Many people have lives of significant disconnect from their emotions. If you struggle to remember the last time you could clearly identify your feelings, you may be one of them. 

Struggling to connect with your emotions shouldn't be a cause for shame. There are many reasons why you struggle, including:

• Being influenced by harmful social norms (ex., toxic attitudes around masculinity)

• Growing up in an abusive, unsupportive, and emotionally unavailable household

• Living with unprocessed and unresolved trauma from painful past events 

• Struggling with alexithymia (an inability to identify emotions)

• Having severe emotional dysregulation due to ADHD 

Unfortunately, closing your eyes to emotions doesn't mean they go away. 

Mood swings and painful flare-ups of emotions don't disappear just because you struggle to synch with your emotions, accept their existence, and explore how they impact you. 

The more blind you are to your internal world, the harder it becomes to notice the building tension and emotional weight before a severe mood swing. It also becomes more challenging to spot triggers that can cause a hurricane in your mind because you are not paying attention. 

This article will offer various tools and insights to re-awaken and deepen your connection with your emotions by helping you embrace what you feel instead of running away, ground yourself, and connect to your physical body. We will also cover various coping mechanisms you can use to get your emotions under control in emergencies. 

Learn To Identify What You Are Feeling

There is a huge difference between feeling somewhat tense with mild anxiety and getting jittery, restless, and disorientated while on the verge of a panic attack. Being frustrated with someone and getting grumpy is miles away from feeling enraged to the point you want to rip their head off. Feeling bumped with a sinking feeling in your chest is nothing like violently shaking while weeping your heart out. 

As those illustrations suggest, emotions can wildly differ in their intensity. 

Identifying your emotions is much more than stopping to vibe check yourself for a moment, and sticking a label of "sad" on your forehead. You also need to verify a) how intense the emotions are, b) what's causing them, c) what they are trying to tell you, and d) how your feelings affect your behavior and physical condition.

The answers to those questions will determine the actions you have to take to best respond. 

You can feel a mild sadness while looking at old photos, which bring back nostalgia and an odd sense of melancholy. This is a perfectly normal human experience, and if you let yourself feel it fully, it will eventually pass and fade away. However, if you feel a massive hole in your chest and immense sorrow after a painful confrontation, you will have to do much more to calm yourself, like reaching out to other people for comfort and getting in touch with the person who caused those emotions to clear the air and say what may have remained unspoken. 

In theory, you can label emotions and make the mental effort on the spot. In practice, it's just not effective enough since you may struggle with visualization, and many other thoughts are fighting for your attention. This is why tracking your emotions somewhere is a much more convenient option, as it also allows you to visibly see past entries, spot patterns, and compare them across different situations. 

Don't worry. You don't have to do a boring, in-depth report. 

Just use something close by, like a digital document you can easily access or a pocket journal. Write down what you think you are feeling, some physical symptoms, and anything else you find appropriate, like the thoughts circling your mind, what happened recently, and even creative ways of describing what's going on with metaphors and jokes. 

The point is to spot patterns by learning what events trigger strong emotions and what you are likely to feel in a given moment if your experiences overlap with previous journal entries. For example, tracking when your anxiety spikes by rating it from 1 to 10 every two hours can eventually show you the times when you are not meeting your physical needs (eating and drinking enough water) or re-affirm your suspicion that browsing social media does more harm than good for your mental health.

If you struggle, remember that it will be challenging in the beginning, but over time, you will get a much greater understanding of yourself. 

Finally, you may want to try to slow down from time to time. It's hard to pay attention to the subtle physical sensations and emotions in the back of your mind if there are much more shiny and stimulating distractions in front of you. 

From time to time, stop what you are doing and just let yourself be. Lay down and focus on the sensation of your breathing. Stare at a wall without looking at your phone for five minutes. Walk while turning your attention to the heels of your feet whenever you wander off into your thoughts. 

