Emotional self-awareness: what it is, what it is for, and how to enhance it

People with little emotional awareness often have serious difficulties in their daily lives to deal adequately with their emotions and feelings, so they tend to hide them and keep them inside and this can cause them to end up exploding in the long term, thus causing sensations such as stress, tension, anger and/or anxiety, being very detrimental to their Health.

Emotional self-awareness is that knowledge and recognition that people have regarding our own emotions, being very beneficial for own mental health, since it is a capacity that allows people to know what is happening inside them, favoring the correct development of intelligence emotional.

In this article we will see what emotional self-awareness consists of and what are the functions it fulfills in people's lives when they correctly develop this capacity.

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What is emotional self-awareness?

When we speak of emotional self-awareness, we refer to the knowledge and also

the recognition that each person has regarding their own emotions or emotional states. This is a somewhat complicated task to carry out, since effort and training are needed to be able to understand and monitor oneself.

emotional self-awareness It can be very beneficial for your own mental health., since it is a capacity that allows people to know what is happening inside them, favoring the correct development of a high emotional intelligence, that this construct that was initially used by Wayne Payne, although it was as a result of the book by psychologist Daniel Goleman that this term became popular and refers to the ability of people to recognize their own emotions and also those of other people, as well as to discern between different feelings and to be able to put a label on them in a way that appropriate.

That is why training for the development of emotional self-awareness It will allow us to be aware of our own emotions and also those of others, thus being a very useful ability to control various situations in order to act in the most correct way possible.

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What role does emotional self-awareness serve?

Developing a correct emotional self-awareness implies having knowledge about one's own emotions and emotional states, but not only that, since it is also necessary to know why we feel those emotions, as well as what links they have with our thoughts, feelings, words and behaviors, and even how they can influence our day to day life in different areas of our lives, letting us be aware of our most fundamental goals and our values.

In addition, it should be noted that our emotional states cause a series of effects in various areas of the human being, starting with changes at a psychological and physiological level. On the other hand, they produce subjective and behavioral effects, since this can be observed in the feelings and those effects produced at the subjective level that have arisen through cause of emotions, as well as those behaviors carried out by people in order to change some conditions that have been caused by some emotion.

All this allows us to have a brief idea about the various functions that emotions could fulfill for people, but... So what would be the function of having developed a correct emotional self-awareness? Well, emotional self-awareness helps to connect with one's own emotions and thus learn to master them so that emotions do not dominate the person himself in the face of certain circumstances, but that it be the person who takes the reins and thus can dominate their emotions and their acts; all within reasonable limits.

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Some examples of what it is for

As we well know, in our day to day life we ​​experience endless emotions, so we are quite used to experience them, so it is quite common that we are not aware of our emotions and therefore we do not know the cause of them. For this reason, we are going to comment on some examples of emotional self-awareness that are quite frequently experienced on a day-to-day basis.

Let us think of the emotion of joy, a quite pleasant emotion which is usually quite easy to identify. This emotion is usually experienced in pleasant and rewarding situations, such as a reunion with old friends or relatives that we haven't seen in a long time, when our favorite team has just won a trophy or when we graduate, among others. In this type of situation, the most common thing is that we are aware that in those moments we are feeling great joy.

Now let's think about the emotion of the fear. Let's imagine that we are afraid to fly by plane and we are about to board at the airport in order to go on vacation to another country. It is quite likely that in this situation it will not be difficult for us to recognize the emotion of fear that we are experiencing. However... Do we usually stop to analyze to what levels fear invades us? Have we stopped to think about the thoughts that come to mind in this type of situation and what reason is there in them? Are we aware of our actions and our activation at a physiological level in this type of situation?

Developing a correct emotional self-awareness could go hand in hand with an exhaustive analysis of this type of situation that causes us discomfort in order to begin to develop skills that allow us to maintain composure, control our emotions to the point that they do not become an annoyance to us and also those thoughts that could alter our emotional states in the direction of a pole that generates discomfort, in order to replace them with others that help us deal with this type of situation in a more adaptive.

Lastly, it can be said that not in all situations it is easy to have a correct emotional self-awareness, since sometimes we might be experiencing a variety of emotions at the same time (eg. g., simultaneously experiencing sadness, frustration, etc.) so it would be difficult to identify them easily and therefore it would be more complicated to regulate them properly, so a greater effort would be necessary to be able to analyze them carefully until becoming aware of All of them.

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Tips to improve emotional self-awareness

IF it is true that emotional self-awareness is not something that is learned overnight, nor is there a specific plan for develop it, yes, there are experts in the field who have investigated the matter and have proposed a series of guidelines that could help develop adequate emotional self-awareness, although it is important to point out that it takes a lot of practice and, above all, tenacity and patience.

For this reason, it is important that a person who considers that they have a low emotional awareness and intends to increase this competence, take into account the advice that we are going to comment on below.

When it comes to training emotional self-awareness, the first thing a person should try to do is establish a connection with the emotions that he is experiencing in different day-to-day situations, trying to give them enough space so that outcrop, analyze them, recognize them and, finally, try to find the possible cause of their appearance, thus establishing a cause-effect relationship between emotions and the situations that provoke them, thus allowing a person has a greater awareness of their own emotions and this is the first step to try to have a greater control over they. To achieve this, the routine of filling out a emotions diary.

It is very important to be aware of your own emotions and to be able to develop mastery over them. them, especially in those situations in which a person may feel overwhelmed or overwhelmed Thus, we must begin by becoming aware of how each emotion experienced affects different situations and how he reacts to them, making an analysis of his decisions and his actions in those cases.

Sometimes it would be necessary to decide when and under what circumstances it would be positive to make a change, being necessary control the emotions that arise in these moments, previously becoming aware of them and, if necessary, transform them. These actions could be very flattering in people's lives, making it easier for them to face those situations that are more complicated in their day to day, as well as in the face of any setback for which they could manage to be prepared based on training.

Finally, it is important to highlight that in order to develop a correct emotional self-awareness, one must be clear about one's own objectives and values, since for a person to be in tune with their emotions and thus control their emotional states in the most suitable way, As your thoughts and behaviors, it is essential that you ensure that they are in harmony with your goals or objectives and also with your values. If not, it is likely cognitive dissonance occurs in your mind, by which an internal tension of the system of emotions, ideas and beliefs is developed, thus entering into an internal conflict.

Now that we know roughly what emotional self-awareness is and what are some guidelines that can help us develop, it's time to get going to get the most out of this psychological competence that can be very beneficial for health, especially mental health, as well as helping to improve the lives of people.