If you’re like most normal people – then treating emotions like people means calling them by name. And if you’ve heard the phrase naming your emotions, then you know that this is one of the objectives of treating your emotions like people.
But why name your emotions? If you’re feeling something, then don’t you already know what emotion that is? Why do extra work? Aren’t we all busy?
The thing is – naming your emotions helps you to be specific. It quantifies your emotions, rather than letting them continue on in an unquantified swirl in your head. And you know the management adage – if you can’t quantify it, you can’t manage it. Managing your emotions will help you raise productivity, whether it’s increasing your positive emotions, or decreasing negative emotions.
That’s the main reason why you quantify your emotions.
How To Name Your Emotions
To do that, I highly recommend using Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions as a guide.
Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. (Credit: Creative Commons)
Remember that the objective of naming your emotions and treating them like people is to be specific, which helps us to quantify it.
Your goal is to select one of the emotions on the outer part of the wheel, which are more specific than the ones inside. To do so:
- Look at the centre of the wheel and select the emotion that is closest to what you’re feeling.
- Go on to the middle of the wheel and look at the emotions listed under the first one you chose. Select the one that is closest to what you feel.
- Finally, go on to the outer part of the wheel. Select one of the two emotions listed under the emotion in the middle part of the wheel.
If after doing this exercise, you don’t feel that emotion matches how you feel exactly – that’s fine. Look through all the emotions on any part of the wheel, and pick the one that matches how you’re feeling the most. It can be from the center or middle of the wheel.
That is the name of your emotion, and that is how you can address that emotion thereafter.
Treat your emotions like you would another human being. (Credit: Pixabay)
What It Means To Treat Your Emotions As A Person
To treat your emotions as a person, firstly, means that you talk to your emotions. You name them, say hi to them, and ask them the following questions:
- Why are you here?
- How do you feel?
- What would make you leave?
- What would you like?
If you were talking to a person – any person – you’d want to find out their needs, wants, and motivations. That’s the same thing you’d with your emotions when you treat them as people.
You’ll respond as your emotion, because your emotions are coming from you. So in a way, it is like to talking to yourself. But it’s talking to yourself in a way that is expressing yourself as an emotion.
There are 5 benefits of doing this.
Setting the scope of the emotion. (Credit: Pexels)
Benefit #1: It helps you quantify your emotion and scope it better
As mentioned earlier, naming your emotions helps you to quantify it. That means you know what it is – and what it isn’t. Too often, we catastrophise when we have an uncomfortable emotion – and make it more than it really is.
That’s not to say that you can’t be feeling more than one emotion at the same time. But it means that you know what you’re not feeling. Talking to, and naming your emotions, makes it easier to visualise and manage. It gives you the scope of the emotion, so you know where to focus your efforts and what to prioritise.
In short – being specific and quantifying your emotions, helps you to correctly identify what you’re feeling.
It’s like talking to another version of yourself. (Credit: Unsplash)
Benefit #2: It separates you from your emotions, which externalises them
When you talk to your emotions, it feels like you’re removing the emotion from you, and talking to it as a separate entity.
This has the psychological effect of helping you recognise that emotion, while limiting its effects on you. Since that emotion is “outside” you now, you tend to think more calmly, in a way that’s less influenced by your emotions.
This helps you to engage your prefrontal cortex – you know, the rational part of your rain? The one that does the executive functions like decision-making, problem-solving, and emotional regulation. This then creates a space between the emotion, and your response.
This results in you externalising your emotions, which has the added benefit of increasing your rationality. And given that you’ve probably identified that your emotions have a outsized influence on your decision making, it helps to reduce that impact – particularly important if you’re figuring out how to treat your emotions.
When you externalise your emotions, the rational you gets to be in the driver’s seat and make more logical decisions.
Walk a mile… in your own shoes. (Credit: Unsplash)
Benefit #3: It puts you in your own shoes, while still allowing you to be rational
As mentioned earlier, when your emotions respond, the response comes from you. You’re responding as you with that emotion.
But because you’ve externalised your emotions, there’s the rational you who’s analysing the situation and doing the fact-finding.
By playing both sides, you get to place yourself in your own shoes (as the emotion), while still giving you the ability to assess it logically (as the rational you). That helps you make better decisions, because you acknowledge the emotion is there, but you make decisions with less of that emotion’s influence on you.
You understand your own emotions better, but through a rational lens.
