What are Emotions?
Emotions are sensations, thoughts, and responses that indicate a thinking mind, a living soul, and a reacting body; they also cause physiological, behavioral, and cognitive changes. Emotions are created unconsciously and characterize bodily conditions. They are often independent physical responses to external or internal stimuli. There are as many supposed emotions as there are researchers who disagree with them. There are seven main emotions to consider: joy, surprise, fear, disgust, wrath, contempt, and melancholy.
Researchers have effectively outlined the five primary functions of emotions: Emotions assist us in taking action, surviving, striking and avoiding danger, making decisions, and understanding others. Furthermore, they assist others in understanding us.
Understand that feelings are not facts by watching our video:
What is Meant by Emotional Wound/Trauma/Turmoil?
We must realize, just as we must identify physical traumas, that we all encounter a variety of emotional traumas as a result of life’s numerous difficulties. Emotional trauma affects the mind, heart, and soul. It can result from a variety of events.
Emotional trauma occurs as a result of very stressful circumstances that destroy your perception of safety and leave you feeling helpless in a frightening environment. Emotional trauma can burden you with lingering negative emotions, memories, and worry. It can also make you feel numb, distant, and incapable of trusting others.
A threat to life or safety is a common component of emotionally catastrophic events, but trauma may be caused by any circumstance that makes you feel helpless and alone, even if there is little risk of physical injury. Your personal emotional reaction to the incident, not the objective facts, determines whether it qualifies as traumatic. You are more prone to experience trauma the more terrified and helpless you feel.
Some reasons behind emotional trauma can be (but are not limited to) as follows:
- One-time occurrences like a mishap, injury, or violent attack, particularly if they happened unexpectedly or during childhood, can result in emotional trauma.
- ongoing, unrelenting stress, such as suffering traumatic events that recur frequently, such as assault, domestic abuse, or neglect as a kid, fighting a life-threatening illness, or living in a felony offense-ridden neighborhood.
- commonly disregarded factors include surgery (especially within the first three years of life), a close relative’s unexpected death, the end of a meaningful connection, or an embarrassing or emotionally unpleasant experience, particularly if someone was intentionally harsh.
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Symptoms of Emotional Trauma
There are many various physical and emotional responses that we all have to trauma. Do not criticize your own or other people’s responses since there is no “correct” or “wrong” response to a thought, an emotion, or a response. Your responses are reactions that are usual to unusual events. The following are some symptoms and signs of emotional wounds that require emotional healing:
- Disbelief, denial, or shock
- Confusion and attention issues
- Angry, irritable, and moody
- Fear and angst
- Shame, guilt, and self-blame
- Withdrawal from other people
- Sad or despairing feelings
- Having a distant or numb feeling
- Nightmares or insomnia
- Fatigue
- Being quickly startled
- Difficulty paying attention
- Rapid heart rate
- Anxiety and jitteriness
- Pains and aches
- Tense muscles
Consequences of Emotional Trauma
The symptoms of emotional trauma vary from person to person, emotional traumas are frequently difficult to identify. Others may use drugs, alcohol, or other acting-out habits to numb their anguish. Many people could seem to be conducting themselves as normal.
Harder to identify are problems of the heart and mind. They may be hidden from the outer world more easily as a result. As a consequence, we deceive ourselves into thinking that we can “move on” and are okay by rejecting, suppressing, or shunning them. However, much like a physical wound, an emotional one has to be attended to, cared for, loved, and healed. We have to go through the process of repairing our emotions. The first and most important step in emotional healing is realizing the need for it.
What is Meant by Emotional Healing?
We frequently picture physical damage whenever we talk of “healing.” We realize that healing from physical harm involves time, rest, a gentle touch, and medical treatment but do we have the same outlook on emotional wounds?
Since emotions are a natural part of life, it is important for each of us to confront, manage, and even enhance our emotional states in order to improve our healing and general well-being. Acknowledging, admitting, embracing, integrating, and processing difficult life experiences and powerful emotions is the process of emotional healing. Empathy, self-control, self-compassion, self-acceptance, mindfulness, and integration may be involved. Many individuals have a propensity to desire to minimize pain and regulate their emotions in an effort to influence the emotional healing process, but this may ultimately prevent it from happening.
If you give your emotions the space they need to be completely recognized, felt, worked through, and processed, they will heal in the time that they need to—which may be more or less than you anticipate or prepare for.
Read Blog: Read our article to know about emotional healing and cardiac coherence.
