The amount of shame that circulates around the showcasing of human emotion is crazy. We’re set in a world where wearing your heart on your sleeve is weak and matching people’s negative energy is the norm. Living in an era where social media is so prominent, we’re always consuming noise. Social media creators like to use your humanity against you. If you’re burnt out, that means you’re lazy. If you care, you’re soft.
There are healthy emotions, and there are unhealthy emotions; positive and negative. However, no emotion is wrong. It’s not a matter of shutting off your emotions, but acknowledging and regulating them. Your emotions are trying to tell you something, and by blocking them out, you’re basically covering your hears and refusing to listen. But one thing about an emotion, it will make you listen. And it probably won’t be at the most convenient time.
Healthy emotions are defined by how you respond to them. For example, jealousy can be both constructive and destructive. In the sense of feeling jealous to fuel what you may lack or yearn for in your life, jealousy is healthy. It’s an emotion shedding light onto what you can work towards, or what you can change. Jealousy fueled by hatred is unhealthy; when you miss the bigger picture and just dislike or judge someone for reasons you may not even be aware of. In effectively analyzing your emotions, you deal with them in a way that benefits you without shaming the other.
Emotions are teachers, but they are not leaders. And as we tread through the different seasons of our lives, we need certain emotions. Sometimes we feel exhausted because our body is begging us to slow down. We feel envy because we lack something we want; lost because we’re misaligned. You are not at fault for feeling anything. So stop beating yourself up for being what you’re designed to be- human.
Emotional regulation starts with emotional acceptance. You must be willing to feel everything, releasing the urge to control or ignore them. A great way to regulate your emotions is to unplug. Energy transfers are real and powerful. Between the noise of social media and the people around you, we don’t realize how much we take in emotions that aren’t fully ours. And isolating ourselves for just a moment can reset our emotional system, allowing us to take ownership of our emotions and throw away others.
You may want to believe that you’re nonchalant, care-free, and emotionless, but that’s a lie you tell yourself because you lack vulnerability. And you need to reframe the perception that emotions slow you down. There are genuinely people out there that assign shame to people who lead with love, and mistake being positive with naiveness. There’s a fine line between wanting to put out good energy and being oblivious. By now, we know life comes with it’s rewards and it’s challenges. But extrapolation, the projection of a single experience into a long-term assumption about life, is built from bitterness. And if you see kindness as weakness, you’re the problem. If you project your negative experiences onto others, you’re adding fuel to a nasty fire.
I used to feel I was behind in my life because that’s what was being yelled in my ear and plastered in my face. But when I really sit back and think about it, I don’t think I’m behind at all. I think I’m making the best of my circumstances, and by internalizing the assumptions others had about my journey, I was unhappy. But that wasn’t my emotion to take on. Misery is an emotion that loves company, and will stay for as long as you let it.
Spending time alone is important so we can assess our triggers and respond rather than react. I knew a guy once who could not regulate his emotions to save his life. It wasn’t that he was overreacting, he just didn’t know how to deal with his emotions. He’d blow up and make terrible decisions, causing people to not want to be around him. He was angry, which was valid. He’d went through a lot. But when he felt that anger, he’d let it take over every part of him and project that anger onto those closest to him. Terrible energy transfer. While I no longer have access to this person due to that negative energy transfer, I hope he found some sense of relief in managing his circumstances.
Your emotions should never be in the drivers seat, you’ll get run off the road. Emotions are the GPS trying to guide you, not take the wheel completely. In high intensity situations, our ability to think rationally is impaired. So if we lose control of the wheel, we will literally make the worst decisions. Emotional regulation is extremely imperative to our well-being, especially since we experience so many at different times of the day.
Your humanity allows you to feel both life’s joys and it’s triumphs. You cannot pick and choose what you want to acknowledge. Life is a beautiful sequence of trial and error. It’s a constant learning curve; a consistent self evaluation. Once you accept that emotions are a non-negotiable, you learn to use them to your advantage rather than see them as a roadblock. Emotions are meant to be fleeting, but if you don’t give them room to be felt in their entirety, they’ll sneak behind you and take the reigns themselves- and they won’t do it kindly.
Your humanity is a gift, not a burden.
