Working with emotions - labelling exercise

How often do you work with your emotions? Or think about what an emotion means? What’s it for?

Emotions are part of our limbic system (a more ancient part of the brain than the neocortex where “conscious” mind lives), and evolutionally their purpose is to help us survive. That means that no matter how hard we will try not to have emotional reaction, this is outside of conscious control, at least on an automatic level. However, if we manage to understand how to leverage emotions and the whole power of the more ancient part of the brain and the energy it brings this can really make a big difference in life.

In many cultures we are not really focused on verbalising emotions and are more focused on actions and results, even though this approach still does not stop emotions from appearing.

My first exposure to verbalisation of emotions was when I started to read all sorts of psychological books about children. And there are those approaches when parents are told how to teach kids to deal with emotions: for example, “now you are feeling upset and angry, that’s ok… etc”.

Often as adults we are not realising what the emotion is, and we at the same time might not like the feeling, and that sometimes causes frustration, procrastination, and even more frustration because we don’t understand what’s going on. One useful exercise that I learned at one of the coaching courses was called “labelling”. The idea is that you need to name the feeling and/or emotion that emerges or put a label on it. That allows to bring that emotion out of limbic system and make it some sort of an “object”, move it into the conscious space. Then intuitively for our brain that becomes something we can work with, look at it from different angles, perform root cause analysis and detach an emotion from our own personality. Emotion is not equal to a person, and we can have the full spectrum of emotions. When we understand what those are and what our ancient brain is trying to tell us by showing up those emotions, we can transform our thoughts/beliefs and behaviour patterns to support a desired emotional state.