Dealing with emotions is an important part of building your self-confidence.
It’s about taking responsibility for what you’re feeling and getting to know yourself better!
Emotions… such an interesting topic!
Learning how to deal with your emotions will help you know yourself better and feel ALIVE 🙂
The benefits? So you can truly live your life, being completely aware of what’s going on inside of you and feel comfortable being who you really are!
Let’s start by talking about what are emotions and what is the difference between emotions and feelings…
Let’s get this party started!
What are emotions?
Good question! I still can’t believe that we teach so many things at school and yet, we don’t learn anything about our emotions and more importantly, how to deal with them!
To me, emotions are helping us understand how we are feeling deep inside.
You’re probably starting to know me! I always say that everyone is trying to fulfill their own needs.
When our needs are being fulfilled, we are experiencing positive emotions. When they are not, we are experiencing negative emotions.
And en emotion is a vibration in our body, it’s our body trying to tell us something about us.
It can feel amazing (positive emotion) or it can feel unpleasant (negative emotion). But both of them are very important to experience everything that’s happening to us in our life!
What is the difference between emotions and feelings?
I always wonder!
So I just checked online and found this great explanation on the website of “The best brain possible”.
Debbie Hampton says that “Emotions are lower level responses occurring in the subcortical regions of the brain, the amygdala, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, creating biochemical reactions in your body altering your physical state. They originally helped our species survive by producing quick reactions to threat, reward, and everything in between in their environments.”
And that “Feelings originate in the neocortical regions of the brain, are mental associations and reactions to emotions, and are subjective being influenced by personal experience, beliefs, and memories. A feeling is a mental portrayal of what is going on in your body when you have an emotion and is the byproduct of your brain perceiving and assigning meaning to the emotion.”
Okay, so here’s the thing: according to Debbie, an emotion is a reaction to a stimulus (I’m spending a moment of fun with my friend which is creating the emotion of joy) and the feeling is the emotion interpreted in my head because of my beliefs, experience, etc. (I’m feeling happy).
To me, emotion is more temporary and a feeling can be much longer.
Anyway, let me tell you something… No matter if we call it emotion or feeling, we need to practice experiencing both of them more often to feel better and more self-confident 🙂
Great conclusion to the discussion of what’s the difference between the two of them right? 😉
Even if there is an interesting distinction between the two of them, please forgive me if I’m using emotion and feeling as almost the same just because I think that the main point here is to experience what’s going on inside of us, no matter what name we give it 🙂
Why do we have emotions?
As I said before, emotions are telling us if a need is being fulfilled or not.
Experiencing emotions makes us alive, they give us vibration in our body which is an indicator of how we are feeling. It’s very important to be aware of them, just doing this is already helping A LOT in dealing with emotions 🙂
For example, you’re reading in your bed with a cup of coffee. You’re smiling because you feel calm and relaxed! Your needs are being fulfilled. If someone ignored what you just said, you may feel offended and sad because your need of being recognized is maybe not fulfilled…
If you’re interested in reading more about needs, please head to this blog post where I’m talking about our needs and how to express them better to feel happier.
Why is it hard to deal with emotions?
The first thing that I want to say here is again, we never learned it! We cannot blame ourselves for doing something that we have absolutely no idea how to do it! 🙁
And emotion is something that is especially difficult to deal with because of the stereotypes around it.
For example, I still hear people saying “I’m not talking about my emotions, I’m not a girl!” or simply, we are just not used to talk about our emotions, it can be even taboo or embarrassing.
Obviously, it can be hard to deal with something that nobody talks about! All of this makes total sense and this is why it’s so important for me to talk about it with you guys 🙂
I would add that we are definitely avoiding experiencing our emotions. And I think that we shouldn’t put breaks on negative emotions. Again, they are here to tell us that a need isn’t being fulfilled and that we can pay attention to it to feel better 🙂
We shouldn’t be afraid of experiencing negative emotions. We just need to learn how to deal with them, they’re anyway going to be there so it’s our responsibility to accept them in the first place and then to know what to do with them…
How to deal with emotions…
The best part of this blog post for sure 🙂
How are we supposed to deal with these emotions??
Save this infographic that will show you how to allow negative emotions:
Then, I wanted to share a thought from Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School. About negative emotions, she says that “Opening ourselves up to dive into the negative emotions will give us the full experience of what it means to be alive” Brooke Castillo.
I love what she’s saying!!
If you’re like me and you want the make the best out of this life, to live it 100% fully and not just exist, then you will want to experience every emotion you’re feeling. Because it shows you that you’re alive!
For example, even if a breakup is very hard, after some time, you can think about it and feel so happy that it happened.
In a song from The Lumineers, the singer sings “I’d better feel pain than nothing at all” and I always felt this way.
