Are you happy?
Are you sad?
A little excited maybe
Or don’t know how you feel?
Are you amused?
Or a bit confused?
Whatever it may be
Let’s learn why it all matters.
Why it counts
Emotions are like colour of the sky over our heads. Sometimes, it is blue, sometimes it is cloudy with sun, red at times, orange at others, starry at night, or maybe shining with a moon, rainy at times and sometimes a strange mix of many of these colours which is hard to define.
Our emotions work in the same way, we cannot change or decide how we feel, it just happens and keeps changing as our surroundings change or as our bodies go through various phases.
Primarily there are 7 defined emotions viz. joy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, contempt, and sadness. These 7 emotions result in the 25 secondary emotions. We put labels of good and bad to these feelings and emotions. For instance, being happy or amused are considered as good emotions and being sad is considered negative and bad by many of us. However, emotion can or should not be classified as good or bad, they are all emotions, equally important and which cannot be and should not be suppressed. They describe our psychological state, what we are going through and are not generated consciously but sub-consciously.
Emotions are an essential part of our psychology that influence our short term and long term decisions, they influence the way we behave.
Our body works like a machine throughout the day and just like any machine there are two things which remain constant, input and output. We get a whole lot of inputs throughout the day, be it the music we are listening to or the movie we are watching, a phone conversation or a breakup. These inputs affect our functioning and our body generates feelings and emotions in turn. Now we come to the next and the final step which is the output. This can be in many forms and generally is our behaviour and reaction to the inputs we have received. For a successful and positive output, we need to understand our feelings and express them and move to the next task.
If we do not follow any of the steps in the functioning of our machines, then surely it will land in some problem which can either be psychological or physical in nature.
By expression of emotions, we do not mean that we need to exaggerate it. Exaggeration can make some situations worse, we should try and forget the source of the emotion. For example, if we are very angry and our day has been bad, we should not think who or what made us so angry but we should accept the emotion. Talk to ourselves and accept that yes, I am angry and it is okay. We do not have to overthink the situation, but try to feel our emotion, be aware and accept and let it go once we realise that the phase of that emotion is over.
Doing so will help us build a new perspective towards our feelings, help us feel better and above all it will help us know ourselves better. Understanding our emotions and accepting them will help our body and mind learn how to react to any emotion and neither suppress them nor exaggerate them. This will help in better decision making, sense of relief and a sense of control over ourselves.
To all our problems, expression is the key and we should understand that the more we express, the better we become. Like mentioned earlier, emotions are like colour of the sky, the sky will not be called sky without its colours and the beauty of the sky is not because it remains the same always but admiration comes for its diversity. We, humans are like this sky and the colours of this sky are our emotions, suppressing even one of these colours makes us incomplete. Lets accept our emotions for all emotions matter equally, if we do not know the importance of a setting sun we won't be able to cherish the rise of the sun with same intensity. Similarly, if we do not feel or know sadness or experience different types of emotions, we would not know what happiness is!
Authored by Arsh Aggarwal
Edited by Clownselors
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