The Guiding Light of Emotions

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If I may go out on a limb here, I’ll wager that, at least once, you know what it’s like to have an emotion come up and think something like one (or all!) of the following:

Ugh, I don’t want to feel this!

Why won’t this annoying thing go away?

I shouldn’t be feeling this way. There must be something wrong with me.

I need to find a way to get rid of this. Acknowledging what I feel won’t get me anywhere and may make it worse.

If you can identify with this, it’s an exceedingly human response. We receive potent modeling and messaging related to feeling and conveying emotions, including whether various emotions are permissible, in our family and our culture. Not only, that, emotions don’t always present us with a clear, illuminating message about what’s happening for us and what we need. Take the anxiety a person feels when deciding between two job offers, for example. It doesn’t necessarily say “Hi! I’d like you to know that you do want job B rather than job A. I, your anxiety, am here because you’re afraid you won’t succeed, which stems from that job you had five years ago.” Instead, the person experiences it in this case as a vague, confusing blob of uneasiness that’s hard to pin down and interpret.

In light of this, it’s understandable to struggle with seeing the utility in what we feel or to want to shine a light away from the inner world of emotions and look outward. At the same time, this response doesn’t tend to help. Instead, new research reveals that if we listen to our emotions and cultivate a clearer awareness of what we’re feeling, we may be more able to make choices in life and reach for what we want.

The researchers for this study found a link between a higher level of emotional clarity and reduced difficulty with decision-making, along with more movement toward personal aims. Having said this, the study design doesn’t make it possible to say that having more awareness of what we feel will lead us to be more able to reach decisions more conclusively or to strive toward what we want. It's also worth approaching the task of cultivating emotional clarity with some degree of care, as other research indicates that there could be exceptions to the usefulness of a higher degree of emotional awareness despite its plus sides.

For example, on the one hand, research has pointed to a connection between more emotional clarity and a better ability to manage emotions as well as less likelihood of a person struggling with symptoms of anxiety and depression at the same time. On the other hand, the same researchers have noted that in some cases, higher emotional awareness could be connected to more internal struggles, making it important to better understand what the productive, healthy use of emotional clarity involves.

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