We all know it’s important, but we don’t always do it when we actually should: talking about your feelings. In this blog I will explain why talking about your feelings is important and how you improve your skills of talking about feelings. 

Emotions are a form of communication

Expressing emotions is important for your wellbeing, but emotions are also an essential part of communication. Emotions are not just for yourself, but they are also signals to others. How can someone deal with you in the best possible way? For example, if others notice a tear, they probably will react a bit more caring, while a smile maybe provoke a more amicable reaction. 

But what if you can’t properly identify someone’s emotional state? There is a big chance you will cross someone’s boundaries! How frustrating can it be if you’re feeling the need to be heard, but you receive an exciting story? Some emotions can’t be identified so easy. These emotions are more internal. It can be pretty difficult for someone to notice what’s going on when you’re not talking about it.

Why don’t we talk?

We often find ourselves having difficulties opening up and being vulnerable, because we are afraid of the reaction. We are afraid the other will find us negative, weak or perhaps a nag. The fear of a negative judgment makes us decide to keep things to ourselves. In that way you increase the chance that others will cross your borders or that you will keep walking around for too long with negative feelings. You don’t want that!

Tips

But how do you do it? Share your emotions is not always easy. Ask yourself these questions. It will give you more insight.

  • Consider this: how much emotions are there with someone who complains about the rain and how much emotions are there when someone wants to express his heart? The emotions are different. Do not be afraid that you will be seen as a nag. People see the emotions when you tell a story that really touches you.
  • Which emotions do you see by the other person? Often you see in someone’s eyes, the attitude and the tone and the way you talk that something is happening. Body language betrays a lot.
  • But there’s more. We humans are social animals and we are emotionally smarter than you think. You often feel if something is wrong. So think about it: someone sees this as well as you do.
  • Then ask yourself how you would find it if you see someone else that something is there, but the person does not tell. You would find that annoying, wouldn’t you? Therefore tell what is on your heart.
  • Ask yourself: if someone else trusts you and wants to express her or his heart to you. Would you find that weak? Or do you like that someone appreciates you for coming to you for support? Probably the latter. So realize that you appreciate it for other people if you air your heart with them.

Start a conversation

Give it a try and see how your environment reacts. Of course you don’t have to tell your life story right away. You can start with something small! Plan an event outside of your comfort zone in the NiceDay app and afterwards describe what happened. See if what actually happened matches your expectations.

Coach your own inner world 

One way to deal with difficult feelings and inner conflict is to see your own inner world as a team which you are the coach of. By identifying who your players are and how they relate within your team, you learn to understand yourself better and it helps to make choices that are right for you.  

Team rules

Within your team, there are some principles that are important to remember:

  1. Every teammate has the same goal: the best for you and the team. 
  2. Teammates may have different views on what is best for the team.
  3. Every teammate is equally important and has the same potential to contribute something to the team. 
  4. You are ultimately responsible. Teammates may give input, but as a coach, you decide the strategy every time. 
  5. You cannot expel anyone from the team. 

 

Teammates

Decide for yourself what your team looks like and give them their own names. For example: fear, uncertainty, calm, the critical voice, the angel, the shadow, the slacker. Some teammates are similar, like disappointment and regret or sadness and anger. Other teammates are diametrically opposed in their views, such as fear and courage or self-compassion and self-criticism. 

Teammates also have different personalities or experiences. For instance, you have loud screamers, silent forces and shy types, some feel misunderstood, are angry or no longer want to participate, others are still very young, underdeveloped or performing below their capabilities. You know best who is who. You can make a list of teammates playing and sitting on the bench, or you can get creative and draw them!

 

Feedback 

As a coach, you have the important task of keeping the team functioning, performing and developing. And for this, 1 thing is crucial: feedback. 

