My blog
Thoughts and reflections from my experience and from relevant literature. I hope you find it useful.
Why should we pay more attention to our feelings and emotions?
Through society and our education, we are often obliged to only follow our rational minds and not to allow ourselves to be distracted by our emotions. “Emotions and feelings can overwhelm you, only the mind can help you”, is a sentence that rings in many heads. Use your brain, only the weak follow their heart. And of course, no one wants to be overwhelmed by their feelings and emotions.
But the feelings and emotions are there anyways! They make us human beings. They allow us to empathize with others and care for each other. But also, bad feelings and emotions have their meaning. They tell us what's not good for us. They signal us when we need to change something. That is why it’s called “a gut feeling”, which sits in the stomach or the intuition that sits in the chest area. These are other sources of information that we should not leave unused.
If we now ignore the bad feelings and emotions because we think we must not feel them, it will be difficult. It can take a lot of energy to suppress these feelings and emotions. It has been described as, —it ́s like trying to push a ball under water. But some of us are really good at it. However, if the force decreases, the feelings and emotions come up again and this time with much greater force and quite uncontrolled (just like the ball that was under water, pops up). This is the moment when our environment only sees our anger, rage, aggression or pure violence. You fight uncontrollably and may hurt your fellow people. Or we can go on suppressing the feelings and emotions until the body doesn't know how to help itself and gets sick.
Therefore, it is important to get access to your feelings and emotions and learn how to read them correctly. Because they give us important information about what is right and important to us. We can learn to accept the situation that makes us frustrated or angry, either with a peaceful feeling or if that does not work then try to make some changes. It's the inner struggle that costs so much energy and makes you sick.