You don't have to become a full-time monk to learn about your emotions better. All it takes is to have small moments in your day where you intentionally embrace your emotions, even if painful and uncomfortable, get in synch with your body, and explore inward.  

The Mind & Body Connection - Exploring Emotions Through Your Body 

Your emotions are messengers that signal whether you are safe and content or threatened and in danger. Depending on what you are feeling and how intense the emotion is, you will see a reflection in your physical body. This happens automatically because your body has to prepare you for the potential events that may unfold depending on your emotions. 

For example, mild anxiety can make you physically restless, but being on the verge of a panic attack makes you tremble, feel numb, sweat, and leads to weakness and chest pain. Similarly, anger and frustration lead to discomfort throughout your body, restlessness, and a desire to pace around, but being furious and enraged creates an even more visible mark with loud and increased heartbeats, muscle tension, involuntary jaw clenching, and blood rushing to your face. 

Since your body mirrors your emotions, reconnecting with your physical sensations can be an excellent way to better grasp what you are feeling. For starters, when you feel uncomfortable and tense, ask yourself the following question - Where are you feeling it? 

I know not everyone can answer this question clearly, even if they are experiencing intense emotions in a given moment. For example, this can often happen if you have past traumatic experiences. 

Your body hasn't processed what you have gone through, and it unintentionally gets triggered by similar situations, so you feel cold, tense, and detached from yourself. This physical dissociation means you are stuck in the freezing stage of the fight-flight-freeze response that all people naturally have to stressful events. If you are chronically stressed, then you never shut off and relax fully, so your connection with your body is severed as well. 

No matter the exact cause, there are some quick ways to re-connect with your body and get some relief:

1. Quick movements - This can include tapping with your feet, jumping on the spot, patting your hands on your legs, squeezing your forearms with the opposite hand, rotating your shoulders in circles, standing on your toes by raising your calf muscles, etc. The point is to practice easy and gentle movements that can snap your attention toward your body. 

2. Progressive muscle relaxation - Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) - If you have unprocessed feelings and suffer from chronic stress, your body can tense up and remain frozen and locked up without you being aware of it. Progressive muscle relaxation is a technique where you use a single muscle group at a time, focus on tensing it up fully, then slowly relax and let go. You can start with your toes, feet, and calves and then move upward.  You can also do slow breaths with a focus on a long exhale to further relax. 

3. Pushing impulses to completion - It's common to feel physically restless when you have ADHD. Not acknowledging those impulses makes you more anxious, uncomfortable, and impulsive. One simple technique is to pick a physical sensation you are going through and exaggerate it. For example, tighten your muscles completely when you feel tense and then fully relax, jiggle your legs and arms if you feel jittery, and quickly pace around the room and even jump around if you feel uncomfortable from sitting for so long in one place. Full expression allows you to relax entirely afterward instead of being stuck in the middle. 

You can do these short exercises on the spot, but there's also so much more you can try out to get in touch with your body. Dancing to your favorite albums and playlists (no one has to know), late-night yoga using apps, guided routines, or just improvising on the spot, working out with dumbbells, resistance bands, or your own bodyweight only, sauna, cold showers, rock climbing, swimming, walking and hiking in nature, gardening, and so much more. 

Connecting with your body regularly makes it easier to spot when your emotions are rising up, which will allow you to respond quickly in a healthy way and more effectively use your body to calm down your mind. It will also allow you to adapt your behavior and schedule for the day to accommodate what you are going through best. 

For example, if you are emotionally shaken from a nasty confrontation with a toxic co-worker, you may need to vent it out to a friend, yell it out quietly in the bathroom, and do some breathwork while sitting with your frustration and letting it slowly fade away without resistance. 

However, if you are not in sync with your emotions, you might as well return back to work, get constantly distracted because of the unprocessed feelings and physical restlessness, get angry at yourself now, and go down a painful spiral. Either way, you don't get any work done, but in the first option, at least you calm down and get yourself under control after a while. 

