The Importance of Emotional Education
You might not be aware of the tremendous effect your emotions have on your life. That’s because nobody has ever taught you how to handle them, change them, or learn about them.
As a matter of fact, it seems as if you forget about them for the simple fact that you don’t see them. However, they’re fundamental in your daily life.
Being aware of your emotions and taking responsibility for them is essential for your mental well-being.
“We were taught from childhood how a body is formed, its organs, its bones, its functions, its places, but we never knew what the soul was made of”
-Mario Benedetti-
Why are emotions so important?
Emotions determine your relationship with the world. Your mental health and personal well-being influence each other, depending largely on how you relate to the world, as well as the emotions you generate.
When you were born, you hadn’t yet developed thought or language, and couldn’t plan what you did. Nevertheless, your emotions allowed you to communicate and identify what was good and bad for you.
In fact, through crying, smiling, or other rudimentary behaviors you related to the world and the rest of humanity. Therefore, we can say that emotions shape your physical, mental, emotional, and social landscape.
In addition, emotions function as indicators of your inner world. Thus, a piece of advice when you find yourself experiencing a specific emotion would be to ask yourself: what is this emotion good for?
The importance of emotional education
Your emotions give you information about your relationship with the environment. You experience joy or satisfaction when things are going well for you and sadness or despair when the opposite happens, such as when you experience losses or threats.
Every time you experience an emotion, you create corresponding thoughts. These also intervene in your nervous system as your body prepares itself for the best response.
Your emotions can be both your greatest strength and your worst weakness. It all depends on how you handle them.
Your emotions are like an alarm system that’s activated when you detect a change in the situation around you. They’re adaptive resources that give priority to the most relevant information, thus activating different processes that allow you to give a response.
In childhood, experiencing positive emotions frequently favors the possible development of an optimistic, confident, and extroverted personality. Experiencing negative emotions has the opposite effect.
For this reason, an adequate emotional education allows you to acquire skills to manage your emotional states, reduce your negative emotions, and increase the positive ones.
In this sense, you get to know how to resolve conflicts assertively, accept short-term frustration in exchange for a long-term reward, and manage your moods in order to motivate yourself.
The benefits of emotional education
A good emotional education entails a whole learning process in which your vision of the world, of yourself, and how you manage yourself is built.
In addition, each lived experience has an emotional tone, which can be either pleasant or unpleasant. Furthermore, with the proper development of emotions, you can:
- Recover quicker if you’re experiencing negative emotions.
- Adopt a positive attitude toward life.
- Be more optimistic, but not excessively.
- Know how to express your feelings.
- Possess a realistic self-esteem.
- Have the capacity to cooperate and solve conflict.