  • You listen to teammates who want to contribute something and assess whether the feedback is justified. Note that you cannot always keep everyone happy. You give feedback to individual teammates. 
  • You give feedback to individual teammates. For example, if they draw too much attention or their attitude in the team harms others. 
  • You give feedback to the team as a group. For example, if there is too little cooperation or why you switch strategies once. 
  • You gather feedback by tracking out different strategies. If things go wrong at once, this is actually valuable for the team’s interest. 
  • You provide space for teammates to provide each other with feedback. For example, if ‘Self-compassion’ can learn something from ‘Perfectionism’.
  • You pay attention to feedback that is not constructive. For example, if ‘Abandonment Anxiety’ tells ‘Anger’ to keep intervening explosively. 

 

Simulate conversation

Now that the teammates and your role and tasks are clear, you can get started by having conversations with your team. A good starting point is to find out which teammates get too much or too little attention and why. Or you can investigate which teammates are still underdeveloped, why that is and what they need. Then you give these teammates a voice and engage with them. This could look like this, for example:

Rest: Do you know what it’s like to be ignored all the time? At some point I’ll cut it out and just shut up. 

You (Coach): Showing other teammates that hard work pays off. I like listening to them because they give results. 

Rest: But I can also contribute something to the team? And have you realised that the team is starting to get tired?

Fear: But soon things will go completely wrong!!!

Rest:  Just try it once, it’s not that bad! You don’t always have to follow my idea, but sometimes I can really contribute something. 

Love is … simple and complex, confusing and enlightening. It can make you feel like you’re on cloud nine, but it can also give you the feeling that you have fallen into an endless black hole. Love comes in different forms, shapes and colours. Love is an important basic need, one that isn’t taken for granted by everyone.

An important basic need

As a psychologist, I regularly hear stories from people who have experienced a lack of love. Very often in their youth, they mention an absent father or mother. And not because they weren’t physically there. No, not at all. An emotionally absent father or mother is seemingly doing just fine. Children who are emotionally neglected seem to be doing okay to the outside world. They are given food, clothing and are closely monitored. But looks are deceiving. Physical safety is very important to develop properly, but psychological safety is just as essential. Attention, a feeling of security, support, and love are all a part of this. When these things are systematically absent, we speak of emotional neglect. And emotional neglect is a form of child abuse. One that is the most common of all forms of child abuse. Research shows that 3% of children experience child abuse, and 36% of them are emotionally neglected.

Consequences of lack of love

Emotional neglect can have serious consequences later on in adulthood. People who were emotionally neglected, have often received many snarky remarks and haven’t received many compliments for example. This causes them to have very low self-esteem. They feel inferior to others. Or they don’t dare to enter into emotional relationships with others simply because they don’t know how to do it. Or because they find it difficult to trust someone else, they don’t dare for fear of being abandoned.

Psychiatric problems

Understandably, anxiety and mood complaints are common among these people, with all the sadness and loneliness that entails. People who have been victims of emotional neglect also appear to be more likely to use addictive substances, often as a way of coping with their problems. Alcohol and drugs, as well as overeating, soothe their mental pain. Cardiovascular diseases are also more common among this group. Because, of course, body and mind cannot be separated from each other.

Compliment someone or yourself

That is why I would like to make a plea for love! Because love is the fuel that keeps our engine running and gives meaning to our lives. So be kind to others and to yourself. To make it more concrete, an assignment that makes everyone happy: give 3 compliments to different people, or to yourself every day! Because:

a compliment a day, keeps the doctor away

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Do you feel like you could use some help dealing with your mental complaints, whether it is concerning this subject or something else? Take good care of yourself, and don’t hesitate to reach out for help. Visit your doctor for a referral to a psychologist. If you would like to know more about treatment via NiceDay, click here.

Everyone feels insecure from time to time, you probably do too. But some people suffer so much from insecurity that it affects their daily life. If you feel insecure, you may, for example, have doubts about whether you’re doing things right or whether you are good enough. Insecurity is a broad concept and can be expressed in different ways. You can be insecure about your performance at work, about your appearance, about your social skills, about certain purchases and so on. Some people are better at disguising it than others, but the fact is that everyone is insecure at some point, and that takes a lot of tension and energy. How can you best deal with feelings of insecurity and make sure they do not get in the way of your happiness?

