The wee hours of the night found me against the sudden onslaught of feelings, sensitizing my emotional well-being. Had I known how overwhelming they would be for my mental health and create sleep problems for me, I would have set healthy boundaries. Instead, I let them become a deluge and disrupt my emotional well-being. My mistake: I blatantly ignored my feelings. But I learned my lesson. So, staying in touch with your feelings can prevent being engulfed by this deluge.
Often, the feelings that besiege us have been quietly accumulating as we go on with our lives. We ignore these minor emotional undercurrents while they silently grow and become the deluge that we experience. Their source can be anything—work, family, or relationships. When I took on this exciting responsibility for my blog, I failed to understand the major lifestyle changes it would bring. I ignored the emotional rollercoaster ride, deeming the associated emotions minor or irrelevant. Thankfully, my curated self-care practices for my busy day help relieve some stress.
I was so caught up with my projects that I found myself deeply ensconced in my unchecked feelings. I believe that this temporary safety net is the antidote I much needed, but it would be churlish of me to propagate this lie. To protect mental peace and encourage emotional development, certain healthy habits can help you get in touch with your feelings.
Acknowledge your feelings for better mental health
The ebbs and flows of emotions are elusive to our grasp, but the feelings can be controlled. The innate ability of emotions to surface suddenly makes them difficult to control. But they often challenge our misconceptions. That angriness in your voice, when you are hurt, is an example of having no control over your feelings. Getting hurt isn’t a conscious choice, but how you respond to it is in your hands. This engulfs us in a thick cloud of questioning our emotions later, intensifying its power by knocking in irrelevant thoughts.
Intrusive thoughts often bring calamities with them. You are reading your favorite book, and suddenly, you remember your colleague’s statement that made you lose focus. It was an irrelevant statement, yet it held so much power over your thoughts that it came unannounced. Consequently, you struggle to focus on your current task of reading the book. Who was the culprit here? You, because you didn’t address it right then.
Why are thoughts intrusive? Or, more accurately, why does your mind permit irrelevant thoughts to infiltrate your stream of consciousness? Mind is a wayward child who likes to roam freely. So, like a child, you need to nurture but instill discipline to not run away to unproductive territories. Certain healthy habits can form mental barriers and encourage thoughts to be gentle.
Differences between feelings and emotions
Feelings and emotions often tiptoe through our minds like two uninvited guests. Understanding their nuances can transform the way we interpret the world within and around us. Emotions are deeply rooted in our subconscious and behave as weather patterns in the mind, causing powerful storms. Emotions can be sudden and overwhelming and momentarily alter our perception. Emotions are categorized as fear, hurt, joy, sadness, disgust, etc. These primal emotions are bodily sensations that can manifest anytime in us.
Feelings are the tales we tell ourselves about these weather patterns. They are the conscious responses to these emotions that change with our mental conceptions. If emotions are rain, then feelings are the umbrella we choose or the reflections we have while sitting in the window and watching it pass. Feelings are personal and infused with our unique memories and beliefs. The reaction to one emotion may produce different results for two people. Where emotion is simply fear, the feeling might be a violent action to protect ourselves or a nuanced dread of failure.
Emotions are unignorable, but you must master them to develop good emotional intelligence. But as we become more attuned to our feelings, any situational distress can be handled skillfully without getting us trapped in the dance of complexity. Simple healthy habits, helped me navigate away from the noise of critical thoughts.
5 Healthy ways to be in touch with your feelings
Create a safe space for yourself
Find a place (or create one if you have to) to engage in stimulating conversations with yourself. Here, self-reflection can bring optimal results when you feel safe and secure in your personal space. The idea of not allowing anyone physically to enter your holy space fortifies and consolidates the belief that no one can trouble your mental peace. Your space should be organized, not messy. Make your bed clutter-free, fold the bed sheets properly, etc.
A cluttered environment often mirrors a cluttered mind. This chaotic space quickly leads you to overthink, and you lose control as clarity departs. This loss spirals into the creation of irrational scenarios and unfounded conclusions. This intoxication, with misguided narratives, compounds the effects of overwhelming feelings on our mental health. We often get pulled in a million directions, facing various feelings. A safe space helps us remain connected with the full spectrum of our feelings. These daily rituals offer some respite and can help you get in touch with your feelings.
