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Are You Really Aware of Your Feelings and Emotions?

True and Interesting Fact:  The average human has about 6 thousand thoughts a day, many of which are repeating thoughts.

PsychCentral suggests that we want to be aware of what we tell ourselves so that we —rather than our emotions—direct our choices.  They also reveal that cognitive abilities do not fully develop until the mid-20′s.

So why is it so important to keep our emotions under control? Well, they say that our thoughts activate emotion driven processes within us, which includes negative as well as positives reactions.

So how can we control our feelings and emotional awareness?   The first thing to recognize is that events and people’s actions may trigger unpleasant feelings and reactions, but they do not cause them.   What causes our painful feelings is what we tell ourselves about those situations.

Our feelings are indicators, according to this article, of when we are off track in relation to where we want to be (i.e. our goals/visions).  It is important for us to be in-tune with our painful and unpleasant emotions such as anger, guilt, shame, hurt and anxiety because they provide information that pleasant emotions cannot.

Here are 6 steps to help you understand and process your emotions:

1.  Select a triggering situation to process.

2.  Identify and feel your emotions and feelings.

3.  Feel and notice the location of any sensations in your body.

4.  Accept your feelings, and be confident that you can handle the emotion(s) and sensations.

5.  Identify what you tell yourself in your mind that is triggering any painful emotions.

6.  Connect empathically to understand and validate your experience.

Smile! You’ll Look Younger

Forget Botox to make you look younger.  New research suggests that the mere act of smiling makes you look younger than you are.

NewsMaxHealth writes that the Institute for Human Development (Max Planck Institute) in Berlin has published a study, in Psychology and Aging and the journal of Emotion Cognition, that found that smiling makes people look more attractive and therefore younger.

The study included 154 German men and women of various ages.  The participants were asked to examine more than 2,000 photographs of 171 people and then estimate their age.

The study’s findings purport that, “Facial expressions had a substantial impact on accuracy and bias of age estimation.  Relative to other facial expressions, the age of neutral faces was estimated most accurately, while the age of faces displaying happy expressions was most likely underestimated.”

Blood Pressure and Emotional Cues

Now there is another reason to keep that blood pressure in check.  New research suggests that high blood pressure can lead to an inability to recognize and process emotions especially happiness, sadness, anger and fear.

A recent study conducted by Clemson University psychology professor James A. McCubbin and colleagues has shown that people with higher blood pressure have reduced ability to recognize certain emotions in others.

This can prove difficult in situations where reading other’s facial expressions are crucial such as at work or in meetings.

“Emotional Dampening”  as McCubbin has dubbed it, causes individuals to  respond inappropriately to anger or other emotions in others.

McCubbin believes that the link between dampening of emotions and blood pressure is its involvement  in the development of hypertension and risk for coronary heart disease, the biggest killer of both men and women in the U.S.

An interesting finding of this study is that McCubbin’s theory of emotional dampening applies to positive emotions as well.  “If you have emotional dampening, you may distrust others because you cannot read emotional meaning in their face or their verbal communications,” he said. “You may even take more risks because you cannot fully appraise threats in the environment.”

Do you think this preliminary research needs to be ongoing before making such conclusions? Or Do you fully agree perhaps because you know someone or are that someone who has high blood pressure and who shows signs of  “emotional dampening”?