Invisible insecurity

You probably know the standard image of someone who is insecure, namely the type who literally and figuratively keeps themselves in the background. The interesting thing is that someone who is in the foreground and throws their knowledge and skills into the fray can be just as insecure! So someone can appear to be dominant, and at the same time be insecure. Many people have a certain urge to prove themselves in order to get approval from other people. The urge for approval from others often comes from a place of insecurity.

Allow insecurity

It may sound strange and vague, but your insecurity is allowed to be there. You don’t have to suppress, deny or ignore these feelings. If you resist your feelings, they will only take up more space. Rather, stand still for a moment and think about how you feel and observe what is happening inside of you. What are you thinking, what do you feel and where in your body do you feel that? By paying attention to this, instead of suppressing it, it will start to consume you less. By dwelling on it for a moment, you hit the pause button, so to speak, and you are less likely to get caught up in a negative stream of thoughts.

Normalise

If you feel insecure, it can be helpful to remember that everyone in the world knows how you feel. You are not alone in this, even though it can sometimes feel that way. To find out that you are not alone, the following experiment can be fun to do:

Ask your friends/partner/family members if they have ever felt insecure and if so, about what. Ask everyone to name different situations in which they have felt insecure and reflect on what they are currently feeling insecure about. By talking openly with each other about this, insecurity will be normalized and you will eventually value it less. You will realize that you are not alone and that everyone suffers from this from time to time. This way there is more compassion and understanding for others and yourself!

Everyone wants to feel that their perspective is taken into account and understood. That their emotions are heard and accepted by others. Emotional validation is a vital skill to communicate understanding, empathy and acceptance in important relationships, such as those with your partner, but also with your children and friends. It can be particularly useful when someone is highly emotional. You can help the person feel heard, supported and cared for. It can also help to calm a situation down, make a person feel less agitated and help someone to regulate their emotions.

Emotional validation versus invalidation

Emotional validation is the ‘’recognition or affirmation that a person or their feelings or opinions are valid or worthwhile.’’ When we validate someone, we show them we understand where they are coming from and that their feelings and behaviour make sense in their current situation.

Emotional invalidation is when someone’s emotions are seen as not valid, irrational, and should be hidden or minimized. That their personal experience is incorrect or insignificant.

Have you or maybe someone close to you expressed that they often feel misunderstood or unheard by others? Validation may be a crucial skill to improve your relationship. 

How do I validate someone?

Validation involves three steps:

  1. listening & observing

Listening to what the other person says about their feelings and what has happened. Observe their reaction and their emotions. Take a moment to stand in their shoes. 

  1. reflecting

Reflecting is restating what you just heard in your own words. This involves reflecting the other person’s feelings, thoughts and behaviour, to confirm that you have correctly understood what they are trying to communicate.  

  1. direct validation

Showing the other person that you understand where they are coming from in a non-judgemental way. Normalizing their reaction in the current situation. Avoid arguing, giving advice or disagreeing with them. 

Example

For example, you come home from a long hard day of work and sit on the sofa. Your partner starts shouting that they have to do all the household chores by themselves and that you don’t help them with anything around the house. A validating statement would be to say that you can imagine that it must be very frustrating that they feel like they do everything in the house, and you would like to work out how you can make it easier for them or share the responsibilities.

Things to avoid saying or doing

  • Disagreeing or arguing with them – Validation doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with the other person. It just means that you understand their perspective and accept their feelings. Once you have validated them, you can discuss your own perspective at a more suitable time. 
  • ‘’I’m sorry you feel that way’’ – although the intention with these sort of statements might seem good, it can be seen as a polite way of saying that someone’s feelings are not correct.
  • Minimising the situation – Statements such as ‘’it could be worse’’, ‘’why do you care’’ or ‘’what’s the big deal’’ only lead to increased feelings of invalidation and agitation.
  • Problem-solving or giving advice – This can be problematic when emotions are particularly high. Save this for after they feel validated and are in a place to discuss the next steps. 

