Category: Becoming Emotionally Healthy

I don't often get “technical” here, but today we're going to dive deep into some “science stuff” to get a better understanding of what emotions can do to our body. So let's get though the technical stuff, and then I'll give you some good tips on taking this information and actually using it.

The body and the mind have a direct connection and your physical health can be significantly impacted by negative emotions. Based on distinct emotions, there are varied chemicals and hormones released by the body as it reacts. When we're stressed, Cortisol and Norepinephrine are released, but when we're happy, Oxytocin, Dopamine, and Serotonin are released.

Consequentially, one can suffer immediate physical symptoms due to these distinct chemical concentrations, and it's no wonder some people experience shaky hands and headaches when they're anxious.

It's important that you understand that feelings and emotions are two different things. Although they're interconnected and share very close similarities, they have a few things that differentiate them. Physical cues like body language, facial expressions, brain activity, heart rate, and blood flow can be used to measure emotions objectively and feelings have a less strong physical grounding compared to emotions. Emotions help us give a quick response to diverse environmental threats. They're coded into our DNA, they first occur in the subcortical areas of the brain, and they're regarded as ‘lower level’ responses.

Feelings can't be measured the way emotions can be because they're so subjective. Feelings occur in the neocortical regions of the brain. They're influenced by our world's personal experiences and interpretations and they're not something specifically general with humans like that of emotions.

There are six identified initial basic emotions according to Eckman (1999) and they include:

* Surprise
* Sadness
* Happiness
* Fear
* Disgust
* Anger

There are eleven basic emotions he later expanded on:

* Shame
* Sensory Pleasure
* Satisfaction
* Relief
* Pride
* Guilt
* Excitement
* Embarrassment
* Contentment
* Contempt
* Amusement

8 Examples of Negative Emotions

Unlike what you may have ever thought or heard; negative emotions aren't that bad. They're quite valuable because they do help us to appreciate positive ones and they're completely normal. There are 8 common negative emotions and they're highlighted below.

Anger – Has there been something on your mind that you've always wanted to tell someone? Whenever you think of this, does it make you boil? Does it make you feel like you want to explode or your temperature is rising? This is a common way of describing anger. Your body is trying to rectify something it isn't cool with and it's reacting. However, you may want to consider coming up with more positive strategies if you often react by getting the feeling of throwing things around (which you're more likely to do), vehemently registering your anger on your face, or shouting at the top of your voice.

Annoyance – Annoyance is more like the weaker form of anger. There are probably some people in your life that you love a lot but they do some things that displease you and you get annoyed by these behaviors. It may be your spouse always watching the TV whenever you've got your hands full doing chores without him or her trying to assist you and it could probably be he or she snoring loudly or talking too much and even loudly. It could be annoying, right?

Fear – Fear gives us warnings about failures, unexpected obstacles, or dangerous situations, and it's an evolved response. Immensely connected with our sense of self-preservation, it's usually regarded as one of the core basic emotions. The essence of fear in our lives is to help us see through potential danger and it's actually not purposed to make us feel distressed. Nevertheless, you can proactively brace up yourself to tackle challenges when you take your time to explore why fear rises and also embrace the emotion of fear.

Anxiety – It's perceived and believed that our ability to act and judge gets impaired when we have an anxious disposition and this explains why anxiety is always seen as a negative emotion. Seeking to alert us about possible dangers and threats, anxiety is pretty much like fear.

Sadness – The behavior of someone else around us, our low achievements, or our dissatisfaction with ourselves are some of the things that can bring about sadness. You'll probably feel sad if you didn't get that job you've been hoping you would, had a bad grade, or couldn't meet up with a deadline. The good side of sadness is that it can be a great catalyst to pursue change and it can be an indication of our passion for something.

Guilt – Guilt tends to encourage us to make changes in our life and it's another strong catalyst on its own. Often referred to as a ‘moral emotion’, guilt connects with how our behavior impacts those around us and our wishes for things to have been different; compared to how we handled them in the past. Guilt is a complex emotion.

