You Make Perfect Sense: A New Way To Think About Emotions

What are emotions anyway? We spend a lot of time trying to categorize emotions into good and bad, get rid of the “bad” emotions, and increase the good stuff. More happiness, less sadness. No anger, all calmness.
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This can lead to a lot of stress and struggle. ​​We spent so much time and energy trying to get rid of our anxiety and fear, and yet it keeps finding its way back into our life. Like that arcade game Whac-A-Mole – you keep trying to push it all down, but our emotions keep popping up in other unexpected places. Except, unlike the game, there are no prizes, and the game doesn’t end.

Exhausting, right?
If you want to find a new way to relate to your emotions, try this on for size.

What if, instead of trying to categorize your emotions into “good” and “bad,” we looked at all our emotions as serving a purpose.

Similar to other physical sensations in the body, emotions are messengers. They tell us to address something in our lives. In a way, it’s a really good thing we have them – all of them.

Let’s compare it to the physical body. When we catch a bug, we might get a sore throat and a stuffy nose. This isn’t pleasant, but we know the inflammation is a result of our body fighting the bug. So we aren’t mad at the inflammation. In fact, it would be dangerous if we didn’t have that reaction, because that would mean our body wouldn’t be fighting the bug and the pathogens could spread deeper into the body. We might be frustrated with the bug that we caught or the discomfort of our immune system doing its job, but we understand the reason why it’s happening. So we focus on nourishing our body to help it fight the bug more effectively. We eat healthy, drink lots of water, and rest so we can heal faster.
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Emotions are the body’s way of processing emotional events.

So when you feel anxious or sad, ask yourself what your body might be trying to communicate to you. Rather than stuff the emotion down, listen to your body and see what it has to say to you. You might find that sadness is asking you to reach out for more connection, or that anxiety is asking you to breathe deeply and slowly. And similar to how the body can sometimes react to an allergen that is not an actual threat to our health, the body sometimes feels fear when we are not actually in danger. And that’s okay. Over time, we can teach our body to feel safer in these triggering situations, the same way we adjust to a new climate when we move somewhere new. We can always communicate back to our body with compassion when the emotion doesn’t quite fit the situation.
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Because at the end of the day, I genuinely believe that you make perfect sense. Practice befriending and validating your emotions and listening compassionately to your body, and notice if your relationship to your emotions changes as you do this.