Mindfulness to Your Emotions
Being Mindful Clues You into Emotions You May Not Be Conscious of Right Now
Mindfulness has numerous benefits. It can help you be fully present, show you how to gain self-acceptance, raise your self-esteem and it can help you to be in control of your thoughts and emotions.
But there can be times when you can emotions simmering within your body that you might not even be conscious of right now. When you practice mindfulness, you have an awareness of what’s going on within your body emotionally that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
For example, sometimes people will have a lot of anger. They may even react to simple situations with irritability or anger that seems misplaced. By engaging in mindfulness, someone who struggles with thinking they have anger could find that what they’re actually feeling is grief.
Once they understand and identify the root of the emotion through the use of mindfulness, they can gain control of that anger.
When you’re aware of your emotions, you can change it.
Mindfulness can help you become conscious of your thoughts by focusing on your thoughts and feelings as they are currently. You’ll be able to see if you’ve been fueling your subconscious with negative self-talk that leave you uneasy, but you can’t quite put your finger on what’s going on with you emotionally.
By using mindfulness to clue into your emotions, you’ll be able to more easily recognize them when you feel them. This will help you grasp why you may have an upward or downward turn in emotions.
This can be especially helpful for people who can’t understand why they just don’t feel right. They have an intuition that something’s going on with themselves but they can’t pinpoint it and mindfulness can help with that.
Mindfulness will allow you to focus on the inner self and bring what it is you’re not conscious of to the surface.
For example, you may have a sense of unease that you didn’t even realize was rooted in fear.
Once you establish that and recognize it, you’re able to call it what it is. When you go through your day to day living, you can gather up outside stimuli to your emotions. But you don’t grasp how something or someone made you feel until you practice mindfulness.
By not knowing what you’re feeling, you can react to something and not really know the why behind your actions. You only know that something that happened or something someone did or said elicited you to speak quickly in response, almost like you had the answer waiting.
As you go through exercises that help you identify what you’re feeling and bring the emotions to the conscious level, you can change the way that you think or respond automatically to something.
When you become conscious of what you’re feeling, it can help you learn to see things from a different perspective and sometimes, a better perspective.
Stop Trying to Escape Emotions – Use Mindfulness to Accept and Address Them
There are many reasons that people have for wanting to escape emotions, but one recurring theme is that it can be painful to face certain feelings. This is why escapism with alcohol, drugs, overworking, overeating and other habits are often used in place of dealing with emotion.
But when you push away the emotions rather than accepting them, they can grow in intensity.
The anger can become bitterness, the fear can become an anxiety disorder. When you attempt to escape emotion and they end up building, not dealing with them can become a wrecking ball that will hit you when you least expect.
You’ll end up feeling overwhelmed when the wall of emotion from months or years of holding them back hits you all at once. The best way to deal with emotions, even the painful ones that you don’t want to face is to address them.
By addressing them, you can discover a better way of handling what you feel.
Mindfulness can help with this. If you practice mindfulness, it can show you how to accept your emotions rather than pushing them away and not dealing with them.
One of the reasons that many people don’t want to accept their emotions is because they attach another emotion to the original. For example, if they feel afraid of something, it’s often followed by shame.
They’ll shame themselves by engaging in negative self-talk for having the fear to start with. The reasoning behind this is because people label feelings as acceptable or unacceptable or as good or bad.
When you use mindfulness to accept whatever it is that you’re feeling, you simply allow those feelings to be. You let them exist without defining them or attempting to alter them.
It means that you’ll be able to release feeling the need to keep your emotions tucked away. With mindfulness, you’ll discover that emotions aren’t bad to have and they’re not bad to accept.
By accepting them, you can experience freedom.
When you accept emotions, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to stay stuck in a rut of always feeling anger or grief or whatever emotion that you have.
It means that you recognize the emotion for what it is. A feeling and nothing more. Accepting means that you allow the emotion to be felt and you don’t fight to keep it at bay.
Mindfulness can help you address the emotions that you try to escape from. You need emotions to help guide your way through life. Exercises can help you learn to address your emotions, such as deep breathing while focusing only on the emotion that you’re experiencing at that time.
While you’re focusing on the emotion, get to the reason that caused the emotion. When you figure out the cause, it can be helpful in accepting and addressing it. Once you identify the cause, you can release the emotion tied to the source.