Apathy – Apathy, at times, could make us start pursuing a more passive-aggressive expression of rebellion when we lose control over a scenario or situation. Apathy is when you're no longer excited or moved by the things you used to enjoy – loss of interest, motivation, or enthusiasm. Apathy can be a complex emotion, just like guilt.

Despair – Have you been trying to get things done and it looks like you're never going to achieve that certain goal or task? Do you feel like just quitting after you've tried several methods to work something out but it's not going through? That is despair and it helps us to see reasons why we should quit on our desired goals. Despair shows up when we're finding it difficult to get the results we crave.

How Emotions Could be Affecting Your Health

Chronic stress can affect your life's longevity and you'll become more prone to an array of sicknesses when you get your immune system hampered by negative emotions. There are adverse effects of subduing your negative feelings. These effects are quite harmful even though they can be silent. It becomes pertinent for you to learn to deal with and express your negative feelings correctly because this is a great way to keep your body in the healthiest state possible.

Note: Always remember… Happy = Healthy and Healthy = Happy!

Additionally, giving your negative emotions too much freedom to reign has a downside because you have the tendency of going into a spiral of rumination when you dwell on negative emotions and the causative situations. Rumination is a driver for clinical depression, it increases your brain’s stress response circuit, and it can affect your mental and physical wellbeing because it may make you end up feeling worse about whatever the situation is.

Physical health consequences like depression, clinical anxiety, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, insomnia, and harmful coping behaviors like alcohol consumption, smoking, and overeating have been linked to rumination also. At times, some people strongly believe that they're actively solving problems without realizing that they’re stuck in a ruminating rut. Rumination can be a difficult loophole to get out of.

How to Identify Negative Emotions Right Now

We often tend to ignore our deeper feelings to suppress our emotional side. Taking to social vices, drinking alcohol, overeating, and adopting worrisome habits are ways we compensate for this. Nevertheless, for us to gain our balance, we must identify and accept our negative emotions, and these three tips can go a long way in helping to achieve that.

1. Listen to Your Subconscious Mind — Now is the time to start listening to yourself. That pattern of thinking you developed that made you neglect the voice of your inner consciousness coupled with your hectic schedules that aren't helping things must be worked on. Listen to your subconscious mind.

Delve into your inner self. Break the cycle. All the negative emotions hidden inside you and your thought process can be analyzed when you start practicing the act of writing down your thoughts. And, in the process, you'll get to learn more about the things you love, your relationships, subdued emotions, your weaknesses, and yourself in particular.

Get a journal and start writing all this stuff down. A simple little notebook you carry with you everywhere will soon become one of your “healing tools” and the best friend that never judges you. 😉

2. Prepare a List of Moments You Were Hurt — There are times that we get hurt and we tell ourselves that we'll get over it. We often say “it's just a small thing, it's fine” while the opposite is the truth. For all the hurts that keep on coming back, no matter how little or unimportant you may think they are, prepare a list for them. With this, you stand a good chance of gaining a greater understanding of who you are and you'll be able to confront these emotions, instead of just avoiding and burying them.

3. Record Your Emotions for 8 Weeks — Jot down whatever makes you feel negative or positive as you keep watching how you felt and the significant emotional events that happen in the space of that 8 weeks. Identify things that made you angry and do well to analyze your emotions. Again… Get a journal!

You'll be able to work on your emotions, raise your awareness about them, and even feel stronger when you write them down. If you don't want to get stuck with negative emotions, unmasking your anger or other emotional issues is something you must do.

Tips to Release Negative Emotions

What you need to do next is to learn to release your negative emotions once you've been able to identify them. To keep your body in a healthy, balanced state, you can make use of these simple tips to release negative emotions.

Physically Release your Negative Emotions — Releasing your negative emotions is one of the major ways to get rid of them physically. For some people to vent their negative emotions, they need to scream till it feels better.

They release their negative emotions by shouting or screaming at a secluded place. Not everyone does this as we have a few other people who tend to vent their rage by using controlled physical exertion. It's the biggest reason I spend time in the gym almost every day. It's my biggest release tool!

