Here are a few ways you can practice increasing your emotional awareness. It can be helpful to use these tools alongside a counsellor who can help you make sense of what you’re noticing as you practice these skills. Once you start to become more aware of your emotions, you can get support from a counsellor to learn how to communicate how you’re feeling with important people in your life.
1. Practice recognizing emotions
- Spend an hour or aday observing your emotional responses. You might notice that you feel some anxiety as you get ready for the day. What we’re doing here is just noticing our emotion. You could say to yourself, “there’s anxiety”. If you’ve seen the movie “Inside Out”, you can imagine the character Anxiety at the control panel of your brain.
- You might come home from work and see a big pile of dishes in the sink, and notice anger. Again, you can just say to yourself “oh, there’s anger”.
- Remember, this isn’t about judging yourself for any of your emotions. It’s just about practicing noticing and naming what you’re feeling.
2. Notice physical responses
- Notice how your body feels in different situations, or when you have certain emotions. When you come home and see that pile of dishes and start to feel angry, notice what happens in your body. Do your shoulders tense, your belly tighten, your breathing gets faster?
- Once you start noticing your physical responses, you might be able to check in with that emotion. You might ask yourself – is this anger? You might also be experiencing other emotions as well, like disappointment, hurt, or sadness.
- When we gain awareness of our physical responses, we can make decisions about how we want to react. For example, if we notice we’re feeling angry when we arrive home from work every day, we might take a deep breath or drop our shoulders before we walk in the door. This helps us feel more empowered, relaxed and in control. This allows us to address the situation in a way that feels better for us and those around us.
3. Get curious
- Once you start to notice and recognize your emotions, you can start to ask yourself questions. For example, you could ask yourself, “Have I always felt this way about the dishes?” “When did this start?” “Why does this make me so frustrated?” “What would I like to be different in this situation?”
- This can help you to understand your emotions better, and might bring up something that is helpful for how to deal with those emotions.
- Again, these are all questions you are just asking yourself with gentle curiosity – to get to know those emotions a little better and understand what they might be telling you. Sometimes just understanding how we feel can help us, but sometimes we also need to communicate how we are feeling with others – healthy communication and conflict navigation skills are an important part of a healthy relationship.
4. Notice the impact of your emotions on others
- Again, we are going to do this without self-judgment. This is just about noticing how your emotional state impacts others.
- Think about yourself like a scientist… “Wow, look at what happens to ________ when I am feeling __________”. For example, “Look at what happens to my partner when I am feeling calm when I come home from work”. They are smiling, their face relaxes, they are calm, happy, curious, excited to see me.
- This is not about self-criticism, it’s just about quietly observing and noticing.
How can a counsellor help you with increasing your emotional awareness?
A counsellor can help you by asking questions that help you understand what you’re feeling, why you might be feeling that way, and how you can use that emotional information to make decisions in your life. For example, when you practice using some of the tools listed above, you may start to notice patterns around your experience of uncomfortable physical or emotional responses around specific situations or people in your life. We can work together to gently explore where those feelings and discomfort might be coming from. Usually, our responses to situations in the present are rooted in our past experiences. When we have a better understanding of how our past has impacted us, we are able to integrate that awareness into our present – basically, we get to know ourselves a lot better! This can help us increase our self-awareness, self-compassion, and self-esteem, and also to help us make decisions that align with who we want to be. Plus, when we understand what we are feeling, we can more easily communicate that to others – this can help us to get our needs met in our relationships, and increase emotional intimacy with our partner, friends, and family.