People often get confused about what emotions are. They may take feelings too seriously, believing that they are instructions or inescapable facts. They may try to control their emotions by clinging to them or trying to push them away. But all these things just make feelings hard to cope with.
If you truly understand what emotions are, they can never bother you too deeply. Stop giving your feelings more power than they really have by understanding what an emotion is and what it is not.
Emotions Are…
Not Reality
An emotion is never the ‘truth’ of the matter. A feeling is not reality. An emotion is your perception of a situation. This doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It doesn’t mean you should ignore, repress, or suppress how you feel. But it does mean you should step back from your feelings sometimes, and understand that they are your own response, not the reality.
If you do feel a certain way, what different perception could you have that would make you feel differently? What are the other sides of the story? Emotions are often linked to past experiences and don’t truly reflect what is happening in the moment. Be curious about your emotions rather than taking them as concrete facts.
Not an Instruction To Act
Many people feel in thrall to their emotions, as if a feeling can make them behave a certain way. Emotions can be powerful, but they can’t move our arms and legs for us, nor open our mouths. We should allow our emotions to inform us, rather than thinking they compel us to take a certain action. True wisdom lies in looking at your emotions rather than reacting mindlessly to them.
If you find it really difficult not to react to your emotions, learn to pause. Walk away from whatever is provoking a strong emotion if necessary, then come back to deal with it after you’ve mellowed out a little and can reason properly.
Information
Emotions serve a purpose and that’s to convey information to us. They can alert us, warn us, teach us, and tell us what to pay attention to. Fear, for example, is a hint that you might need to protect yourself. Anger might be a sign that someone has crossed your boundaries.
Listen to the information, figure out why it’s there, and acknowledge it deep inside. Then you can take sensible action if you need to, to ensure things turn out for the best. The feeling will often pass if you act sensibly on the information given.
Not You
Emotions are shared by everybody – they are never yours alone and they don’t mean anything about who you are. Feelings are part of the human condition, and right now, someone else in the world is probably feeling exactly as you do.
At any given moment, we may share in these universal feelings and connect with a particular one – but we didn’t invent them, we don’t own them, and they are never ours to keep. Remembering that can help when you’re feeling a difficult emotion. An emotion is not you ‒ it’s just something you’re experiencing at a particular moment in time.
Ephemeral
Emotions come and go and never last for long. If you’re stuck in sorrow, anger, or grief, remember that it’s actually difficult to sustain an emotion for any length of time. You may feel like you’re sad or grieving for days on end, but if you actually look at the reality, you’ll notice you probably stop for lunch, when you go for a walk, when you talk to a friend, or when you do the dishes. And you probably don’t feel exactly like you did yesterday or last week. Emotions come and go ‒ let them pass, and they will.
