Emotional Self-awareness: What It Is, What It Is For, And How To Enhance It

People with little emotional awareness usually 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 explode in the long term, thus causing sensations such as stress, tension, anger and/or anxiety, being very harmful to your health.

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

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.

What is emotional self-awareness?

When we talk about emotional self-awareness we refer to 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 it requires effort and training 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 high emotional intelligence, that construct that was initially used by Wayne Payne, although it was as a result of the psychologist’s book Daniel Goleman, which is why 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 various feelings and be able to label them appropriately.

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 skill to have various situations under control in order to act in the most correct way possible.

What function does emotional self-awareness serve?

Developing correct emotional self-awareness involves 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 daily lives in different areas of our lives, allowing us Be aware about our most fundamental goals and our values

Furthermore, 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 also 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 a subjective level that have arisen due to emotions, as well as by those behaviors carried out by people with the purpose to change some conditions that have been caused by some emotion.

All of 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 a correct emotional self-awareness developed? Well, emotional self-awareness helps you connect with your own emotions and thus learn to master them in order that it is not the emotions that dominate the person in certain circumstances, but that it is the person who takes the reins and thus can dominate their emotions and their actions; all within reasonable limits.

Some examples of what it is for

As we well know, in our daily lives we experience an endless number of emotions, so we are quite used to experiencing them, so it is quite common that we are not aware of our emotions and therefore we do not know the cause of them. Therefore, we are going to comment on some examples of emotional self-awareness that is quite common to experience on a daily basis.

Let’s think about the emotion of joy, a quite pleasant emotion which is usually identified quite easily. This emotion is usually experienced in pleasant and rewarding situations, such as a reunion with old friends or family 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 these types of situations, 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 fear. Let’s imagine that we are afraid of flying on an airplane 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 is rational in them? Are we aware of our actions and our activation at a physiological level in these types of situations?

Developing correct emotional self-awareness could go hand in hand with an exhaustive analysis of these types of situations that cause 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 reach us. be a nuisance 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 face these types of situations in a more adaptive way.

Lastly, it should be said that Not in all situations it is easy to have correct emotional self-awareness since sometimes we could be experiencing a variety of emotions at the same time (e.g., simultaneously experiencing sadness, frustration, etc.) so it would be difficult to identify them easily and therefore it would be more difficult to regulate them appropriately, Therefore, a greater effort would be necessary to be able to analyze them carefully until we become aware of all of them.

Tips to improve emotional self-awareness

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

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

When training emotional self-awareness, the first thing a person should try to do is establish a connection with the emotions they experience in different everyday situations, trying to give them enough space to emerge, 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 to have greater awareness of their own emotions and this is the first step to try to have greater control over them. To achieve this, the routine of filling out an emotions diary can help.

It is very important to be aware of one’s own emotions and to be able to develop control over 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 various situations and how he reacts to them, analyzing his decisions and actions in those cases.

Sometimes it would be necessary to decide at what moments and under what circumstance it would be positive to make a change, being necessary to control the emotions that emerge at those moments, previously becoming aware of them and, if necessary, transforming them. These actions could be very beneficial in people’s lives, making it easier for them to deal with those situations that are most complicated for them in their daily lives, as well as any setback for which they could be prepared through training.

Finally, it is important to highlight that to develop correct emotional self-awareness you must be clear about your own objectives and values, since for a person to be in tune with their emotions and thus control both their emotional states and their 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 that cognitive dissonance occurs in your mind by which an internal tension develops in the system of emotions, ideas and beliefs, thus entering into an internal conflict.

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