Responding To Painful & Intense Emotions - How To Live Through Mood Swings 

Before diving into those strategies, I want to emphasize two essential characteristics of emotions:

1. Emotions always have a function - Emotions are not pointless, even if they sometimes flare up excessively or get triggered in the wrong context. For example, sadness shows us what we value and allows for quiet introspection, and anger prepares us for confrontations and serves as a protective gesture against threats. Emotions are messengers sent to give you important insights, which is why you can't just make them disappear. Trying to erase them only banishes them to the concerns of your subconscious, waiting to violently rise up again later. Acknowledging them and processing what you are going through is mandatory.  If you don't give them space and an outlet for expression, they will keep banging on the door even louder. 

2. Emotions are fleeting - When you are in pain, you want the pain to stop. Many intense emotions are painful and highly taxing to your body and mind. Unfortunately, those messengers don't come with a clear expiration date, so you don't know exactly when an emotion will stop being so intense. Without a clear end, it's very easy to fall under the impression that they will last forever. It seems absurd if you are reading this now but think of the grief and hopelessness you felt two days after a breakup. This is why it's good to remind yourself how emotions are fleeting and transient, either by having notes around you that are clearly visible or by speaking them out loud when you are trying to process them.

Emotions can't be erased, but nothing you feel will last forever, so you should accept your feelings and allow yourself to experience them without hiding and running away. You can also occasionally remind yourself of how you are under control, knowing that all emotions eventually pass. 

I don't expect you to lay on the ground, stare at the ceiling, and try to process what you are going through for every emotion. In many cases, you can work on embracing and understanding your emotions alongside other coping mechanisms that make surfing through the high waves easier. The strategy you apply will depend on how intense your emotions are and what you find works best based on trial and error.

TL DR - There are no bad emotions, only misguided reactions to emotions. We aim to correct the reactions without erasing what we are feeling by responding with curiosity and lack of judgment.

Strategies for Handling Emotions on the Lower End of the Spectrum:

1. Distract yourself - If you feel a painful emotion, it's easy to start hyper-fixating on it, which only makes it more intense. For example, feeling horrible after a company interview rejection is bound to worsen if you lay idle and dwell on everything possibly wrong with you. Instead, you can distract yourself by quickly making plans with friends, playing video games, doing some yoga at home, watching a favorite movie, or anything else that will retain your attention and keep you occupied. Remember, the point isn't to ignore your emotions and pretend they don't exist but to do something alongside experiencing them to make them more manageable and less overwhelming.

2. Physical soothing - Intense emotions create stress and tension in the body. However, the cycle can be reversed. Relaxing your body through your senses can calm you down and ease what you are going through. You can do this through a) touch (warm bath, massage, cuddling with your pet, comfortable clothes, fluffy blankets), b) taste (hot drinks, cold treats, comfort foods), c) smell (candles, incense, fresh air in the park), d) hearing (favorite songs and personalized playlists, white, brown and pink noise, birds singing in nature), and e) sight (favorite movies, comforting YouTube videos, watching your pet).

3. Breathing techniques - Breathing directly regulates and influences your central nervous system, which is why breathing techniques are one of the most effective ways to weather an emotional storm. Popular options include the physiological sigh (two quick and sharp inhales followed by a very slow exhale) or the 4-6-7 (4-second inhale, 6-second pause, and 7-second exhale) for 10-20 repetitions. If you don't like counting, just focus on controlling your breath and ensuring the exhale is longer than the inhale, automatically making you more relaxed. 

Some of those coping mechanisms will also work when your emotions are much more intense. For example, when you get tightly hugged by a loved one while weeping, grab ice cubes from the fridge and hold on to them while quickly pacing the room, or get yourself in a cold shower so that you are busy trying not to freeze. You probably have some unique version of those strategies that work for you.

One reason why some of those coping strategies may not work for intense emotions is that you can't ride out the emotional waves if you are feeling too much and about to burst. 

