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Understanding Emotions: Why it's Hard to Know What You're Feeling

In the whirlwind of everyday life, especially during your teenage years, it's entirely normal to sometimes feel as if you're on an emotional rollercoaster. The highs can be sky-high, and the lows, well, can sometimes feel like plunging into uncertainty. What can be particularly challenging during such moments is identifying exactly what you're feeling. When you can't pinpoint your emotions, it can lead to confusion, stress, and even make you feel isolated. But why does this happen, and what can you do about it?

The Background: Emotional Awareness

Emotional awareness, or the ability to recognise and name your feelings, is a crucial skill for managing personal and interpersonal challenges effectively. It sounds straightforward, right? However, the complexity of emotions often makes this a difficult skill to master. Emotions are how we react to things happening inside us or around us. They can make our body feel different, change how we act, and affect what we're thinking or feeling. Identifying what we feel isn't always clear-cut because many emotions are interconnected and can occur at the same time.

Why It Can Be Hard to Identify Emotions

There are several reasons why you might struggle to identify your emotions:

• Lack of Emotional Vocabulary: Not knowing the words to describe different feelings can make it hard to express or even understand your own emotions.
• Emotional Blunting: Sometimes, to guard against emotional pain, people subconsciously dull their emotional responses. This can be due to past experiences, mental health issues like depression, or high levels of stress.
• Social and Cultural Influences: In some cultures or families, expressing certain emotions may be discouraged. This can lead to suppression of feelings, making it harder to recognise them when they occur.
• Neurological Factors: For some individuals, there might be neurological reasons behind the difficulty in identifying emotions, a condition known as alexithymia.

The Impact on Young People

For teens, the inability to identify and express emotions can significantly impact various aspects of life. Emotionally, it can create feelings of inadequacy and confusion. Socially, not understanding or expressing emotions appropriately can affect relationships with friends, family, and teachers. It can lead to misunderstandings or conflicts, as emotions are a key component in how we communicate and connect with others.

Moreover, academic and extracurricular achievements can also suffer. Emotional distress can decrease concentration, motivation, and the overall ability to perform tasks. Long-term, these challenges can feed into a cycle of stress and emotional turmoil, potentially affecting your self-esteem and mental health.

Strategies to Help Identify and Manage Your Emotions

If you find it tough to figure out what you're feeling, here are some practical steps to enhance your emotional awareness:

1. Keep a Feelings Journal: Writing down your thoughts and how you feel daily can help you trace patterns in your emotional responses and better understand them.
2. Educate Yourself: Learning about different types of emotions can give you the vocabulary and understanding needed to describe and identify your feelings.
3. Practise Mindfulness: Mindfulness exercises can increase your awareness of the present moment and help you become more aware of your emotional state.
4. Communicate Openly: Talking about your feelings with someone you trust can also help you clarify your emotions and gain insights from another's perspective.
5. Seek Professional Help: Sometimes, it helps to discuss your feelings with a counsellor or therapist who can guide you through understanding and managing your emotions effectively.
6. Use Emotional Guidance: Tools like emotion wheels or apps designed to help people explore their feelings can also be beneficial.
7. Reflect on Physical Sensations: Sometimes, emotions manifest physically. Noticing these sensations can provide clues to understanding your feelings.

Conclusion

Struggling to identify your emotions is a more common issue than many think, particularly in the complex world of teenage years. By recognising this challenge and taking proactive steps to enhance your emotional intelligence, you can begin to break down the barriers between feeling and understanding, ultimately leading to a more balanced, comprehensible, and fulfilled emotional life.

Remember, identifying and dealing with emotions is a skill, and like all skills, it gets better with practise. Be patient with yourself; recognising and understanding your feelings is not just about coping better with life, but also about deepening your relationship with yourself and those around you.

How are you feeling?

It is really important that when we need help, we feel able to ask for it. This could be speaking to a parent, a close friend, a teacher or someone else you trust. Sometimes it can be really hard to share our feelings with other people but if we are feeling low or don't know where to turn, sharing with others is really important. Teachers will always take you seriously and listen to your problems in confidence if you approach them for help. Likewise, parents, siblings or friends will help you if you reach out to them.

If you feel like you can't speak to anyone you know, there are people and organisations that can help support you:

• Childline - Call them on 0800 1111 any time of the day or night, every day of the week
• NSPCC - Call them on 0808 800 5000 between 10am and 4pm Monday to Friday or email them on help@NSPCC.org.uk
• The Samaritans – Call them on 116 123 any time of the day or night, every day of the week
• SANE – Call 0300 304 7000 for support (4:30pm - 10:30pm every day)
• Mind – Call 0300 123 3393 (9:00am - 6:00pm Monday to Friday)

*Sometimes we will use real life examples in our articles to aid understanding. When we do, names and ages will be changed.