Cultivating Emotional Self Awareness: Tools for a More Insightful Life
Emotional self-awareness is the foundation of building your emotional intelligence (EQ). It means you can recognize, understand, and effectively respond to emotional information about yourself and those around you. Emotional self-awareness is the key skill in EQ because having a solid grasp of your emotions underpins all the other aspects of emotional intelligence.
Emotional self awareness is the first part of the broader concept of 'Self Awareness,' and it is foundational for emotional intelligence.
This skill is all about your ability to;
- notice emotions as they come up in the moment
- categorize and name those emotions
- be aware of the physical, mental, and storytelling aspects of emotions
Emotional self awareness is something you can actually measure and teach, so it's a skill you can totally work on and improve with practice.
How Do You Define Emotional Self Awareness?
In Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence, he writes;
"Self awareness - recognizing a feeling as it happens - is the keystone of emotional intelligence... the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy. People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives"
And so emotional self awareness is simply the capacity to notice and interpret emotions as they arise in our body.
Emotional Awareness vs Emotional Intelligence
These terms sound similar and are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have quite different meanings.
Emotional Intelligence is a framework used to describe the set of skills required to understand and use emotions. In other words, it’s a broader concept that includes our feelings, thinking, and personal experiences with emotions.
In that bigger picture, there are four areas, each with its own specific skills. Those areas are:
- Self Awareness
- Social Awareness
- Self-Management
- Relationship Management
As you dig deeper into these areas, you'll find that Self Awareness consists of three main skills: emotional self awareness, accurate self-assessment, and self-confidence.
So, 'emotional self awareness' is just one piece of the Self Awareness puzzle, which is one of four dimensions in the broader concept of 'Emotional Intelligence.'
Emotional Self Awareness: Activities for Attuning to Your Emotions
Engaging in activities designed to enhance emotional self-awareness can significantly improve our ability to identify and interpret our emotional states.
- By tapping into interoceptive signals—our body's internal cues—we can better recognize how our emotions manifest physically.
- Increasing conscious awareness allows us to analyze and reflect on our emotional responses, promoting a deeper understanding of our feelings.
- Identifying and naming emotions gives us applied experience in emotional self-awareness and can increase our emotional vocabulary, which brings nuance and discernment to our relational skills.
Practice #1 : Interoceptive Awareness of Emotion
To build your skill in emotional self awareness, the first step is to pay attention to the internal sensations associated with your emotions.
I've spoken in more detail about developing interoceptive awareness ; this is a very specific application of that awareness to emotional experience.
- Close your eyes or soften your gaze.
- Scan your body and notice internal feelings or sensations.
- Describe the sensation, and be as specific as possible.For example, there is a sensation in my upper abdomen. It feels like a very subtle sensation of pressure, about a 2/10 in intensity. The sensation is moving. As I pay attention to the sensation, it feels like it is becoming denser around my solar plexus.
It's super helpful to practice this exercise during both intense emotional moments and when you're feeling pretty neutral. Here’s why:
- Practicing During Strong Emotion can help you tune into the physical sensations of those feelings. That can help you improve how you process and manage your emotions. It also provides real-time insight which helps you get a clearer picture of how your body reacts to different feelings.
- Practicing During Neutral Times can help you get to know your body's baseline of typical sensations. That can make it easier to identify changes when emotions begin to arise. It can also help you hone your interoceptive awareness of more subtle sensations, and without the emotional charge of big feels.
Mixing this exercise into both situations will give you a well-rounded understanding of your emotional world. It’ll help you notice and respond to your feelings more effectively, whether you’re chill or feeling intense.
Practice #2: Cognitive Awareness of Emotion
To deepen your emotional self awareness, turn your attention to your internal cognitive experience—your thoughts and inner voice. Reflect on the following questions:
- What are you thinking about right now?
- Are any memories surfacing?
- What images come to mind?
- What sounds do you perceive in your inner dialogue?
- What are you telling yourself?
For example, you might find that the cold triggers a memory of an early morning ski trip, evoking an image of the sparkling trail ahead. You could think, "I love morning adventures!"
In contrast, you might catch yourself saying, "This is so awful; I’m going to get sick now for sure." You may remember reading something about a link between cold & illness and wonder if your feelings are worsening.
To cultivate your cognitive awareness, incorporate these reflections into your scheduled check-ins:
- Close your eyes or soften your gaze.
- Scan your body and observe any internal feelings or sensations.
- Describe the sensations in detail. For instance, you might feel a subtle pressure in your upper abdomen, around a 2/10 in intensity. As you concentrate on it, the sensation may feel denser around your solar plexus.
- Notice the thoughts you are having. What do you visualize? What sounds do you hear? What messages are you telling yourself? Are there memories linked to these feelings or thoughts?
By practicing these techniques, you will enhance your emotional self awareness and improve your ability to interpret and respond to your emotions.
Practice #3: Identify and Name Emotions
This final part of your emotional self awareness is about interpreting the data. That is, using your interoceptive sensations, and cognitive interpretation, to identify and name the emotion you are experiencing.
Some people have a large emotional vocabulary and are able to identify and express many different flavors and nuances of their emotional landscape. Others have a more limited range of words to choose from and may struggle to match a name to their experience.
Wherever you fall on this scale is absolutely fine and serves as information for you to begin to understand where you can work on your skills to improve your emotional self-awareness.
To build your skill in emotional self awareness, the final step is to identify the emotion you are feeling.
For example,
- I might notice that within my body my:
- chest feels tight
- breathing feels constricted
- heart rate is fast
- throat feels tight
- hands and feet are cold
- And inside my mind:
- the cold prompts a memory of an early morning ski trip
- I can see an image of the trail sparkling before me
- I say to myself "I love morning adventures!"
- And I then ask myself "what emotion is this?"
- I like this Emotion Sensation Feeling Wheel Handout by Lindsay Braman; it allows you to begin with a more simple emotional category and then become nuanced as you become more discerning. I invite you to google "wheel of emotions" and choose a reference that feels like a good fit for you.
To improve your emotional identification, incorporate these reflections into your scheduled check-ins:
- Close your eyes or soften your gaze.
- Scan your body and observe any internal feelings or sensations.
- Describe the sensations in detail. For instance, you might feel a subtle pressure in your upper abdomen, around a 2/10 in intensity. As you concentrate on it, the sensation may feel denser around your solar plexus.
- Notice the thoughts you are having. What do you visualize? What sounds do you hear? What messages are you telling yourself? Are there memories linked to these feelings or thoughts?
- Identify the emotion you are feeling. Begin at the inner circle of the emotion-sensation wheel until you feel confident to become more specific.
By practicing these techniques, you will enhance your emotional self awareness and improve your ability to interpret and respond to your emotions.
Developing an Action Plan
The development of skill in emotional self awareness, like any skill, is the work of a lifetime. That means that even if you have an excellent level of skill already, there is always more to learn.
My invitation to you is to continue to play with these practices in emotional self-awareness in moments of strong emotion, as well as when you may be experiencing more subtle sensations or thoughts.
You could even start taking notes, or keeping a journal so that over time you can begin to identify patterns in thoughts, sensations, or feelings that give you important information about your life. Perhaps there are thought loops or recurring memories that let you know there is some processing that needs to be done.
As you become more discerning you can really tap into your intuition. Over time you may notice that a certain set of sensations arise every time you are with someone who is telling a lie. Or maybe you discover that when you are making a decision there are markers to watch for when you are rushing. And perhaps you discover that before you lose your temper with your partner there are a series of moments where you can change course and do something different.