Final tips

  • Consider your body language or facial expression – Try to convey empathy and attentiveness with your body. Acting disinterested or fed up for example will only act against your validating statement. 
  • Show curiosity – Ask questions and clarify if you understand what they meant. 
  • Show empathy – Show the other person that you care about how they feel

Validation doesn’t mean your feelings don’t matter

Bear in mind that validating someone’s emotions does not mean you have to allow yourself to be treated badly by another person. If you feel like some are acting unfairly or aggressively with you, it is important to maintain your boundaries and leave the situation if necessary. 

If someone is struggling with their emotions, it can help to encourage them to seek professional help. You can find out more about online or blended treatment via NiceDay at www.nicedaynederland.nl

If you’re reading this article it is likely that you struggle with anger. In this case, it is important to know that you are not alone! 45% Of people report losing their temper at the office regularly and a study by Romanov (1994) found that 15% of people scored very high on hostility. 

Basic emotion

Anger is one of the basic human emotions; we all experience it now and again to varying degrees. However, intense and poorly managed anger can cause distress and problems in your daily life. It can hurt relationships, mental health as well as your work. Think about shouting at your colleague, or acting aggressively toward a friend. Poorly regulated anger can worsen situations and often ends up increasing your anger. 

Learning about anger, how to express it appropriately, and gaining insight into it, can have a positive impact on your practical and social life. The goal of this article is to help you understand it, as a first step to help you learn better skills to manage it. 

Importance

Anger is an emotion that lies on a spectrum ranging from annoyance to frustration, intense rage, and hate. Intense anger can be a very powerful and overwhelming experience. It charges you up and prepares you to take action. It is part of your natural defense system; your ’fight or flight’ response. It doesn’t necessarily make you ‘fight’, but it is an emotion that helps you to stand up against injustice. It helps you stand up for yourself and others if you feel attacked, and make changes where necessary. 

You experience anger when you detect that something is wrong, you sense a threat, or if you feel that you are being mistreated. It tells other people to listen to you. Therefore, anger is often also warranted and a very important emotion! Think about important social movements for equality and the motivation to right wrongs.

Common causes

Common things that cause you to feel anger:

  • Situations you perceive as threatening. For example, when someone insults you or a loved one. This can be considered as a threat to your well-being or status.
  • Being prevented from reaching an important goal. For example, being stuck in traffic causing you to be late for work. 
  • Unpleasant physical or emotional sensations such as pain. For example, after accidentally cutting yourself with a cooking knife. 

As with any other emotion, anger is a brain and body response or reaction to events or thoughts we are experiencing. It is therefore temporary and will flare up and die down if you allow it to run its course. This is important to keep in mind if you are learning to manage your anger! 

Exercise

Now that you have a good understanding of what anger is, a good first step to managing it is becoming aware of when you are experiencing anger. Try to keep track of when you feel angry in the NiceDay app. Turn on the custom tracker ‘Angry’ and register each time you feel angry and include a note with a description. Write down what caused you to feel angry and any thoughts, feelings, or sensations you might experience. Look at your registrations from the past week/few days. Do you notice any patterns? Do you often feel angry in certain situations, after certain events, or at certain times? What makes you vulnerable to the feeling of anger? What helped calm you down? Write down your insights in your NiceDay diary. 

NiceDay

Would you like to learn more about anger? Check out our psychoeducation library on emotions. Are you struggling to control your anger and would you like to learn some skills to help you effectively manage it? You can follow a treatment via NiceDay at various organizations, click here for more information.

Do you ever finish a whole bag of chips without being hungry? Is chocolate your savior when you feel the need to cry? Or do you have any other experience concerning emotional eating? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. It might help you for a little while, and it might make you feel less sad. But after a few hours, your feelings and emotions return and you feel even worse. You end up in a vicious circle of negative feelings.