If You’re a Worrier, Mindfulness Can Help
Some people worry about little things, some people worry about big things and others worry about everything. Sometimes worry can be a tool used to prod you to do your best at a task, but constant worrying is a problem because it holds you back by keeping you stuck in negative thoughts and emotions.
If you don’t deal with worry, it keeps your stress levels up and this can lead to health problems. You can develop anxiety and it can affect you physically by causing a lack of appetite or insomnia.
Worrying can cause a pattern of behavior to develop. It can also lay the foundation for addiction because it can drive you to try and find a way to get some emotional reprieve from the worrying.
Worrying often goes unchecked because we don’t know how to identify it correctly.
You might worry about your job because you’re worried about how you’ll pay the mortgage or put food on the table if you lost it.
You might worry about your loved ones becoming ill or losing them. These what-if thoughts aren’t the foundation behind the worrying that’s built up in your life. What you think about situations in your life is where the worrying first begins to develop.
From there, it becomes a pattern or a habit to worry. What causes you to worry is the thought that something bad or unfavorable toward you is going to happen. When you experience these thoughts, your emotions kick in with the response of fear or anxiety.
These worries are over things that have never happened and have a strong probability that they never will.
But what worriers have a tendency to do is to create scenarios in their mind of these probably future situations.
When you create a scene in your mind, your brain sees these thoughts as a mental image. It views this image the same way it would if you viewed a negative situation in a movie.
It sees the vivid details and then your body experiences things like anxiety when you watch a scary or dramatic movie. Those are the same results that you get when you paint scenarios in your mind that haven’t even happened.
Your mind registers this as something that’s occurring. So, then you feel afraid and anxious. This thought pattern can make you anxious, irritable and untreated can turn into a chronic and devastating anxiety disorder.
Mindfulness can set you free by showing you how to stop these thought patterns in their tracks.
When you have a worrying thought, take a moment and redirect your focus back to the present rather than allowing your mind to be projected into what isn’t even happening.
Don’t give the worries any power within your mind. Give the thought the title of what-if and then release it. Mindfulness will help you learn to recognize those what-if thoughts and understand that they’re not real. They’re not happening. By taking away the power, the fear dissolves and the worry is gone.
If You’re Feeling Lonely, Mindful Volunteer Work Can Help
Loneliness is an emotion that’s universally understood. There can be many reasons that cause you to feel lonely. Sometimes, it can be because you’ve experienced the loss of love – or someone that you love has passed away and you’re lonely because of the grief.
You can feel lonely if you struggle with a health condition or you’ve experienced some kind of life upheavals such as a move or a job loss. While going through experience can be a cause of loneliness, that’s not always the case.
Sometimes, you simply feel lonely regardless of what situation you’re in. There are those who will sometimes confuse loneliness with someone who is by himself. But being alone and being lonely are two different things.
Experiencing loneliness is tied directly to your emotions while being by yourself is not.
When you’re struggling with loneliness, you can feel sad. You might feel like you’re all alone in the world and that everyone has someone but you.
You might feel that you don’t have anyone to talk to and no one to love you. These emotions can often trigger thoughts that add to the loneliness. But there is a way that you can reduce and even eliminate the loneliness that you’re feeling and that’s through mindful volunteer work.
When you volunteer to help other people, it triggers your compassion response and helps you to become connected to someone else. Studies have shown that when you volunteer, it raises your level of contentment.
When you don’t take action to deal with loneliness, then your mind will get on a track of constantly thinking about things that only add to the feeling.
These things might be thoughts of the past or negative thoughts.
By practicing mindful volunteer work, you’re focusing on the present and the activity helps to keep your mind occupied, which keeps the negative thoughts from becoming a cycle.
Mindful volunteering allows you to feel involved with others which acts as a bridge to give you a connection. You end up feeling rewarded because mindful volunteering can give you the social connection that you need to break free of loneliness.
When you volunteer, you’re helping to meet the needs of someone else but in return, you’re getting your own needs met, too. Mindful volunteering means that you decide that you’re going to focus on helping someone else.
You’re going to be there for them without any thoughts of what you’re going to get in return. But what happens is that you always end up getting back a lot more than you give with mindfulness.
Helping others gives you a boost in positive feelings and thoughts.
This is because you’re no longer focusing on how you feel, what you think or what might be missing from your life.
Instead, you’re pouring yourself into a cause or a purpose and you end up creating a support system for yourself as well as increasing empathy for other people.
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