When asked “How are you?”, how often do you simply respond with the expected standards such as fine, good, and well? I saw a post this morning that caught my attention, urging people to speak their truth instead by responding authentically. But how many of us really know how we feel anymore?
It’s so easy to get out of touch with your emotions when we lead ourselves to believe that if you can’t respond positively, then you shouldn’t respond at all or that there are right and wrong ways to feel at any given moment. What if you just gave yourself permission to answer honestly and then actually think for a minute about how you feel without using one of the standard responses?
You might even find that you can broaden your emotional vocabulary and discover that life is more 50/50 than you think…50% filled with positive emotion and 50% filled with negative. If I simply look back at my last 48 hours, I’ve passed through dismayed, disgusted, shocked, self-conscious, brave, relieved, connected, and relaxed. Had I not stopped to write this, I might not have realized how varied it’s actually been.
Another benefit of owning how we feel at any moment is to avoid the suffering we put on ourselves by layering emotions. By that, I mean when you feel disappointment but don’t want to say that to someone else for fear they will think you are being “negative”. So you lie and then feel guilty for lying, so now you feel disappointed and guilty, thereby layering multiple negative emotions on top of each other.
Or how about when you are angry but tell someone you are fine? You start to layer isolation or loneliness on top of your anger, maybe even betrayal because you aren’t being true to yourself. You get my point. One negative emotion at a time is much easier to deal with than making a double decker sandwich out of it, simply by denial.
Another thing I see these days is people being afraid to admit they actually feel anything remotely positive. Like they should feel guilty for actually having a good day in the middle of all this disruption. Own the positive too, because you faking your way to negative isn’t going to help someone else’s suffering go away. As much as we like to believe we can control the world around us, we simply can’t. Their emotions are driven by their thoughts, not your answers.
So here’s your challenge, for the next 30 days, make it a point to evaluate your current state every time you are asked how you are doing and go beyond the obvious to give an emotion that truly fits. On that note, I leave you with my current emotion…content.