Health & Fitness
Your Emotions Serve a Purpose
See how you communicate emotions on a daily basis and what it takes to become aware of them when they occur.
As humans, we have experiences that trigger emotions.
Take a moment to reflect on how you feel when your favorite sports team is winning the game, a call from a friend you haven’t heard from in a long time, a baby’s laugh, the meeting you dreaded was cancelled. Then there are feelings that trigger unpleasantness; job stress, an argument, a pet dies. We feel a wide range of pleasant and unpleasant feelings and yet we understand little about the function of those feelings. Did you know emotions serve a purpose? They do. Our emotions are necessary and we wouldn’t be able to get by without them.
Emotions communicate information to other people. When we see someone crying, we know immediately that person is upset. We tend to stay away from an angry person and we laugh with a happy person. Emotions help us communicate in addition to our words.
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Emotions provide us with information. Our emotions are the bodies’ way of communicating with ourselves. For example, when we experience anxiety, we are given information that we may be in danger. When we experience anger, we might be provided with information that we do not have control of or that we have been violated in some way.
Emotions get us ready to act. They guide us in acting in ways that are appropriate to the situation. Take for example our environment, when you sense danger or a threat, you may respond by leaving the situation.
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Emotions deepen our experience of life. Life would be very boring without emotions. We need both our positive (happy, excitement, joy) and negative (anger, anxiety, sadness) emotions. We sometimes wish we didn’t feel our negative emotions, however, how would be know positive feelings if we didn’t feel the negative ones as well?
Increase your awareness of your emotions. Our emotions are necessary and they are important. The way we learn from our emotions is by being aware of them when they occur. It is very important to learn ways of being aware of our emotions and it can take courage sometimes to better understand what they have to say to us.
