What is mindfulness? Mindfulness is the practice of bringing our awareness to the present moment, without judgment. We are usually taken up with our thoughts and feelings and reacting to them as we think and feel them. Mindfulness is a way of being in the present and simply observing ourselves. …
More Coping Skills
Several weeks ago, we took a jump up to the 30,000-ft level for an overview of coping skills. We discussed how thinking, emotions, and behavior all affect each other. Then we examined some specific thinking skills, emotion regulation skills, and behaviors, and how we can use them. Now it’s time to …
Behavior and Emotion
Behavior ties in with emotion because emotions come with an urge to act. Behavior is sometimes a direct expression of emotion. If we are skilled enough at emotion regulation to take the critical pause, label our emotion, and choose our behavior, it can be a modulated expression of emotion. But does …
Behavior
In a previous post Next Up: Feelings, we used this diagram to illustrate how thoughts and feelings influence behavior, and how behavior also influences thoughts and feelings. What do we mean by behavior, as it relates to emotions and thinking? Behavior can be a direct expression of an emotion, …
Codependence
Codependence, or co-dependency, as it’s also called, involves the opposite of emotional development and emotional regulation. Co-dependent people have learned to suppress and avoid emotions and disregard their own emotional needs. Mental Health America offers this description of …
Anger Management
It is especially important, and useful, to have effective emotion regulation skills when it comes to anger. Without the all-important pause, where we identify our emotion, ask ourselves what prompted it, and choose our reaction, anger can easily produce harmful behavior. Anger often results from …
More Emotion Management
Emotional self-regulation is defined on the Crisis Prevention Institute Blog as “the ability to monitor and manage our own behavior. With self-regulation, we can calm ourselves down when we’re distressed, and pick ourselves up when we’re low.” Successful management of our emotions does not …
Managing Emotions
Why is emotion-identification one of the first steps in managing our emotions? It is often easier to know what to do with, or how to react to, something we know, rather than to something we do not know. When we can say “oh, I know what this is!” or “I often have this feeling when …” or “I know where …
Emotion ID
Emotions come in many flavors and sizes. Sometimes we begin teaching children four basic emotions: mad, sad, glad, and hurt. On the other end of the spectrum, Live Bold & Bloom undertakes to list 400 “emotion words” – names of emotions, or adjectives describing the emotions. Some emotions are …
Feelings Primer
Feelings are considered the conscious experience of emotional reactions. Many people when expressing themselves will use the word “feeling” interchangeably with the word “emotion.” Feelings are, in their most basic definition, senses—like the sense of smell or taste. A cool breeze might give us a …
Coping Skills Overview
As you’ve seen in the past weeks’ posts, there are a great many coping skills available to us to deal with the demands and challenges of life. Let’s jump up to the 30,000-foot view to categorize some of these. We are complex beings, with thoughts, emotions and behaviors all working together. Our …
Feelings and Emotions
Feeling is one of the basic physical senses—perceiving by touch. It has also been generalized to mean perception of events within the body. A feeling is also an emotion, or an emotional perception. Feelings as emotions can be initiated by bodily responses—the interaction between physiological events …
Emotional Intelligence
The term “Emotional Intelligence” was coined in 1990 by two researchers who described it as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and …