Transmute Your Emotions — This is pretty easy. Get your eyes closed as you sit in a chair and make sure you're in a comfortable position. Now, try to get yourself relaxed by taking some deep breaths. Then, you see those emotions that haven't been good to your well-being, begin to search for them.

The midriff area is where sadness often rests and the belly button is where anger is usually found. There are different places around the body where subdued emotions are located. Once you've been able to locate your emotion, hold it and be with it. To reduce the size of the cloud of this emotion, continue to hold them, by repeatedly going through this process.

Use Meditation to Release Your Negative Emotions — A session of meditation will make you feel things differently and it can as well alter your perception about things strongly. Close your eyes as you get seated in a relaxed position. Relax your body by taking deep breaths at least ten times. Confront and get rid of your negative emotion by identifying it and tracking where it's stemming from.

Now of course there are many other ways that you can release your negative emotions and I'll be giving you more tips here on the blog. For now, I hope that this deep dive into what negative emotions can do to you has opened your eyes, and you'll start putting the work in to release them. This will bring you to a much happier state, and as I said… happy = healthy, and we've got to be BOTH to get 110% out of this life!

Repressed emotions are something that we really need to bring to light, discover, and work through to get to our ultimate state of happy. Happiness is one of the biggest keys to getting 110% out of life. When you're happy you're more motivated to do what it takes to truly live. I'll be doing a series of posts here on “inner healing” to help you get to the happies point you can be at and keep yourself there as much as possible!

Let's get started with talking about repressed emotions…

The emotions that you unconsciously avoid are your repressed emotions. These are the emotions that you don’t know exactly how to deal with so they become feelings you purposely avoid. These emotions are different from suppressed emotions.

Example…

For instance, let's say you're still staying with your parents because you've been trying to save on rent or because you've become so attached to your parents and you're yet to find the courage to live on your own.

One Monday morning, you and your parents had a little tiff and you decided you were going to move out in the next few days. You still had to manage to go to work that same Monday morning without allowing the little situation to get the best of you, knowing that you could still address the situation with your parents when you got back from work.

Note that, at times, it could be a good short-term solution to push aside or suppress your feelings but it becomes dangerous when you keep those emotions hanging for a long time without addressing them. However, repressed emotions, are emotions that tend to show up in diverse physical or psychological symptoms, and they don’t get a chance to be processed.

Why does it Happen?

Our childhood experiences have a close relationship with emotional repression. As a young person, your parents or primary caregivers have a significant impact on your communication and behavior. If your caregivers didn’t judge or criticize your emotional expressions, made it normal for you to experience positive and negative emotional experiences, encourage you to share how experiences made you feel, and frequently talked about their feelings, the chances are high that you'll feel pretty comfortable expressing your emotions.

However, if you had a different childhood experience, you'll feel disconnected from your feelings as an adult dealing with repressed emotions. If your caregivers denied your experience, told you your emotions were wrong, shamed or punished you for expressing your emotions, never talked about their feelings, or rarely showed emotion, it's more likely that you'll repress emotions.

As you keep growing, there's a tendency that you'll keep pushing your noticeable emotions aside. You'll continue to unconsciously bury strong emotions because you've learned that it's pretty much safer to avoid your emotions entirely, especially if you had distressing or painful outcomes by showing your feelings in childhood.

What Kinds of Emotions Get Repressed?

Emotions that are associated with unpleasant experiences or discomfort are some of the strong emotions people tend to repress. Disappointment, fear, sadness, frustration, and anger are the kind of emotions that fall under these strong emotions. They're negative emotions. If you feel you might be judged by others for expressing some of these emotions or you think some of these emotions are “bad”, it's very likely that you'll repress them. And that's NOT a good thing. 😉

If you grew up hearing things like “you should be grateful,” “calm down, you're just overreacting and it's totally unnecessary,” or “there's no reason why you should be sad,” you'll become prone to repressing your emotions.

