Purposeful Emotions

Purposeful emotions refer to purposeful practices and self-care that promote emotional wellness, growth, and fulfillment. Emotional wellness requires self-awareness and expression. With purposeful emotions, you will learn the purpose and function of your emotions, how you can better manage difficult emotions and ways to care for yourself when painful emotions arise.

Emotional Awareness

• Are you curious why we have emotions?
• Does feeling angry, fearful, sad, guilty, or even jealous serve a purpose?

Without a basic understanding of how emotions work, it is difficult to handle our emotions.  It turns out that our emotions are essential to our survival.  Our emotions are to an extent hardwired to our responses in a way that makes sense for survival, so changing them can at times be difficult (Linehan, 2015). As an example, anger is a powerful emotion that provides us with the energy we need to overcome obstacles; however, it may also have destructive results if not handled effectively in our daily lives.  The human brain is designed to experience a wide range of emotions that involve both pleasure and pain for survival purposes. Through our emotions, we are not only motivated to engage in behaviors that keep us safe, but our emotions also drive us to act and make decisions (Gu et al., 2019).

For Example:

• Consider the anxiety that you feel before delivering a presentation or taking a test. This painful emotional experience serves as a reminder to sufficiently prepare in order to improve your chances of success.
• Consider the discomfort of guilt we feel when we engage in behavior that goes against our moral code and helps prevent us from repeating that behavior in the future.
• In relation to attending college, it can look like this:  If I value my education, and that is one of my cherished values, and I choose to show up late to class, turn in late assignments, and not actively participate, then I will feel the pain of guilt, which in turn motivates me to change my behavior to align with what is important to me, my education.

There are reasons why we feel emotions, and managing them does not mean that we need to eliminate them, because emotions play an important role in our survival.  We use emotions to gain insight into what we’re experiencing and know how to react, and they also help us build social connections. The bottom line is that all our emotions have a purpose, and we have the ability to marshal them in a way that enables us to excel in college.  This includes learning to tolerate emotional pain in a healthy way, being less reactive when you experience intense emotions, and interacting successfully with others.

Recognize Your Emotions

*Research suggests that those who can label emotions are more likely to control them (Torre, 2018).  Identifying and naming emotions is the first step in regulating them (Linehan, 2015).

A Few Things to Know About Emotions

Emotions arise and pass

• It is common to feel many emotions throughout the day.  While some emotions pass in a matter of seconds, others might linger into a mood. Consider your emotions like waves in the ocean. Waves of emotions can come in different strengths, but all will pass. Let emotions wash over you in an appropriate manner.

There is no such thing as good or bad emotions

• However, there are effective and non-effective ways to act on them. You probably have some emotions in your life that you have labeled “negative” or “bad,” the ones you push aside, ignore, suppress, or hope will go away.  It’s important to remember that all emotions are information; they are cues and signals and they tell us to get close or avoid, stay or leave. Like the waves in the ocean, we cannot stop our emotions from occurring, but we can choose how we react or respond to them.

Emotional reactivity is more likely to occur when we’re physically or emotionally drained

• Emotional reactivity is also more likely to occur in situations of deprivation.  A healthy mind and body reduce vulnerability to intense negative emotions.  This includes eating well, avoiding mood-altering drugs (e.g., alcohol), getting enough rest, exercising, and developing coping skills (see the Purposeful Body Module).

All emotions are a response to external and internal experiences.

• Our interpretation of an event is often what triggers intense emotions.  You may not realize you are making interpretations because they are often automatic.  According to Aaron Beck, the founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive distortions are thoughts that lead people to perceive reality incorrectly. An out-of-proportion emotional reaction might be more about how you interpret the event than the event itself (Beck, 1963; Beck et al., 1979).