Benefits of Emotional Healing
Even though you may not enjoy the suffering you’re experiencing, you could be reluctant to seek emotional healing because you’re worried about what you might learn. This is a legitimate worry, but there are a few health advantages3 connected to the good feelings brought on by healing.
- Improved cardiovascular condition
- Perhaps living longer
- Lower secretion of the stress hormone cortisol
- Reduced heart rate
- Less likely to have an upper respiratory infection after getting the flu or a cold
Watch our video to know and identify your “at home” feeling for effective emotional healing.
How Can You Start Your Journey of Emotional Healing?
Here are some strategies to start your path to emotional healing if you’re attempting to overcome emotional discomfort. Such as:
- Counseling and Therapy
Even while emotional healing may be very beneficial, the process can also be unpleasant. You may want to consult a mental health specialist who is experienced in assisting individuals daily who are going through emotional recovery processes.
They can give you the knowledge you might not have on your own and help you recover at a tempo that is right for you.
- Mindfulness
It may be extremely easy to get sucked back into the past when we are trying to recover emotionally from something or to imagine what tomorrow will be like if we don’t. You may use mindfulness methods to assist you to be in the moment and realize that everything is OK right now. According to research, an emotion’s cycle could only last 90 seconds. When you are overpowered by an emotion, you can use mindfulness techniques while keeping an eye on the time to track how long it takes the sensation to pass.
Read Blog: How mindfulness techniques can help in stress management by clicking here!
Watch our video to help yourself in practicing mindfulness-based breathing meditation.
Without criticizing or making any attempts to alter the emotion, simply pay attention to how it feels in your body and describe it. Breathe despite your feelings.
Understand why being kind towards yourself is important for emotional healing by watching our video.
- Guided Meditation
Meditation is a mindfulness technique in which one can achieve a state of inner awareness and peace while spiritually maturing; a guided version merely has a guru, master, or scholar directing us through the specified meditation step by step, in which we learn to focus on the instructions given. These guided meditations not only help us expel toxins from the body and the aura, but they also refresh and heal us.
Prepare yourself for guided meditation with these simple steps shared in our video.
- Journaling
Journaling is frequently recommended, and for an excellent purpose. Journaling, according to research, is an excellent technique to get glimpses into the unconscious by assisting people in working through their feelings and making sense of what has happened to them.
- Physical exercises
When you’re experiencing tough emotions, take steps to move your body to aid you to digest them.
Moving the body to handle stress or trauma may also be observed in the animal kingdom. Therapist Peter A. Levine writes in his book “Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma” that in the wild, an impala that escapes its predator would reflexively “shake off” the painful incident, recovering full bodily mobility.
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In this article, our focus is on explaining the role, needs benefits, and types of physical exercises to speed up the emotional healing process.
All About Physical Exercise to Help You in the Journey of Emotional Healing
Although everyone is cognizant of the physical advantages of exercise, it is frequently underutilized as a treatment for mental illness. If you’ve ever felt the buzz after a hard workout or the runner’s euphoria after hitting the pavement you’ve already benefited from some of the positive effects exercises can have on the brain. Exercise may be a fantastic addition to continuing psychotherapy and medication management if you’re healing emotional issues. Exercise could potentially substitute medicine for people going through emotional turmoil
What is the Role of Physical Exercise in Emotional Healing?
Your body and brain create hormones and neurotransmitters during high-intensity exercise that improve your mood, memory, energy level, and overall sense of well-being. The body’s feel-good hormones, endorphins, are among them. They may lead to the joggers’ infamous “runner’s high.”
Your muscles are fatigued yet you feel more at ease after a good workout. Additionally, you could have a sense of fulfillment, which raises your self-esteem and enhances your sense of well-being. Your muscles and mind are less tense and stressed as a result of your training.
Exercise may help lift one’s spirits and boost general well-being. According to research, even five minutes of brisk movement can improve mood, and regular exercise has been proven to entirely relieve the symptoms of depression to an extent comparable to that of psychotropic medications. Exercise helps lessen PTSD and anxiety-related symptoms, according to research.
Benefits of Physical Exercise in the Journey of Emotional Healing
Below are some of the many benefits of the physiological return on exercise.
- Reduced Stress
Exercise’s proven ability to lessen both physical and emotional stress is widely known. Additionally, frequent physical stress helps the body how recuperate from and adjust to stress, both physically and emotionally.
Read Blog: How to save yourself from the claws of stress. Click here!