This is why you may need to find an outlet that allows you to express everything you are going through. Letting it out is much better than keeping it bottled. If you feel immense frustration, anger, rage, or sadness, some examples of finding outlets can include:

• Write down a letter on how you are feeling about the situation, or record a voice message for yourself (you can burn the page and delete the recording afterward)

• Scream as loud as you can into a pillow 

• Take the same pillows and throw them 

• Inhale balloons and then pop them 

• Punch the soft side of the bed 

• Stick pins in dolls and toys

Some of those options are slightly violent, but that's okay. Selective aggression without real harm to anyone can be an amazing outlet for bottled-up emotions. Furthermore, storing those emotions in you can lead to much worse outcomes than making a slight mess of your room. Storing very painful emotions in yourself without an outlet can make it much harder for them to pass. In extreme cases, it can lead to instances of self-harm.

That's a lot of coping mechanisms, and I know it can seem overwhelming.

I don't expect you to perfectly recall all those options and go through them the next time you are huddled in blankets, feeling miserable and hopeless. Thankfully, you don't have to put a lot of effort on the spot if you do some preparation in advance. Simply pick three strategies (ex., physical soothing, progressive muscle relaxation, and a single breathing technique), write a short and easy-to-follow instruction on a few notes, and place it somewhere clearly visible (wall next to the bed, fridge, bathroom, etc).

Planning by writing simple, straightforward, and easy-to-follow instructions in notes can get you started more easily because it reduces executive function demands.  Any doubt and ambiguity on how you should act are gone, and you don’t have to force yourself to think about what to do in situations where your brain is too busy trying to process the overwhelming emotions you are going through.

Strategies For Anxiety Management 

One of the most common emotions people struggle with is anxiety. 

There are no bad or negative emotions, and anxiety is no exception. When people struggle with anxiety, the problem is the intensity of their experience, not the emotion itself. Being slightly anxious can be useful to get your attention and motivate you to respond, but too much can give you a panic attack.

Anxiety is an adaptive biological response that occurs when we face dangerous situations. 

This is nature's internal alarm system that activates your sympathetic nervous system, which releases a rush of adrenaline and triggers the fight, flight, or freeze response whenever you spot a potential threat. This response triggers all the common anxiety symptoms: high heart rate, muscle tension, quicker breathing, sweating, etc. 

Anxiety becomes a problem when you falsely perceive something as a threat in your environment and believe you don't have the resources to handle a situation. 

In clinical terms, anxiety disorders are often defined as an exaggerated perception of threat and an underestimation of resources. It makes total sense to get anxious when you spot an aggressive dog barking at you, but getting anxious from browsing on your phone means your alarm system is firing up when it shouldn't. 

The problem with anxiety is that, very often, it creates an urge for avoidance. If something stresses you out, you want to avoid it as much as possible. However, by avoiding the source of anxiety, you can never break the belief that it's not dangerous or you are capable of handling it. As a result, you enter a vicious cycle where anxiety creates avoidance, and avoidance creates even more anxiety since the unknown is usually much more frightening. 

Techniques For Managing & Coping With Anxiety 

1. Intentional Journalling - This will not cure your anxiety instantly, but it's essential because, in many cases, the interpretation of events you are running with is not what's happening, so you can challenge your automatic assumptions. You can write down what you are anxious about and see if your thoughts fall into common cognitive traps related to anxiety. Those include the probability error (you overestimate the likelihood of a negative event happening), the catastrophic error (you overestimate the negative consequences of an outcome), and resource error (you underestimate your ability and resources to handle a situation). If you want an easy template to follow, you can ask yourself the following questions: a) what is the worst that can happen? b) how likely is this to happen? c) what is the best that can happen? d) what skills and resources do I have to help me with this situation? 

2. Brain dumping - This is another form of journalling that is far less structured, allowing you to easily use it when you feel exhausted and overwhelmed. There is only one goal: to write every possible thing that is giving you anxiety. The very act of writing about your anxiety sources can be enough to create a healthy distance because you can look at them from a distance instead of grappling in your mind. You can also connect different thoughts since common fears often have roots in interconnected beliefs. For example, getting anxious over a performance due to imposter syndrome can be closely related to an intense fear of judgment and criticism, reaffirming your belief that you are not good enough. 

