“Emotions are adaptive and useful to us,” John Grych, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Marquette University, tells SELF. Now it’s time to put your observations to work to help you figure out how to deal. Ask, “What are these feelings telling me?” When you don’t judge a feeling, you give yourself permission to really feel it-which is often something many of us don’t allow ourselves to do. Remind yourself that feelings aren’t facts-feeling something doesn’t make it true-and are often contradictory. It’s tough, but try to exercise self-compassion and sit with the feeling without explaining it away, piling another emotion on top of it, or telling yourself what it says about you as a person, says Fenkel. ![]() You feel left out because you saw your friends had a Zoom happy hour without you, but you push it away, telling yourself to stop being such a baby. Stop me if this sounds familiar: Anger hits, but instead of feeling angry, you feel ashamed because it feels “irrational.” You feel sad because you can’t celebrate your birthday at a restaurant, but then you feel guilty because it’s such a “small” thing to worry about compared to what other people are going through. So often we jump straight to our feelings about a feeling. ![]() One of my favorite tools is the emotion wheel, which exists in many iterations but generally breaks down broad emotional categories (like anger, sadness, and fear) into more specific feelings. By the way, there are a lot of cool resources out there to help you expand your emotional vocabulary, which in turn can help you identify your emotions more easily. Whatever it is, explore it with curiosity, not judgment (we’ll get to that next), and if it helps, write it down. “A big struggle right now is that with all the emotions people are feeling, it can be hard to tease out and identify what’s going on,” says Howes. Or maybe you do feel angry, but that’s not specific enough to encapsulate it-perhaps betrayed or disgusted would be better. Maybe you see on Instagram that a friend isn’t taking social distancing very seriously and you think you feel anger but on further investigation realize that you’re more disappointed than anything. It might be pretty straightforward (like you read a news headline and now you feel anxious), but not always. Then you can investigate a little further, taking into account what triggered the emotion and how you would describe it. What’s going on in your gut? What’s going on in your chest? Is there buzzing in your head? Does your throat feel tight?” ![]() “Start by identifying what’s going on in your body,” says Howes. For that reason, the next step to working with your negative feelings is exploring them.
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