Navigating Your Daily Emotional World

Each of us is beautifully unique, layered, and complex. No two people share the same perspectives, experiences, or thought patterns, even moment to moment!

I love helping women who struggle with the same issues I’ve faced - and occasionally still do (let's be real; the work never ends, but we expand our capacity to handle more!).

Moment by moment, we interact with and respond to our internal and external environment. Literally, moment by moment. In fact, renowned neuroscientist Caroline Leaf suggests we should check in with ourselves every 10 seconds with awareness. Yes, that does sound exhausting - but there’s benefit in it.

When we don't regularly check in, we risk slipping into unconsciousness, losing track of our constantly shifting emotional state. This includes our thought processes, habitual patterns, and behavioral choices. When we go unconscious in our day-to-day lives, we might find ourselves in a mood or state of mind that feels off, without understanding what triggered us into it initially leading us to incorrectly attribute it to something else or externalizing your unmet emotional needs.

The more you become aware of your emotions and thoughts throughout the day, the more you learn about yourself, which is empowering! You can start to notice patterns, which is incredibly helpful. We experience drastic shifts week to week due to our monthly cycle, and when you add past traumas and societal pressures, you can easily find yourself overwhelmed and lost or confused.

To start enjoying your day-to-day life more and gaining greater emotional resilience, begin with awareness. Awareness is the foundation for real, powerful change from within. How can you address a problem if you’re unaware of what it truly is? It’s like deciding to change a recipe without knowing what’s in the original - you're just guessing, without a framework to guide you towards perfecting the recipe, or until the problem is resolved.

Here are my top tips to begin your emotional awareness journey:

1. Recognise the shift. You were in a good mood, or feeling neutral or content, and now you’re unsettled or down. What changed? What did you experience through your senses - sight, sound, taste, smell, touch, and importantly, what thoughts are running through your mind, between then and now?

2. Zoom out. Look at your emotional state over the course of a week. What’s the predominant emotion? Sometimes we miss trends because we’re too immersed in the busyness of our lives. By stepping back, you might notice patterns - perhaps you feel tired and fatigued a lot, and it correlates with something specific in your life.

3. Identify your main life emotion. We often have one or two negative emotions that dominate our lives. For me, it’s been fear. What’s yours? The five main negative emotions are anger, sadness, fear, hurt, and guilt. If you identify something like agitation, dig deeper - agitation is often a manifestation of anger.

These aren’t healing strategies; they’re tools for building awareness, which is a great step toward healing.

Learn about yourself - your patterns, habits, behavioral tendencies, thought processes, emotional responses, and how your internal and external communication changes with these shifts.

This is empowerment!