3. Give context to your anxiety - Have you heard that you can sometimes turn your anxiety into excitement? This popular strategy takes advantage of the fact that the physiological symptoms of anxiety you feel can be given a meaning more suitable to your goals. You can more easily overcome an anxiety episode if you give the experience a context (a situation will soon be resolved) and a cue (how you are currently getting out of the situation). The classic example is saying out loud to yourself how you are excited about your speech and taking a step toward the stage when you have to do a presentation in front of a crowd. Another instance would be feeling jittery about a job interview and reminding yourself how it means you care so much about it, and this feeling will end after the interview. 

4. Dedicate 20 minutes a day for worry and rumination - You spend 15 minutes during the day doing nothing else but writing down or voicing out on a recording of all your insecurities, worries, fears, and sources of anxiety. In the beginning, you will get anxious throughout the day and during your practice, but gradually, it will get easier for you to say, "Thanks, brain, but we can deal with this later." when you get the need to go down a spiral of anxious thoughts because you are guaranteed to have an opportunity later in the day. This practice also challenges subconscious beliefs that rumination is out of your control because you take charge of the reins. Finally, it makes anxious thoughts less real and powerful because scheduling them for later will often lead to you forgetting what you were so worried about earlier today, making you see how they weren't so frightening. 

5. Activate the mammalian diving reflex - This is especially useful when overwhelmed with anxiety. The mammalian reflex activates the parasympathetic nervous system that creates or mimics relaxation, and as a result, you get immediate relief because your heart rate slows down, your breathing slows down, and your muscles relax. This is the opposite of the symptoms you get during increased anxiety. All you have to do is cover your cheeks and forehead with very cold water. This can be done both in a bowl with ice cubes for 20 to 30 seconds or with an ice pack covering your face. Remember to hold your breath to activate the primal reflex. 

6. Keep yourself occupied to prevent anxiety strikes - Clenching all your muscles in the body before slowly releasing, squeezing ice cubes, biting a lemon, or getting your senses overwhelmed with strong flavors like spicy food are all quick ways you can ground yourself. However, eating and drinking, in general, are excellent options because they signal to your brain that you are safe and protected. If you are in public, you can take small sips of water and chew on gum as an alternative. If you are by yourself at home, you can also turn on a voice recording and start rambling about a topic in-depth, reading something out loud, or singing a favorite song. By speaking in some form, you prevent your mind from thinking a lot, and you reduce the chance of quick breathing and hyper-ventilation.

Those are all exercises designed to help you cope with anxiety, not erase it. 

There is no way to eradicate anxiety from your life because it is a natural response that is immensely helpful. The point is to reduce unnecessary triggers for anxiety when you are not threatened at all and to make anxiety episodes less painful and uncomfortable. 

If none of those strategies work for you, you may need to consider looking deeper into other areas of your life. 
Sleep deprivation (below 6 hours) can wreck your mental health, making you more anxious in everyday life. Similarly, not drinking enough water, not eating enough healthy foods to meet your nutrient needs, and not moving enough can also sink your mental health to the bottom. A lack of physical activity is a very common contributing factor. If you have an excess of energy and adrenaline at the end of the day, it’s easier for your brain to have enough fuel to invest in rumination and overthinking.

Finally, highly stressful and toxic work environments, too much drinking of caffeine and alcohol, and lack of movement and exercise can all make anxiety significantly worse. 