- Improved Sleep
Your brain will lead you to become exhausted sooner and aid in a deeper, more restful sleep throughout the night since your body needs time to recuperate after activity. The greatest benefit of recuperation following training sessions is that the body heals itself while we sleep at night. You won’t make much progress toward fitness if you don’t get enough sleep. Fortunately, this one has your intelligence on its side.
- Improved Contentment
Exercise can boost the production of endorphins, which operate similarly to painkillers by interacting with the neurotransmitters in your brain. Fear not—there is no addiction present. Exercise causes the production of endorphins, which have been demonstrated to lessen sadness and boost “euphoria” after exercise. Additionally, exercising outside might increase your happiness.
- Greater Self-Assurance
This is a fantastic advantage of exercising for many reasons. Your social abilities receive an “exercise,” which boosts your confidence. Along with strengthening the impression of your self-worth, you will also be enhancing your positive self-talk and self-image.
- Improved cognitive performance
It has been demonstrated that our cognitive abilities tend to deteriorate with age. At any age, regular exercise can influence and enhance the function of the section of the brain that controls memory. People who routinely exercise have similar changes to their hippocampus, which increases their capacity to remember new information.
- Reduce anxiety
When compared to the function of endorphins explained above, its function is extremely similar. Exercise lessens anxiety because it generates endorphins and offers your mind something else to concentrate on, such as maintaining regular breathing.
Read Blog: Different types of anxiety disorders and coping strategies by clicking here!
Getting Worked Up With Physical Exercises to Enhance Emotional Healing
It might be difficult to find the drive to exercise when coping with emotional stress, so starting slowly is OK and even advised. Start by making small, attainable objectives, such as going for a weekly nightly stroll before dinner. Celebrate your accomplishments, no matter how minor they may appear, and increase your exercise and degree of effort gradually. Take note in a notebook of how you feel prior to, during, and after each of these events. You might attempt the following physical activities to speed your emotional healing:
- Strength and Hand-Eye Coordination Exercise
Exercise for hand-eye coordination and strength will improve your ability to heal from emotional harm. By integrating bodyweight exercises, you may naturally increase your lean muscle mass. Enhanced proprioception and hand-eye coordination are two additional advantages of physical activity. Tai chi and other exercises place more emphasis on flexibility and rehabilitation. Try to heal from wounds, overcome psychological or physical trauma, and include breathing and stretching exercises in your regular routine.
Tai chi is a traditional Chinese workout that is done by people all over the world. Tai chi has been demonstrated to enhance immunological function, boost levels of feel-good endorphins in the blood, and help patients who struggle with symptoms of anxiety and despair.
Because the motions are simple to learn and repetitious, anybody can practice Tai Chi. Instead of requiring strength or endurance, it emphasizes how the motions are done and how they are breathed. Self-healing is regarded as a benefit of Tai Chi. Traditional Chinese medicine claims that the practice aids in removing energy blockages from the body, which aids in the treatment or prevention of specific ailments. According to research, Tai Chi may enhance a variety of well-being factors, such as lowering stress, anxiety, and mood disturbances, as well as boosting self-esteem.
- Yoga
Through carefully controlled asanas (Yogic postures) and breathwork, yoga is primarily a top-notch spiritual practice that aids in achieving a harmonious connection between mind and body.
There are numerous elements that makeup yoga:
- Pranayama (practices of controlling the breath as you release toxins.
- Chanting (Chanting mantras helps release positive energy while also cleansing the soul, mind, and personal environment such that there is a reduction in anxiety and stress).
- Trataka (a yogic cleansing method that involves focusing on a single point, dot, or candle flame to bring energy to the “third eye” and enhance different psychic skills).
- Yogic Mudras is a technique for harmonizing the body’s vital energy by combining various finger and thumb configurations.
- Cardiovascular and Aerobic Exercises
Exercises that are aerobic and cardiovascular are excellent for producing the intensity needed for your body to create mood-enhancing endorphins. Activities that raise your heart rate are referred to as aerobic exercises and include jogging, swimming, cycling, brisk walking, and utilizing an elliptical trainer. Activities like dancing and gardening may both raise your heart rate while also promoting emotional healing. If you enjoy sports, you may socialize while getting cardiovascular exercise by signing up for a local league to play tennis, basketball, or soccer. Another method to get your cardio in while having fun with friends is to enroll in a group class that offers a high-intensity interval workout, like CrossFit or boxing.
Read our Blog: The importance of social connections for emotional healing. Click here!
Download our free worksheet to get started with physical exercises for effective emotional healing.
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