Therapy Workbook in the Cloud/Tracking and Understanding Your Emotions

Emotions are a key ingredient of our life as humans. They have the fundamental roles of singaling personally important changes of the environment and mobilizing our bodies to respond in adaptive ways. For many people, however - and maybe specialy for people seeking psychotherapy - emotions may seem to be the major problem in our lives, or even the true enemy we are stugling against. In this page, we will first go over the adaptive roles of emotions and help you reflect upon situations where they have been helpful to you. After, we will take a look at different components that are generally depicted as either part of or strongly linked to our emotional experiences. Finnaly, we will start thinking about the roles that emotion have been playing in your current life situation, and what kinds of relationship you have been establishing with them. Gaining some perspective is often a good starting point for starting making meaningful changes that can lead to a better life in the long run.

The Adaptive Roles of Emotions

If you are struggling with depressive, anxiety or stress-related disorders, it may seem puzzling to start a therapy workbook section by thinking about the positive role of your sadness or anxiety. Reacting in a rigid, overly judgmental way to our emotions, however, may have an important role in making them seem unbearable, dangerous or even stronger. Therefore, although that may seem like a pardox, by making clear what are some positive things about emotions, we may ultimately help you cope with them.

Fear and anxiety

Fear serves the natural purpose of signaling potential treats and prompting us to take care, escape or avoid danger. Immediate danger, such as a car comming fast in our direction, prompts an authomatic fear response that gives us the energy to fastly move out from the car's route and keep us safe - which is surely important and adaptive.

Anxiety helps us to prepare to deal with a future or possible challenge, by modulating our attention and motivating us to act upon them. If you foresee the deadline of an important task at work or school, anxiety may warn that energy has to be given to complete it.

Sadness

Sadness signals the loss or missingness of something (or someone) that is important to us in life. It naturally follows situations such as the loss of a loved one or even of a job opportunity we were interested in. While the expression of sadness signals to others that we may need their help, the withdrawing behaviors prompted by sadness may create space for us to understand what is important about what has been lost (or is missing), so that we can seek to have more of that in our future.

Anger

Anger prompts us to defend the interests we care about when they seem to have been wronged or threatened in some way. It motivates us to act in defense of such interests.

Shame and Guilt

Guilt and shame are triggered by the perception that we have done something that doesn't match our own (guilt) or our community's (shame) standards. They motivate us to fix that by either making amends or improving our behavior in the future.

Components of Emotional Experiences

Most people starting psychotherapy benefit from examining their emotional experiences in a somewhat more thoughtful way than they previously did in their everyday lives. In doing that, thinking about what are the components of such experiences is usualy helpful. Thoughts, physical sensations and behavior are the main players in that game, influencing each other as our experiences unfold.

Thoughts are our interpretations about ourselves and the world around us. They can be seen as ways to "filter" our experience that help us to act efficiently (rather than attending to every single stimulus around us). Importantly, that can happen fast and automatically (which is usualy called "automatic thought") or take on more deliberate, analytical forms.

Physical Sensations are the signal our body gives us about changes in our physiological state in a particular situation. Our body is getting ready for the behaviors that are elicited by our emotional experience. In a fear reaction, for example, our heart rate will go faster, our muscles will tense and we will tend to sweat more: we are ready for fight or flight!

Behavior is what we do. Emotions are accompanied by their "suggested" course of action: what we feel like doing when we experience them. As we have previously discussed, people feeling angry are prone to stand up for their rights, and people feeling afraid are ready to protect themselves. Importantly, what we do may also strongly influence our emotions. For example, in a same period of time, we are likely to feel very different emotions if we invite our best friend or family member for a walk vs. if we stay alone in our rooms.

Tracking your emotions

Although emotions have the important, adaptive roles we have discussed above, most of us eventually come to struggle with our emotions at some point. Some of such struggles may involve degrees of suffering and/or impairment that reach the threshold to be diagnosed as a mental disorder, and warrant specialized professional help.

Although each of such struggles have very individual, specific characteristics and context, most therapists agree that the way we deal with our emotional experiences is a key aspect in determining if and when we will heal from that struggle (or mental disorder). Therefore, investigating the contexts in which important emotional experiences are happening, and the ways we have been dealing with them, is a key point in any psychotherapy. The specific procedures involved in doing that, however, may vary importantly depending on your problems, goals, context and preferences. Below, we will talk a bit about some common ways this is done.

Common ways to track emotions

Paper or virtual forms are generally used to track the components of emotional experiences in order to better understand them and/or learn new things about them. Some forms are more focused on specific emotional experiences (e.g., allowing the reflection upon the three components of emotional experiences mentioned before in the context of a single specific situation), while others might track many different experiences along the week. Depending on the specific goals of your current stage on therapy, you and your therapist may want to track a specific kind of emotion or mood and rate (for example, from 0 to 10) how much it has been experienced in each situation along the week. Other things can also be included, such as ratings about the antecipated degree of distress in a situation, which can then be compared to how much distress was actually experienced.