We were mainly reflecting on the meanings of a wide spectrum of emotions. How they evolve? How do we perceive them differently? We further talked about how we can become more self-aware, and this encouraged me to read and reflect more on the following:
What is self-awareness?
How can we start our self-awareness journey?
What is emotion? (I am using the word emotions and feelings interchangeably as they are close enough to my understanding {but they are not the same})
Where do emotions originate from? Why do we know and experience some while others are vague to us?
The above questions encouraged me to search further on how our brains work.
Some define self-awareness as the degree to which we are in touch with our body, feelings, and our intuition. On the others explain self-awareness as recognizing when we are experiencing a feeling or emotion inside of us. Then we need to name/label this emotion and then decide how to manage/regulate the emotion so we can choose how to behave (self-management).
It’s factual that developing self-awareness has a critical role to play in how we think, how we feel, and how we act–and how we react to our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Now I know becoming more self-aware can help me understand my wants, needs, and desires, as well as identifying my strengths and weaknesses and more. The exercise of identifying our strengths and weaknesses was a tough one – I’m still visiting it every day to see if my lists are changing- It’s challenging to be honest about it, or sometimes it’s difficult to admit it or reveal it to ourselves from ourselves…
Though I am committed and eager to identify my strengths and weaknesses for further self-development, I find it hard to write them down. Sometimes I feel writing evokes certain emotions, and sometimes, I write things for the sake of comforting myself. I am also working on journaling my emotions at least twice daily. Sometimes I feel stuck☹ I felt I need to go back and understand more about emotions and our brain to understand how the process of thinking-feeling -acting work inside of us and where is the challenge source.
How does our brain process emotions?
Based on the anatomy of our brains, it’s factual that our emotional brain has the power to influence our behavior before our rational brain knows what is happening. When the part of our brain that is emotional overrides the part of our brain that is rational, it can result in inappropriate reactions that can sabotage our success. I need to capture myself at this moment-practice realizing the emotion and not reacting before thinking. This requires practice until it becomes unconscious competence.
We are aware that any emotion that we have -we know it or we don’t know- is the end product of past experiences in life. And to start our self-awareness journey, it’s vital to recognize and understand emotions. It’s a skill to realize and acknowledge them. Knowing how to tap into our own emotions when they happen and how they manifest in our body is a great step. A further step is to know how to name those emotions – naming the same unnamed emotion can have different meanings. It evokes different feelings to different people with different intensity depending on the situation, different mindset, and reactions (from our perspective and others’ perspectives).