Even if life can get tough, I still feel that the negative emotions are “worth it”.
We better not resist experiencing our emotions!
Brooke Castillo is also talking about our resistance to feeling emotions.
She’s saying that “our desire to make them not be true, is creating more problems because it denies truly our experience of being alive, we run away from ourselves, we miss the experience of experiencing ourselves”.
She’s also adding that instead of welcoming our emotions and getting to know ourselves and how we are feeling, we are creating what she calls a “side-life” which can be described as “overeating, overworking, overdrinking…” because we don’t want to listen to what our mind and our body is really telling us.
I also feel like emotions are truly growing as we resist them.
Because we don’t know how to name them and what to do with them, we are feeding thoughts that are making these emotions grow. For example, we may feel sad, so we will eat something. Then, we will tell ourselves (thoughts) “you shouldn’t have eaten that, why did you?” and then we will feel even more sadness and maybe some guilt too (emotions).
It’s not easy at all, but just keep in mind that being aware of this, learning about all of this is already A LOT 🙂
You’re truly getting to know yourself better and this is so important!!
Why be connected to your emotions and feelings makes you super brave…
As we said before, we need to feel and experience our feelings.
You connect with someone when you share your feelings! This is why I’m always telling friends that if you want to get close to someone, you need to talk about personal stuff 🙂 to share deep connections, deep thoughts 🙂
Brooke Castillo said this. She said that “feeling your feelings is one of the most courageous things anyone can do. When you’re willing to feel any feelings, that’s when you’re going to be willing to take any actions because you won’t be afraid of whatever emotion you may encounter while taking that action”.
This is so right! This is why I don’t believe when people want to show that they are proud of not showing emotions because to them emotions have something to do with weakness. I can understand them, but to me, someone who knows how to deal with emotions is a genius!
We are comfortable with what we know!
Why should we learn how to deal with our emotions? It goes with the question “why should I know myself better?”
The answer is simple: because we are more comfortable with what we know.
It works with everything! We may like changes, but we are more comfortable with what we know: our home, our partner, our friends…
So when it comes to dealing with emotions, that’s the same: we need to understand what’s going on, be able to name it, and then, to be able to deal with it.
No more feeling bad about feeling bad!
When it comes to feeling emotions, there’s also something that is essential to do.
And the thing to do is really to be more aware of it!
In today’s life, we think that we should be happy all the time, that we have everything to be happy.
But actually, feeling negative emotions is just part of life!
It’s what makes us humans.
The problem here is that we most of the time add another layer of feeling bad!
Because we feel bad, we feel negative emotions and since we think that we should not, we feel bad one time (which is totally okay) and then we feel bad about feeling bad (this one doesn’t have to be!).
So, simply, next time you’re feeling negative emotions, do not think that something has gone wrong.
Just accept that sometimes, you’re going to feel negative emotions and that’s okay!
It’s just your humanness, no need to add another layer of drama!
I like how Jen Sincero says that: “Feel sad but don’t blow it up into some huge drama. If something negative happens in your life, feel it, learn from it, let it go, and get back to focusing on the life you’re excited to live.”
I love it! 🙂
Will you be more gentle towards you and others about feeling negative emotions?
What have emotions to do with self-confidence?
To build our self-confidence, we need to know ourselves better and to be comfortable with who we truly are.
Understanding, accepting, and experiencing our emotions are an important part of boosting the self-confidence that is inside of us.
We need to look at it, to experience it with curiosity and fascination, without judgment, and to truly allow ourselves to feel every emotion and feeling.
There could be sometimes kind of feeling guilt towards our emotions. We feel like we’re not supposed to feel this way, that we should be happy all the time!
This guilt can make us less trust ourselves but we shouldn’t be afraid: we can still trust ourselves and I would say, even more!
Because we know how we work (we can name and understand our emotions), we are confident in who we are. We know that we are good enough!
This could be summarized like this:
Understanding/accepting negative emotions -> is helping us taking action -> taking action helps in building our self-confidence
It does help in building our self-confidence because we know that no matter the result of the action that we are taking, we will be able to deal with any emotions we will feel (results or feedback!).
You really need to read this post about taking action to build your self-confidence!
To sum up!
As you can see, emotions and feelings are very important when it comes to building your self-confidence!
The moment you are aware of what you’re feeling and how to accept it and to deal with it, you’ll feel comfortable being in many situations of your life, because you know that you’ll be okay no matter if you’re having positive or negative emotions 🙂
I have so much more to say about this subject, but I think that it’s already enough for a start 😉
I’ll probably talk again about this amazing subject that is emotion and feelings, we definitely need to learn more and more about it to feel better and happier in our lives 🙂
Am I right?!