Be picky with your attention
Take some respite from struggling to give voice to every thought. Not all thoughts need your attention. Some are just fleeting considerations, that’s all! Forgive me for making it sound like epiphanic talk. There’s something magical and liberating about not giving attention to pessimistic thoughts. Let them remain uninvited as you shut doors on them. I crafted a healthy morning routine that includes a powerful activity, meditation, that helps guide me in refocusing.
Daily meditative practices often stop these thoughts from permeating your stream of consciousness. Focusing on one breath at a time improves your attention and teaches you the art of selective focus. Through daily practice, you tame your mind to selectively prioritize between important and unsolicited feelings. However, it’s common to misjudge our feelings, mistakenly interpreting them as permanent fixtures of our lives. But our moment-to-moment experiences shape them. Meditation teaches us to concentrate on a single point that truly matters to our emotional well-being.
Daily journaling is a powerful medicine
Why do I say this confidently? My confidence stems from my personal experience with daily journaling about my feelings. I observed significant lifestyle changes. Consistency is the key to journaling, and if you are arduously committed, you will enjoy its remarkable results. Our unattended thoughts need a release to stop them from resurfacing in unexpected ways. The act of releasing encumbered thoughts through journaling is transformative, allowing you to be in touch with your feelings.
Apart from clarity, daily journaling boasts undeniable benefits: better serotonin rush, reduced stress levels, embracing calmness, and I could go on. Adding this self-care practice to your routine has a long-lasting effect on your mind. So, grab the pen and rant out whatever comes to mind, even trivial thoughts. I prefer physical journaling over a digital journal, but you should choose what you are comfortable with.
Get busy with an engaging activity
An empty mind is the devil’s workshop, a proverb that perfectly encapsulates the reality of an afflicted mind. A mind starved of creative juices falls prey to cooked scenarios (or inflates trivial issues). However, creative exercises can elicit rational thinking from the same mind, improving your emotional well-being and mental health.
I chose to engage in writing a creative piece every day. This daily writing ritual saved me from succumbing to overwhelming emotions; it was like defusing a ticking time bomb. I effectively sidestepped the emotional minefield by engaging in my daily writing ritual. My writing ritual promised me a sparking romance in my mundane life, and I love coming back to this habit. Find an engaging activity for your mind, and use it as a channeling medium to be in touch with your feelings.
Accept the fear of failure
The fear of failure is a universal human experience that often acts as a formidable barrier to our personal growth. This overt fear weakens our strength to push boundaries for growth and instead pulls us away from understanding our feelings. My prolonged struggle with this fear gradually dissipated through consistent self-awareness practices—recognizing, accepting, and choosing every day to pursue my dreams.
One thing I realized is that you shouldn’t dismiss this feeling and pretend that you are not scared. The fear lingered in the back of my mind when I transitioned from a career in engineering to one in literature. Many clouds of unwarranted anxiety undermined my efforts. Had I been more confident and expected challenges, I could have changed my internal narrative from self-doubt to determination. The openness of this acceptance allows us to truly feel our feelings. We expose our vulnerabilities, bringing greater clarity and compassion within us. Being in touch with your feelings embraces this fear, connecting us on deeper emotional levels. We feel safe knowing there’s an emotional home to come back to, and that is enough.
Before I conclude,
Every person has a fatal flaw: they often battle with their feelings. Being conscious of your feelings is a journey of self-introspection and self-resuscitation. We are all part of this journey, walking or running at our paces. Even on our best days, we tend to lose our focus due to some random thought that occupies our mind associated with that feeling. Making a conscious effort to be in touch with your feelings improves your mental health.
Many impactful events occurred in the last few years of my life that changed me as a person; a docile sheep transmogrified into a courageous wolf, leading with courage. I am grateful for those events because their repercussions made me intentional and engaged vehemently with my life choices. I went through those feelings, unguided and vulnerable, yet emerged stronger.