What is your emotion getting you to do?

Emotions have a very important role in our lives of getting us activated, moving, and solving problems. If we had no emotions, we wouldn’t know when we were missing out, miserable, in a bad situation, or needing to make some sort of change. Sometimes our emotions are working very hard to give us a strong and important message.

Have you ever considered the benefit of what your emotion might be trying to tell you? Emotions are messages, red flags, and physiological responses that work to capture our attention.  Suppressing, ignoring, or inhibiting them over time can lead problems with our overall health and wellbeing.

Sometimes our emotions propel us to take a good hard look at painful, scary, or uncomfortable situations. Fearing the worse, we may actively avoid.

Avoidance of emotion can lead to inactivity. Inactivity is what happens when our emotions are trying to get us to solve a problem, but we fail to act on it. When we fail to act on it, the problem gets bigger. We feel worse and we get stuck even more.  Our experiences of helplessness and powerlessness increase.

Sometimes our emotions are working really hard to get us to approach an extremely difficult thing. Approaching and problem solving difficult things in our lives gives us an opportunity to feel accomplished, competent, and more in control over the outcome.

Are you avoiding a situation or problem that your emotion is working hard at getting you to solve?  What are the consequences? What would be the first step towards problem solving? What would you have to risk? What might you have to give up? What might you have to lose?