Emotions are your built-in navigation. They highlight needs, boundaries, and opportunities in real time. When you can read them, you make clearer choices and recover faster from stress.
How your caretakers responded to your feelings taught you what to do with them: express, suppress, avoid, or feel ashamed. Those early lessons often persist. If you default to numbing or dismissing emotions, the guidance system stays muted.
Emotions speak through sensations. To understand them, notice:
Location: where it shows up (throat, chest, stomach, face)
Quality: pressure, heat, flutter, tight band, hollowness
Pattern: rising or dropping, local or spreading, left/right
Metrics: intensity, frequency, duration
If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Tracking these signals turns vague discomfort into useful data.
Once you can read the signal, you can respond wisely:
Use energy from emotions to act (e.g., channel anger into a boundary).
Challenge emotions that mislead you in a context (e.g., anxiety before a familiar task).
Hold emotions with curiosity to understand the need beneath them.
This skill also powers the next block—empathic communication. If you repress your own emotions, it’s harder to recognize and respond to others’.
Pause 3× daily (morning, mid-day, evening).
Name the emotion in one word (sad, mad, glad, scared, etc.).
Map the body (location + quality) in a sentence.
Rate intensity (0–10) and note duration (minutes/hours).
Do one wise action: soothe, set a boundary, rest, or proceed with focus.
Repeat for a week, then review what changed.
Why this works: measuring sensations trains attention. Repetition rewires recognition. With practice, emotions shift from noise to navigation.
Which emotion do you tend to numb or dismiss—and where does it show up in your body?
In what situations does that emotion actually offer useful guidance?
What one supportive action will you practice the next time it appears?
Emotions are not problems to erase; they’re messages to read. Learn their language in the body, measure what you feel, and use that information to choose your next best step—for yourself and your relationships.
— Sandro Formica, PhD
Founder of Permanently Happy (questions at [email protected])
Keynote Speaker | Transforming Leaders & Organizations Through Positive Leadership & Personal Branding | Director, Chief Happiness Officer Certificate Program
Happiness Fundamentals | Needs | Values | Talents & Skills | Thoughts & Beliefs | Emotions | Empathetic Communication | Imagination | Life Purpose | Life Plan
