10/12/2025
How we feel and the emotions we experience are a central part of our mental health. Conversely how we respond to emotions is critical for our health, mental and physical. While they can perplexing, stubborn, frustrating, annoying, frightening and downright depressing at times, emotions are a fundamental and necessary part of brain functioning. In fact, they are central to being human.
Unfortunately societal beliefs often tells us we shouldn’t have emotions or some emotions are bad. Telling your brain it shouldn’t have emotions is like telling your heart not to beat or your lungs not to breathe, and it doesn’t make your brain very happy.
Emotions don’t always feel nice and can make us want to run away from them. And like any avoidance, short term this seems to work, we feel relieved. But inside your brain is feeling pretty annoyed at trying to hold it all in.
How you respond to your emotions is important. Research shows suppressing, berating and shaming emotions doesn’t help us deal with them at all and just creates more stress and make emotions feel even more difficult.
Naming, validating, expressing and recognising emotions seems to help us process them and help us become friends with them, rather than them having power over us. It seems to soothe those emotions and instead of adding a layer of more stress and difficult feelings, helps us deal with the ones we have.
read more about the science of emotions and how we can help our emotions in my books
📕‘A Toolkit for your Emotions’.
📚 A toolkit for modern life
📖 A toolkit for happiness