A vicious circle

You try to get out of this circle, but you can’t. That’s because this is a lot more complicated than it looks. A decreased appetite is a natural reaction of the body to negative feelings and stress. For some people, the appetite does not decrease or even increases. To prevent emotional eating, it is important that you find out the cause. We have listed a number of possible causes for you:

  • Making associations

Do you always eat cake on your birthday? That’s probably because you’ve learned to eat cake when celebrating your birthday. Your brain associates happiness with eating. This theory also works the other way around, when you’re experiencing negative emotions. Think about eating Ben & Jerry tubs after a breakup. Those examples might seem innocent, but these associations can be the reason you are an emotional eater.

  • You try to regulate your emotions with food

Eating prevents you from being flooded with your emotions, making you think you can handle the situation better.

Food is fuel, not therapy

  • You get the wrong incentives

Your body also responds physically to negative emotions by providing stimuli in your stomach and intestines. Are you regularly hungry after a meal? Then you may be receiving the wrong incentives.

  • Do you suffer from binge eating?

During binge eating, your awareness decreases, and your attention to your nearby environment increases. This weakens your emotions, creating a kind of “flight” response.

If hunger is not the problem, then eating is not the solution

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Do you recognize symptoms of emotional eating? In the NiceDay app, you can keep track of how often you think you’re emotionally eating. Does it happen regularly, or are you concerned about it? Make an appointment with your doctor to talk about it. If you want to know more about treatment via NiceDay, click here.

Overwhelming emotions can occur in all emotions: angry, happy, sadness or fear. For some people emotions are like a wave of emotions. If emotions overwhelm you, you may react more violently than you wanted. When you try to suppress emotions, it will have a opposite effect and make the emotions even more overwhelming when they do come out. If you suffer from overwhelming emotions you will probably recognize this. Why do some people have overwhelming emotions and others do not?

Causes of overwhelming emotions

Research shows that having overwhelming emotions is often a combination of your genes, the environment in which you grew up and what you experience in your life. If this is a safe supportive environment, you are less likely to struggle with overwhelming emotions later in life. However,  experiencing a trauma brings a greater chance of overwhelming emotions.

Strategies for dealing with emotions

It can be difficult for people who experience overwhelming emotions to deal with pain and sorrow. Some people develop strategies (also known as coping) that often give them relief in the short term, but are often harmful in the long run. Examples are:

  • Alcohol or drug use
  • Withdrawing yourself and become passive
  • Being very selective in food intake or overeating
  • Many varying sexual contacts
  • Ruminating  or hurting themself

Do you recognize yourself in one of these strategies? Please, contact your doctor or practitioner for support.

Long and short term

People are often aware that these strategies have negative consequences in long-term, but when overwhelmed it is difficult to make a good choice. This makes it difficult to break a circle of this behavior.

How to deal with overwhelming emotions?

Learning to deal with your emotions requires some practice, because sustainable change takes time. Start with distracting yourself from the overwhelming emotions. Make a plan in advance so that you know what to do if the emotion overwhelms you. You can write this plan on a note and keep it somewhere with you. Or place it in sight, for example on a mirror. 

You can distract yourself in different ways:

  • Do a chore; wash the car, water the plants, clean up, do the laundry or go to the hairdresser..
  • Focus your attention on someone else. For example: call someone and ask if you can do something for them. This can be a friend or family member, but also at a volunteer organization.
  • Distract your thoughts; think of a pleasant event, focus your attention on your breath or do something creative.
  • One of the exercises that I personally find valuable is counting. It has a calming effect. You can count how many doors you walked through today (back and forth counts as two). But you can also count your breaths.

Want to read more?

If you want to read more about this you can purchase the book Dealing with overwhelming emotions by “Matthew Mckay, Jeffrey Wood and Jeffrey Brantley”. This is a book provides practical information about dealing with overwhelming emotions.

Every month the NiceDay blog focuses on a certain theme. In August this was the theme “Processing life changing events”.

During our lives there will always be events, large or small, that we have to deal with. Usually, we can easily process these events on our own; it may take some time, but we are capable of doing it. Other events can be so traumatic that we need a little help. Would you like to read more about this subject? We have listed all recently published blogs for you:

Losing a job evokes different emotions; disappointment, frustration, sadness and anger. In her blog, NiceDay psychologist Maaike talks about her experience with losing her job. She explains how she dealt with it and provides you tips for coping with job loss.

