There is a unique quality in human beings, which gives them an edge over all the other creations of God -the ability to express their feelings.

Expressing feelings or emotions is a simple way to understand information for, and about, us. The art of expressing a ‘feeling’ is nothing but the creative de-coding of how exactly the ‘feeling’ wants to come out, so that you can avoid ‘feeling’ the worse for it.

Sadly, in today’s materialistic and fast-paced world, expressing one’s feelings or emotions is often considered weak, or foolish. But, it should also be known that the inability to express one’s feelings is a facet of emotional immaturity. The art of expressing emotions need to be taught, at least to those who have problem in understand their own feelings.

The best way to express one’s feelings is to talk about them… share them with someone; this keeps us from sulking into depression. But it often happens that, even through personal interactions, people are not able to express their feelings completely. They tend to hide or suppress what they are feeling either because they don’t want to reveal their feelings in front of anyone, or because they don’t know how to express them. Whatever the reason, the act of suppressing one’s feelings can cause mental illness (depression), which is the major cause of many health issues today. Almost 80% of the health issues today are related to stress and other forms of emotional baggage.

Why? Simply  because we decide to quell our emotions rather than express them, and the only reason certain emotions (for e.g. anger or grief) become a problem is because they’re not properly dealt with. Dealing with emotions is nothing but really allowing oneself to feel the emotions as and when they arise within us. When we feel angry, we should allow ourselves to feel that anger, and vent it out in some form or the other, without causing any harm to others, or oneself.

Some well known ways to do this are punching a pillow, martial arts, hitting the ground with your cricket bat or badminton racket. But, if you are not comfortable with any of these, then there is a better alternative – penning your feelings down, or the modern alternative – typing your emotions!

Let all those suppressed emotions come alive in an MS-word File, or write an e-mail about them but don’t send it to anyone, or, better still, write a blog. And, if you don’t want people to read it, then keep the posts private. When you search for words to express your emotions, you get in touch with your real feelings. Those who have a better understanding of their feelings, have better ways of coping up with both positive as well as negative emotions.

It is often said that the head and the heart should work together to take better decisions.  The reason is that the heart feels (emotional thinker), whereas the head thinks (logical thinker). And when the heart feels, nothing is bad or wrong. The sole objective of the heart is to Love everything that comes its way, even the negative emotions. So, it’s the logical thinker’s responsibility to help the emotional thinker to acknowledge and understand emotions, so that they can be dealt with properly.

Image courtesy: andreyutzu from sxc.hu