Stepping on the path of Emotional Growth 🌱
Not coming into existence was not an option for us; and unless we absolutely cannot endure it, we will live the life we are given to its end. Even though the end of our life is not really predictable, the quality of it is something we can control to some extent, which gives us a chance to enhance the “how” even if we cannot change the “how long”.
One aspect that contributes greatly to the quality of our life is our emotional well-being and to get there, we need to gain in-depth knowledge of our emotions and ourselves as emotional machines. It’s a given that we want to feel good emotions and move away from bad ones as much as possible. “Good” and “bad” are open to interpretation and relative. Well, in the case of emotions we experience, not really. As long as we are mentally closer to the healthy side of the spectrum, we want to feel universally good emotions (happiness, joy, hope, etc.) and not universally bad emotions (grief, anxiety, fear, etc.). This requires us to first accept that we are capable of emotional growth and second, move in that direction.
What blocks us from growing emotionally?
The short answer is ignorance. But let’s explore that a little bit more.
Many of us have the fixed mindset that we have limited control not only over our life events but over our reactions to these events. We have heard many times people saying “I lost my control”, and “it was out of my control”. What we have not realized is that this unconscious conditioning that is carrying us through life and is putting us in certain situations and in certain emotional states, is rooted in us first not knowing that change is possible and second, how to change.
Ignorance is a disability. It limits us in knowing what we are capable of. Once we move past our ignorance and become passionate learners, our freedom starts to expand. This is the case when we learn how we are emotionally structured, what makes us feel in certain ways and how we can change that. There are solutions both scientific and spiritual we can use according to our preferences.
Whatever solution we choose, once we recognize our limiting beliefs and move past them, growth and emotional well-being become accessible.
How can we approach emotional well-being?
We keep emotions in our mind and body in an encrypted manner & unless something explicitly reminds us of them, we do not have access to them in a clear, verbal format. However, even in their encrypted form, emotions can impact our current perception of the world, our behavior, and our identity to a much greater extent than we would estimate. That’s why we want to move toward emotional well-being and here are a few ways that help us do that:
Expand our Knowledge
Gaining knowledge with the intent of self-improvement can benefit us in many aspects of life. An example could be, if you experience recurring high levels of stress, you can learn about the methods available for stress reduction. One I can introduce that is both scientifically and empirically proven to work is Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) which provides actionable solutions to reduce stress.
Human sciences can provide us with many tools and techniques to improve ourselves in different aspects if we are aware of their existence; and one way to gain awareness is to be avid learners, either by reading books and articles, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, watching videos, or attending courses. It does not mean we should read heavy scientific textbooks that are not easy to digest. There is plenty of easy-to-understand content for the general audience. The path is clear, gaining knowledge enables us to help ourselves and grow.
Journaling Daily about our emotional experiences
One way that we can dig into our subconscious mind and release emotional burdens is through a particular form of journaling.
Journaling daily about emotions we experience helps us think about the emotions we have experienced in a clear way and track down the events or thoughts that may have caused them. In this way, we are giving ourselves a chance to find patterns of recurring emotion-thought-action that may have some deep underlying roots. Once the root cause is recognized and addressed, we may find ourselves free from that pattern and able to experience the world in a fresh way.
Getting help
There are times when we feel something is not working right in our life and we are able to recognize and solve it ourselves. But this is not the case all the time. Sometimes the severity of the situation we are caught up in is too much we feel we cannot survive it. That is usually when we have so much accumulated baggage from the past that at some point, we are unable to handle it all by ourselves. That’s when we should (and really should) seek help from the outside, usually in the form of a therapist or a consultant (it can be a spiritual guide as well, but that’s a topic for another time). Either way, this person can pull us up and give us the help we need to stand on our own feet while showing us how to help ourselves.
Redefine our identity
Emotions are easily accepted as part of our identity. We find them attaching to our definition of our “self”, “I am an anxious person”, “I’m not very happy”, … while emotions are actually impermanent. If we keep a daily log of the emotions we experience through a day or week of our life, we see how transient they are. Our narrative and the way we interpret our emotions matter in how we perceive and experience them. Replacing “I’m an anxious person” with “I am experiencing anxiety right now” makes a great difference. In the second sentence, we don’t define ourselves as anxious people and this distance we acknowledge between our emotion and our “self” is going to show in the quality of our experience of that emotion. In a sense, we will become more self-aware of the emotions we experience throughout our day, and keeping them at a distance does not allow them to take over our control completely.
Our observing self who recognizes the impermanence of the emotion is the one who is eventually in control, and in this way, we break the vicious cycle of the unwanted emotion reinforcing itself in us.
What Comes Next?
We are dynamic systems, meaning we change constantly, even as we speak. And this indicates a constant requirement for evaluation and optimization. We cannot work once on our emotional well-being and think that is enough, nor is it enough to spend a block of intense time on getting better and then letting go of any effort in that area. We need to constantly meet with ourselves and do self-evaluation and optimization. This can be done by setting times daily, monthly, and yearly to sit and assess how we have been and what has happened to us. Then see if we are systematically doing the right things, making the optimal decisions according to our values or not. If yes, that will affirm we are on the right track. But it easily happens that we lose track of our values and goals every now and then or emotionally distressing events happen to us along the way that jolts us out of our path. That’s why regular recalibrations are necessary, and in these sittings with ourselves, if we know how to do self-assessment the right way, we can bring ourselves back on track with minimal effort.
I am interested in personal growth, all forms of it. Follow me for more on this topic.