In her monthly blog, experience expert Ghyta discusses her fear of life choices. Why is she so anxious and what does this do to her? How do you process this fear?

Feeling down or sad doesn’t always have to do with one specific event. There are many different factors that can affect how you feel. NiceDay psychologist Sarah discusses processing in a holistic way.

Emotions play a major role in our lives and processing emotions is an important process. When this goes wrong, we can suffer from it in the long run. But how does emotional processing work?

You have about 40,000 thoughts every day. Most of your thoughts are unconscious and it is difficult to process all these thoughts. One of the ways to slow down this flow of thought, is to write. But why is writing good for you?

Are you a perfectionist, but does it bother you because it gets in the way of your daily life? Then check out this article, it might be able to help you!

Mark was very depressed, and after his fear of falling short was confirmed by his wife, he lost all confidence and faith in himself. He shares his experience with help through NiceDay and explains how he processed his feelings.

Change, we often aren’t too fond of it. However, sooner or later we all go through big changes in our lives. How do you deal with this and how do you process these changes? Martijn explains it in his blog.

Sometimes finding your own way in life and your career just goes without saying. Sometimes, the next step needs a little more attention, for example when you unexpectedly lose your job. Ard takes you through the processing of such an event and the process of finding your own way.

When you experience one or more shocking events and / or if you have witnessed such a shocking event, trauma can arise. If a trauma is not processed, it can cause problems in dealing with yourself and others. But how do you deal with a trauma?

Emotions play a huge role in our lives, and processing them correctly is very important. When something goes wrong, we can experience difficulties in the long run. But how does emotional processing work? Below you can read more about the process and what can go wrong.

Emotional Processing Theory

Almost 50 years ago Edna Foa and Michael Kozak developed a theory to explain emotional processing: the Emotional Processing Theory. Your brain saves everything you experience as a ‘program’. When you encounter a similar situation later on, the corresponding program will be activated. This program makes sure your brain knows what to do. In order for this program to work adequately, there is some essential information needed. This is an example of the information that is programmed during an encounter with a wild bear:

  • Signal: Seeing a wild bear
  • Physical reaction: An increased heart rate
  • Meaning: A bear is dangerous!
  • Response: A fast heart rate means I’m afraid

Because this information is readily available in your brain, you can react fast and flee or hide. In this situation your emotions are helpful, and this is seen as a helpful reaction. 

Problematic reactions

When such an automatic reaction occurs when it’s not needed, they become problematic. A reaction becomes problematic in the following situations:

  • The information is not an accurate representation of reality.
  • Physical symptoms and fear reactions are caused by something harmless.
  • The fear reactions interfere with daily functioning.
  • Harmless signals and responses are seen as dangerous.

These kind of situations are common for people with anxiety or traumatic symptoms. For example, a phobia of spiders, where something relatively harmless can cause an extreme reaction of fear. Or, if shortness of breath becomes a signal to panic. But also thoughts about a traumatic event can lead to an unnecessary fearful reaction, because it feels like the event is happening again.

When you want to change a problematic reaction, there are two requirements: the emotion needs to be activated, so that the old and incorrect information can to be replaced with new realistic information. That means you need to face your fears in order to be able to decrease them. And that’s actually counterintuitive!

NiceDay

Try describing what kind of typical situations you react to with an emotion that’s (too) extreme. Describe all the information to get a clear overview of your program, so you can examine whether it contains inaccurate information. Maybe you see the signal of making a mistake, as a confirmation that you’re a failure. Or, maybe you see a negative feeling as a signal that something dangerous is about to happen. If you gain more insight in your program, you will get a better understanding of what you can change!

To do this, you can use the Thought Records in the NiceDay app. They give you a clear insight in your thoughts and the (possible) consequences. They can also help you bend your negative thoughts to more positive. You can use the NiceDay app without having treatment, download it here.