Learning to communicate your emotions more effectively can impact your physical and psychological health and improve the quality of your relationships at home and at work.
Do you ever feel like your emotions are beyond your ability to express? One quick trick is to stop for 10 seconds when feeling upset and determine if your feelings are in line with what’s actually happening. Once you’ve assessed this, you can use the tips below to communicate your feelings appropriately.
1. Put a positive spin on things
An early step to managing our emotions involves evaluating a situation, and then shedding a positive light on it. You might feel anxious before a job performance review if, for example, you believe you will be judged on your skills.
But if you consider the review an opportunity to learn more about how you can succeed, you might instead feel eager and confident. Your efforts shift from masking anxiety in the meeting to expressing confidence.
2. Stop suppression
Suppression is an unhealthy practice of bottling up your feelings by restraining your verbal or physical expression. This quick fix offers immediate relief of your anxieties, but in the long term results in the accumulation of unresolved negative feelings.
Holding emotions in requires an ongoing effort that’s mentally and socially draining. Suppression has been linked, for example, to poor memory, particularly of conversations with others and recent emotional events.
3. Watch for disconnects
The divide between your inner feelings and your outer self also leads to a negative self-evaluation—that feeling of being untrue to yourself. Suppression can cause you to alienate yourself from others, making it even harder to open up.
4. Listen to your body
Unexpressed feelings can even have a measurable impact on the beating of the heart. Stress caused by pent-up emotions can increase your blood pressure, accelerate your heart rate and arouse your sympathetic nervous system.
5. Ask a pro
Effective communication is a learned skill. A professional psychological counselor can help refine your technique. A counselor could, for example, look for physical signs of emotion and help you translate these into words. They may give you tips for nonverbal communication at home: for example, holding hands with a loved one while going for a walk.
6. Practice reframing
When you’re ready to talk, reframe sentences to remove blame from a statement and shift the focus to yourself. For example, we might be inclined to say, “You don’t love me,” but a less threatening statement is: “I feel unloved.”
Communicate better: the cheat sheet
- In personal relationships, hold hands or hug to transfer your emotions through body language.
- Reframe statements by removing blame or threat.
- If you’re not ready to talk, put your feelings down in writing.
- Enroll in assertiveness training to improve your functional communication.
- Seek advice from a registered professional counselor.