How To Improve Emotional Wellness By Reducing Social Media Usage

Saying social media is harmful feels like beating a dead horse at this point. However, we need to briefly stress the stunning magnitude of harm you experience from high consumption. This can include:

1.  Immense amount of time wasted, fragmented attention span, increased impulsivity, and a higher need for immediate stimulation, which makes regular work much more challenging and stressful

2. Unhealthy comparison with people who show only distorted and unrealistic versions of themselves, increasing feelings of inadequacy and anxiety about your worth

3. Reduced sleep quality because regular social media use likely persists very late into the night when you have the least willpower and impulse control to resist

4. Chronic feelings of anxiety, powerlessness, and hopelessness due to excessive consumption of negative news coverage that are inherent to app algorithms

5. Mental exhaustion and unnecessary frustration and rage while dealing with hateful comments, fighting in comment sections, and superficial drama 

Quitting social media is hard, but it gets even more challenging when you have ADHD. 

Struggling with impulse control and needing high levels of stimulation makes scrolling on your phone an irresistible option because you can effortlessly turn on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit, or anything else you are using. Furthermore, social media is the perfect place to find new special interests and satisfy your curiosity, which is very common in ADHD due to your interest-based nervous system (enjoyment matters more than importance and consequences).

If you are serious about quitting social media or significantly reducing how much you are using it, some of the following suggestions can help:

1. Focus on this and nothing else - You can't try to reduce social media use while learning how to meditate, exercise more frequently, journal, or build other habits. Since you will be tempted during the whole day, you need all the focus, energy, and intention to go toward resistant cravings and put barriers to staying away from social media use. Of course, you can do your hobbies and try out new habits if you want to keep yourself occupied with all the time that is freeing up. However, staying away from social media, documenting your progress, and putting yourself in situations where you can't scroll should be your current top priority.

2. Take it slow - Look at your average phone use for the last 4 weeks. I highly doubt it is below 6 hours most days. Social media is not cocaine, but that doesn't mean you can go cold turkey on it instantly. In the beginning, you can start with small goals by having 2 times during the day where, for 30 minutes, you don't use your phone. Then, you can slowly build it up to 45 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, and more. It will be easier, and you will feel better if you intentionally schedule breaks where you can use social media for 10-15 minutes, which will gradually get you in the headspace of waiting for the scheduled use instead of wanting it right now at every moment. 

3. Create as many situations as possible where scrolling is not an option - The appeal of your phone is simply too strong for you to endlessly resist it if it's right in front of you. If you want to have time not scrolling, the most effective way is not to have your phone with you or be in a situation where you can't be using it. You don't have to become a caveman and buy a flip phone instead (even if it's a viable option), but you should design your schedule to follow this rule. For example, going out with friends and your partner without your phone, going out shopping and for a walk without your phone, etc. 

4. Create as many barriers as possible - The problem isn't your impulses and cravings for stimulation but the lack of time you have to snap out of it. Thankfully, there are a lot of ways for you to make it harder to access social media apps, like deleting the apps from your phone, blocking them, using apps that limit how much you can use them per day, using apps that create a long loading screen after you click on an app, etc. You can also create physical distance, like putting your phone on the other side of the room in the morning to avoid scrolling in the comfort of your bed or putting your phone and other devices on a very high shelf while trying to work. 

As with any other habit you can build, perfectionism is the enemy. 

You are not likely to completely stop using social media altogether. However, dropping your average from 8 hours to 90 minutes is a significant improvement. Furthermore, you are likely to have relapse periods where you drop your efforts and structure because something else is going on in your life. That's all fine because the point is to get small wins and resume your efforts after a break. 

You can't lose if you don't stop trying. 

Conclusion

Regulating your emotions is a skill that many of us haven't been taught at all. 

This leads to a reduced awareness of how emotions affect your body and behavior. It also exacerbates painful and uncomfortable emotions because you are not used to processing your feelings, let alone responding to them effectively. 

Unlearning the habit of ignoring, dismissing, and shutting down your emotions will take effort and time. However, you can see a dramatic improvement in your emotional awareness and ability to cope with intense emotions if you consistently practice any of the exercises we have covered in this article and follow the simple mantra of - acknowledge, accept, embrace, float, and let time pass.