We are going to examine how being mindful benefits your emotional health. Mindfulness is the art of tuning into your emotional state of being. It’s becoming aware of yourself, and particularly your emotions. You might think that you are already in-tune with your emotional states, but are you?
Do you recognize when you have experienced an emotion? Or do you realize when you are experiencing a feeling? There is a difference. The first way is past recognition and the second present recognition. Most people are guilty of the former, although they believe they are doing the later.
Being able to decern the difference is what mindfulness of your emotional states is all about. Being emotionally healthy is the ability to recognize your current or present emotional experience. When you intentionally identify what your current emotional state is, you can experience significant improvements in psychological health.
If emotional health is something you want to improve, below are some of the benefits of mindfulness.
Experience Full Emotions
When you practice mindfulness around our emotions, you learn to experience your emotions at their fullest expression.
Suppose you are sitting around a table during the holidays with your closest friends and family. There is delicious tasting food packed on every last inch of the table. There is a sweet and pleasant smell in the air. The sound of laughter and conversation is bouncing off the walls. At that moment, you notice a warm glow deep inside your chest.
What if you were able to identify this warm deep glow inside of you as joy and love in the present moment? Not after the fact—when you reminisced about this memory—but in the present when it occurs.
When you’re mindful about emotions at the moment you are experiencing them; you can also cultivate the feeling and allow it to develop into its fullest expression. You can experience the joy and love to its fullest.
Allowing your emotions to express themselves to their fullest does wonders for your emotional health. It’s much like allowing your body to experience the fullest expression of physical motion, which is good for your physical health. Mindfulness helps you exercise your emotions to their full expression.
Experience a Complexity of Emotions
When you practice mindfulness of your emotions, it also enables you to experience the entire complex array of emotions that you possess.
When you are at the mercy of your emotions—meaning that your feelings occur to you and are entirely outside your control—you will often notice that the same few emotions seem always to be present. You will tend to have a “top tier” set of emotions that seem to dominate the others. They can dominate so much that you soon never see any other emotion surface.
When a few emotions dominate over the rest, it’s not a healthy way to live. Just as going to the gym and only working your calves and biceps creates an imbalance in your musculature, merely expressing a few emotions creates an imbalance in your emotional health.
When you practice mindfulness, you develop the ability to cue into different emotions you possess intentionally. You can experience a wider variety of emotions because you deliberately seek out new emotions and identify them when they occur. Being mindful benefits emotional health and leads to a more balanced and exciting emotional state.
Experience the Right Emotion
Finally, practicing mindfulness helps you experience the right emotion for the situation. When you are not mindful of your emotional state, a feeling that is not well suited for the occasion might present itself.
A very hurtful and sad experience can happen to you, for example, and anger boils up in you. If you don’t practice mindfulness, you might unconsciously experience this emotion and therefore display a behavior that is not well-suited for the situation. Using anger can lead you to experience more distress, anxiety, and pain.
A person adept at practicing mindfulness, on the other hand, would be able to identify the current emotions they are experiencing and determine whether or not they need to pivot and access a different feeling that would be more effective for the situation. Mindfulness applied in this manner allows you to function in a healthier emotional space.
Being mindful benefits emotional health, and the reward it brings is a state of wellbeing. It is your choice to be aware of your emotions and experience all that life has to offer or react to your feelings and put yourself in a cage.
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