment and remaining present, while being curious and compassionate.
What does it mean to be mindful of your emotions?
Being mindful means being aware of all of your thoughts, emotions, and how you are both physically and mentally. It is accepting how you are feeling and being aware of the thoughts and feelings that you are having without feeling restricted and feeling judged. Just letting your emotions out naturally and acknowledging them in the healthiest way possible.
Mindfulness of Emotions: Signs and Meanings
- Anger
Signs:
It is when your anger comes out as a roar, a sharp edge voice, narrowed lips, focused
eyes, and lowered brows.
Meanings:
Dissatisfaction to boundary challenges to threat
- Fear
Signs:
Wide eyes, stretched lips, raised eyebrows, withdrawal physically, screaming, heavy
breathing, and pulling away.
Meanings:
Slight concern to panic
If you have irrational fears or phobias there are a lot of CBT phobia treatments in New York that would help you to conquer your phobias.
- Disgust
Signs:
Protruding tongue, a raised upper lip, and a wrinkled nose
Meanings:
Wishing for something to be kept away to belief that something is socially or morally
wrong or unclean
- Sadness
Signs:
Frown, raised cheeks, eyebrows drawn upwards and together, tears, quivering voice and
sobbing
Meanings:
Comfort to empathy
- Enjoyment
Signs:
Smiles, wrinkles around the outer corners of the eye, relief, and laughter
Meanings:
Contentment with the feelings that are present to encouragement of social interaction
What are the benefits of mindfulness?
- Psychological Benefits
- Stress: Children who are higher in mindfulness are less impacted, and less stressed, both psychologically and physiologically. Mindfulness helps manage existing stress and it offers protection from future upset.
- Happiness: Happiness is not just something that makes you feel good, it offers protection against disease and even death. Maintaining a positive mindset keeps you healthy. Improvement has also been seen in people with low mood, anxiety, and depression.
- Cognitive Benefits
- Memory: Mindfulness benefits sleep and memory and in return, improves our chances of actually remembering and recalling information.
- Creativity: Mindfulness increases creativity, especially with the improvement in sleep. It improves our ability to tackle problems and reduces mind wandering.
- Physical Benefits
- Genetic: Mindfulness improves telomerase activity which is a vital enzyme that controls cellular aging and the age-related decline of the entire body. So mindfulness keeps us young.
- Immune function: Immunity is a critical factor in maintaining good health. Mindfulness reduces stress, fatigue, sleep disturbance and optimizes your immune system.
How to be mindful of your emotions:
- Identify and label your emotions
Give your feelings a “name”. It would be easier with the emotions that are positive like excited, fun, motivated, and the like but it would be a lot harder with strong emotions. When you do this, you are grabbing and claiming authority over your emotions.
If you avoid them, it would end up just feeling worse and that is something we do not want.
- Acknowledge and befriend your emotions
Accept your emotions. Take a deep breath, acknowledge your emotions, and accept them. You could literally say it out loud or say it in your mind. It teaches you to accept your body and your emotions because your thoughts cause all your emotions.
- Identify the thoughts causing your emotions
If you are having a problem at some point, sometimes the problem itself is not what causes you to have these emotions, sometimes it’s what you are thinking. Instead of running away from your thoughts, be open and explore them. It helps you hold space for yourself, increases your emotional intelligence and mental health overall.
- Plan how to react next time
Reflect on how you thought when you were going through it, how you felt and acted. In the self-reflection that you are doing, it is important to not overemphasize. It allows you to increase your emotional responsibility and now you would know how to react next time that happens.
Another way of us being mindful is getting help for all the things that we are possibly going through. We could get treatment for our phobias and traumas, for the benefit of ourselves and the people around us.