A productive partnership with your emotions. (Credit: Pexels)
Benefit #4: You get a productive partnership with your emotions
And when you can be rational, you can also rationalise with your emotions.
Think of it this way – if your emotions are swirling in your mind, every decision you make will be coloured by it. But by externalising your emotions, you get to have a calmer conversation with them.
It’s like a conversation between two people. If both parties are being emotional, it’s hard to have a rational conversation. But if one party is calm, it’s easier to have a logical, rational conversation that will produce fruitful outcomes. It becomes a productive partnership.
That’s not to say you deny your emotions, or that emotions are irrational. This is about finding out more about your emotions, in a calm, methodical, logical way.
Reach a decision with your emotions. (Credit: Pexels)
Benefit #5: It helps you figure out what is needed to keep that emotion, or to help it to leave
With the benefit of a calmer, rational you speaking to your externalised emotions, you get to have a productive conversation.
And that’s about whether you want your emotion to stay, to leave, or to do something else. You get to have that conversation about the change you want from that emotion. After all, if you were satisfied with that emotion, you wouldn’t need to talk to them, right? You want change from that emotion – whether it’s more or less of it.
That’s why I haven’t addressed this topic as “getting rid of your emotions”. This approach works for all emotions – positive or negative.
If you want a positive emotion to stay – talk to it and figure out what will keep that emotion around.
If you want a negative emotion to leave – talk to it and figure out what would dissipate that emotion.
My experience: getting emotions to stay or leave
Getting A Positive Emotion To Stay
I realised I would get this joyful feeling some weeks, but I didn’t know why. I thought it was being with some people, I thought it was play – but neither truly held the answer because I never really say down and asked that emotion.
So I did. I asked the joyful feeling what would make it stay. It turned out that it wasn’t just one reason. It was the feeling of being recharged that helped it to stay – and to be recharged, there were several things I could do. I could play the drums, draw chibi figures, play an RPG, open a toy, dance a little. Doing any of these in excess would diminish the feeling – but doing several of them (even if it was only 5 minutes) would help to produce that joyful feeling. The benefit was that it took less time to recreate that feeling.
So I’ve been doing a little bit of each activity per week – and with a very minimal time investment, I’ve been able to recreate that positive feeling and get it to stay.
Getting A Negative Emotion To Leave
I realised that I would occasionally get this feeling of being excluded by friends, and I thought that the only way out was to double down on asking them out. But left me feeling exhausted, and that friendships were one-sided. Again, I never asked the feeling of being excluded why it was there.
So I did. And I found out – it came when I didn’t get enough sleep. Not having enough sleep meant being tired, and being tired resulted in a poorer memory. A poorer memory meant that when it came to friends, I would forget about the good, inclusive things that they did, and I would have to actively recall those memories to combat the feeling of being excluded.
But it all boiled down to sleep. So I did – I made a concerted effort to sleep more for a week, and tracked the feelings of exclusion. They were lower. So I try to get more sleep these days – but if that feeling of being excluded comes around, I’ll remember that it’s linked to sleep, and I promise to talk to it after I’ve had a good night’s sleep.
And when I wake up, it won’t be there anymore.
If we’re kind to animals, we should be kind to ourselves too. (Credit: Unsplash)
Be kind to your emotions – and yourself
You may have heard of all of these benefits before in some form or the other. I don’t deny that many experts tout these as ways of managing your emotions.
What I find most useful about treating your emotions as people is that it helps you to reap all the benefits in the most efficient way possible. Remember – the least amount of effort for the most reward.
An additional side effect is that it helps you to be kinder to yourself. By treating your emotions as people, you tend to afford them more leeway and more kindness, just as you would to people. Treating your emotions as people results in you treating yourself more kindly. And since you are a human being – isn’t it a good thing to treat another human being with kindness?
So talk to your emotions. Find out more about them, what makes them stay, what makes them leave.
Talking to your emotions as people will be well worth the time spent.
(Note: Originally, Happiness for Busy People was going to be called Friends with Emotions. But it wasn’t going as quickly as expected. Then I sat down, talked to my emotions, Happiness for Busy People came up, and everything progressed so much faster.)
How talking to your emotions like people will improve your productivity
Increasing positive emotions (and reducing negative emotions) is a way to increase your wellbeing, according to the PERMA model of wellbeing. Specifically, it pertains to P – Positive Emotions. It’s not the only way to elevate your wellbeing – there are four other components to look at in PERMA.
Happiness for Busy People 
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