Understanding Intense Emotions -- How To Manage Today's Heightened Levels Of Stress

Intense emotions are reactions to thoughts and feelings and every person feels them differently. Some people feel intense joy from time to time, while others might feel intense anger or sadness. No matter their intensity, these emotions are normal and everyone has them from time to time.

There is a common misconception that the more stressful your life is, the more intense your emotions will be. This isn't always true, but for most people it's not too difficult to find sources of stress in their lives. It can be draining trying to balance work with family obligations and having spare moments for yourself but it's important not to allow stress become an excuse for going on living an unhealthy lifestyle or skipping out on important responsibilities.

It's also common to think that your emotions are more intense when you are feeling less confident. But in fact, the opposite is true. For example, if you feel stressed and anxious about what might happen in the future you will also likely feel scared of what could be lost forever. Most people are both realistic and more positive at times which can make them seem like they're not very emotional but they can still have an intense reaction over something that is upsetting or stressful.

As with most things in life it's important for each person to find a balance between their own feelings and those of others to find the best way of dealing with any type of emotion. Many people might believe that they shouldn't feel them at all or that they should feel nothing but the truth is that life is full of both ups and downs and it's important to be true to our feelings in order to find happiness. Everyone has their own way of finding happiness and everyone has their own way of dealing with emotions.

Intense emotions can be useful in helping you feel alive, but they often cause some problems when we let them control us. If you're feeling intense anger or sadness it can be hard to concentrate on anything else because anger and sadness are so overwhelming. I know this from personal experience as I used to get extremely stressed out by my own emotions and felt completely overwhelmed when my mood swung from one extreme to another.

There are many different ways a person can manage intense emotions and people who understand what they are going through are better able to empathize and help you work out how to deal with yours in the most appropriate way. From a distance, it's sometimes hard to know what is behind an emotion and it's hard to know how best to help someone dealing with an intense emotion.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotions From Feelings

One of the most important things you can do for yourself if your feeling intensely emotional is for you to differentiate between emotions and feelings. When we think about them together, many emotions can be confused with feelings.

It's been said that a feeling is an emotion you can feel and an emotion is an emotion that you can't feel. There's a lot of truth to this, and it's something I've lived with myself for a long time. You may be able to tell that you're angry, but if it affects your body physically you may not be in the mood for talking about emotions or for reading about them. If we went around identifying emotions by how we feel then most people might mistake sadness and loneliness for loneliness, shame and despair for despair, disappointment and anger for anger, anxiety and insecurity for anxiety and unhappiness or depression for depression.

But when you take your feelings out of it, it's easier to see that there are different types of emotions that correspond with each other. The fact is, there are a lot of emotions and they are all present in everyone at some time or another. We can think about how we feel to identify what we're feeling and the more you know about yourself, the better you will be able to handle whatever emotion you happen to experience.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotion From Anger

Anger is a strong, intense emotional reaction that is often negative and may be associated with other emotions such as sadness, frustration or fear. It is a response to another person's behavior or event and involves an active emotional state that takes place in your brain. With intense anger you might be able to imagine how angry you are because you are feeling it physically inside your body but it's not always easy to say what made you angry in the first place.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotion From Sadness

Sadness is an intense emotion that happens when someone has lost something they valued. It's an extremely strong emotion as it can make you feel very down and unhappy, and might be associated with other emotions such as grief, anger or embarrassment.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotions From Fear

Fear is an extreme reaction to a thought or something that you imagine happening in the future. It involves a physical reaction which includes a jump in your heartbeat and your muscles tightening up which makes you feel physically fearful. It's different from anxiety though in that fear is something you can actually imagine happening, while anxiety isn't always so clear-cut. Sometimes people have intense feelings of fear but they don't know what happened that inspired the emotion.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotion From Anxiety

Anxiety is a type of extreme emotion that comes from a sense of fear and uncertainty. We often talk about anxiety being dangerous, but actually it's quite the opposite. Anxiety does not have any clear or immediate danger attached to it, so for example you might be anxious about an upcoming exam or work deadline but there isn't any real threat of anything bad happening if you don't do well on this test or make this deadline. An anxiety can be very complicated though because it can be linked to many different fears, fears that are hard to pin down sometimes. A person can be anxious about anything, but it's often related to a fear of not being able to handle the future or of losing control.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotion From Shame

Shame is an intense emotion that involves a misplaced feeling related to other feelings that may come from thoughts, feelings or beliefs. It's associated with embarrassment and humiliation and can be more intense than most emotions. A person experiencing shame can feel very confused about what happened because it is so overwhelming. Shame is often tied in with uncertainty so if someone feels shame often they might not know why they're feeling it in the first place.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotion From Despair

Despair is an intense feeling of sadness, fear or hopelessness that makes you not want to live. You might feel too sad to think about living, you might not have any hope for the future or you may think about ending your life. The despair feeling doesn't come with a warning and cannot be controlled easily by yourself although it is described as a feeling which can be broken because it is only temporary.

Understanding Intense Emotions By Differentiating Emotion From Disappointment

Disappointment is an intense feeling of being sad, upset or angry that happens when something you wanted doesn't happen.

Conclusion

That's all we have for this article, but there's more! If you want to take your emotional abilities to the next level then check out these pages:

-How To Become An Emotionally Intelligent Person

-How To Boost Your Emotional IQ

-Understanding Intense Emotions: A Step By Step Guide

-Emotional Intelligence In Relationships: How To Improve Your Relationship With Others (A Complete Guide For Women)

-Learn Emotional Intelligence: The Only Self Help Book You'll Ever Need

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Social And General Skills Intense but important emotional intelligence articles. (And a bunch of others, but these are the ones I've found most useful.