It really does make me wonder how is it possible in this day and age that people still allow themselves to go around in apathy?
These emotionally resilient people are perfectly fine with simple mundane existence rather than actually living.
But living and being in tune with your own emotions does wonders for your well being. This self awareness of having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment.
This emotional awareness is often called Emotional Intelligence or EQ.
“Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathize with others, overcome challenges, and defuse conflict. Emotional intelligence impacts many different aspects of your daily life, such as the way you behave and the way you interact with others.
If you have high emotional intelligence you are able to recognize your own emotional state and the emotional states of others, and engage with people in a way that draws them to you. You can use this understanding of emotions to relate better to other people, form healthier relationships, achieve greater success at work, and lead a more fulfilling life.”
Having a good EQ is all about Self-awareness. By recognizing your own emotions and how they affect your thoughts and behavior, you learn and have a firm grasp of your strengths and weaknesses, which all increase self-confidence. Having this awareness then allows you to manage your emotions and you’re able to better control impulsive feelings and behaviors. By managing your emotions in healthy ways allows you to take initiative, follow through on commitments, and adapt to changing circumstances with ease. Self awareness also allows you be aware of others. By understanding the emotions, needs, and concerns of other people, you are able to pick up on emotional cues, feel comfortable socially, and then can recognize the power dynamics in a group or organization.
All of this in turn allows you to live holistically and peacefully as so you can develop and maintain good relationships.
So why is it so important to be in touch with your emotions? Because it improves your health! Your mental, physical, and spiritual health on all levels! It also helps your performance at work, and also improves your relationships especially those important romantic ones that allow you to create connection.
There is a wonderful article here that suggests ways to increase your Emotional Intelligence.
Some people however in one form or another develop a low emotional intelligence and thus apathy towards their emotions, in my opinion, due to some sort of emotional numbness which occurs as a response to extreme physical or psychological trauma. If this is the case, healing is just around the corner. Abuse survivors, sufferers of PTSD, or simply the pangs of a deeply broken heart can wreck havoc on a person’s psyche and spirit.
I have often struggled with patients who had such strong emotional blocks that they were unable to continue treatment. Once we were finally getting somewhere, their response to the release of these emotional blocks was too much for them to handle at the time, which under the circumstances is understandable. My point here being though is that emotional blocks take time to heal, and healing can only happen if you want to be healed. There is no reason to feel undeserving. This attitude is directly related to the trauma. So, when the time comes for you to open those emotional doors beware, you may become uncomfortable. But being uncomfortable for a short time in my opinion far outweighs the pain and suffering of staying in emotional limbo for all of your life.
Why exist when you can live? Treatment and help is available, as well as affordable if not for free. Don’t allow yourself any reason to not seek the help. Love yourself enough to let your Self find peace.
Solar question prompted by Caitlin Matthews, Celtic Devotional.
The following are a list of interesting facts about emotions.
- Some researchers fear that technology, particularly social networking, is creating emotional disconnection rather than connection.f
- Emotional abuse is similar to brainwashing in that it attempts to systematically wear away a person’s self-confidence, self-worth, and self-concept. Emotional abuse can take many forms, including using economic power to control, threatening to leave, degrading, belittling, continually criticizing, name calling, or shouting.e
- Any emotion has three components: 1) physiological changes (e.g., acceleration of heart rate) 2) behavioral response, such as a tendency to escape from or stay into contact with whatever is causing the emotion, and 3) a subjective experience, such as feeing angry, happy, or sad.e
- A 1980 study by Robert Plutchik proposed eight primary innate emotions: joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. He suggests that complex emotions such as guilt and love are derived from combinations of primary emotions.c
- A human can make over 10,000 facial expressions to express a wide variety of subtle emotions.c
- Body language often reveals emotion. For example, a person standing with their arms on hips with elbows turned outward is an example of a territorial display. Someone with their hands folded and their thumbs popped up indicates that he or she has something positive to say. Touching the nose indicates someone is hiding something. A former FBI agent and specialist in nonverbal communication states that the “feet provide the strongest body language signals.”e
- Emotions are contagious. Negative or unpleasant emotions are more contagious than neutral or positive emotions.c
- Researchers note that when concealing a strong emotion, people tend to let out “micro-expressions,” or sudden leakages, of emotion unbeknownst to themselves very briefly, in as little as a 24th of a second.c
c Eckman, Paul. 2003. Emotions Revealed. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
e MacDonald, Matthew. 2008. Your Brain: The Missing Manual. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
f Sandler, Elana Premack. “Facebook, Emotions, and Identity: The Social Network and Teen Emotional Health.” Psychology Today. March 30, 2011. Accessed: June 10, 2012.