In fact, when you're told to stop shouting or crying and not encouraged to freely express your intense emotions, you'll become vulnerable to repressed emotions, even if your emotional experience didn't specifically get invalidated by your caregivers. Consequentially, you'll find it difficult to acknowledge your disappointment, anger, and sadness because you feel they're feelings that you shouldn't possess. However, a few other people dealing with emotional repression can still express emotions that are generally accepted by others or those considered “normal” and they could feel more in touch with positive feelings.

Can it Really lead to Physical Symptoms?

While you may still be wondering if your emotions can make you sick, it's important that you know that, truly, they do have a way of making you sick. Yes, anger doesn't cause cancer and neither does sadness give you flu, but you should know that you can recover slowly and get sick more frequently when your immune system doesn’t work properly due to a decreased immune system function linked to your emotional repression — research has proven this.

More so, depression, anxiety, stress, and a few other mental health conditions can be factored in by repressed emotions. You're likely to express some physical symptoms, which include:

* Sleep problems and fatigue
* Appetite changes
* Nausea and digestive problems
* Pain and muscle tension

These are just a few symptoms…

It's also been proven that a number of people who suffer chronic illness have repressed emotions and childhood trauma as contributing factors.

There are significant health consequences attributed to unresolved anger as well and you stand a high chance of developing cardiovascular disease, digestive problems, or high blood pressure if you're finding it difficult to express anger in productive ways.

How do I know if I have Repressed Emotions?

Since there are no definitive tests you can take to know if you're dealing with emotional repression, you may find it quite difficult to know if you have repressed emotions. However, you're likely to notice a few key signs if you're struggling with repressed emotions. These signs affect how you treat other people and yourself and they can be evident in your behavior or feelings.

Recognizing Emotional Repression in your Feelings

Naming and understanding your emotional experience is something you'll often find troubling when you're dealing with repressed emotions. When your needs are not served by certain aspects of your life, you may find it difficult to recognize that, and it could as well be tough to describe your feelings to others.

You may experience this:

* When someone asks you about your feelings, you feel distressed or irritated

* You never ponder on upsetting or insignificant things and this makes you feel cheerful and calm most of the time

* When other people tell you about their feelings, you experience unease or discomfort

* You have a tendency to forget things

* You never understand why but you feel stressed, low, or nervous most of the time

* You regularly feel numb or blank

Again… Just a few examples here.

Recognizing Emotional Repression in your Behavior

The manner in which you respond to others and your behavioral expressions is how repressed emotions commonly show up. You might develop problems in your interpersonal relationships when your emotions get in, especially when they get triggered by small things. Your built-up emotions can explode after you've been struggling to express them healthily.

These are the abilities emotional repression can affect:

* Your ability to encourage or praise yourself
* Your ability to understand how other people feel
* Your ability to build intimate relationships
* Your ability to talk about things that matter to you

It's also possible that you notice some of these things:

* Dealing with situations that upset you make you exhibit passive-aggressive behaviors

* You avoid being alone by spending most of your time with other people

* You avoid feelings you don’t want to explore and stay numb by using social media, TV, substances, or other activities

* Rather than express what you really want and need, you just go along with situations

* Another plausible sign is often being referred to as “relaxed,” “calm,” or “chill” by others.

Are any of these things “hitting” you right now?

Is it Possible to Release them?

A good first step you can take is to talk to a mental health professional if you find it quite troubling to express or regulate your emotions. You can enjoy guidance and support and have a safe space to learn more helpful methods of emotional regulation.

Note: If the term mental health professional sends you over the edge, know that you have many options other than the standard “shrink”. A little searching on the Internet can show you many alternatives to health professionals that can help you. Even educating yourself can help you.

You can beef up your comfort level around talking about emotions and work on naming and understanding your feelings when you get therapy. Aside from therapy, a handful of strategies will also help you manage and deal with your emotions effectively. I'll be sharing these strategies in future posts and will be linking to those posts at the bottom of this post.

For now though let what you've read here marinate in your mind. Do you have repressed emotions that are coming out in your life? Start by naming them, and acknowledging them, so you can get on the path of releasing them.