Check in with yourself: Monitoring your emotions is good for love

An exercise for schoolchildren got me thinking, and logging my emotions, says Simran Mangharam. ‘I find that the practice makes me more centered, more confident, able to communicate better.’

“Mama, I am feeling very happy,” my friend’s four-year-old said to her recently. A few hours later he came to her and said he was feeling angry. As an adult, I was fascinated by how uninhibitedly the child was expressing his emotional state.

Then, as part of a personal social education class, my daughter had to monitor her feelings for a week. She reported, at various times, that she was happy, sad, angry, upset, embarrassed, shy, proud, bored (among a long list of other things).

Inspired by this seemingly simple exercise, I started maintaining a secret log of my own. To be honest, I found it a bit odd and very hard initially to pinpoint my emotional state. Years of conditioning to hide one’s true feelings makes it tough to articulate them even to oneself. As forced as the exercise felt, I pushed through, because I also wanted to have a sense of what my child might be feeling.

As it turned out, I learnt quite a bit about myself. I found, for instance, that the yo-yo of feelings was not unique to children. As my day unfolded, I went from feeling irritated when the cook called to say she wasn’t coming in to work, to feeling gratitude that my mother-in-law had offered to take over the kitchen, to feeling overwhelmed by my to-dos at work, to feeling a surge of love when my daughter hugged me from behind and said, “Mama, are you okay?”

This approach of being in sync with my emotions has since become a habit, and it has had an unexpected effect: it has made me feel more confident. I am able to communicate at a more optimal level with loved ones, especially my husband, and he reciprocates. We both feel less obligated to go against our feelings, and are finding it easier to discuss, debate and disagree pleasantly and effectively too.

I have begun recommending this exercise to the couples I coach, especially those having trouble communicating. One such couple are Rohit and Gayatri. Rohit is extremely inexpressive and the air of mystery that gave him was initially one of the things that attracted Gayatri to him. She was a talker, and he was drawn to that expressiveness and candour.

Five years later, Rohit hasn’t changed in this respect, and Gayatri has begun to mirror his inexpressiveness. Once they commit to my new exercise and do it diligently, Gayatri is shocked by the emotional depth of Rohit. He seems like a whole new person. And she is enjoying discovering his emotional landscape as she works her way back to reclaiming her own expressive nature.

Rohit says he feels quite liberated by the exercise. He is still a bit uncomfortable verbalising what he’s feeling, so he keeps a log and shares it with Gayatri instead.

With my single clients, I use this exercise to gauge the success of a date. Often, articulating feelings helps them decipher how they felt, and even whether they want a next date or not.

The range of feelings that people log in their own minds is interesting too. Feeling slighted when the date commented on their career choice. Feeling respected when the date silenced or did not answer their phone. Feeling deflated by a series of monosyllabic responses. Feeling attraction when the date looked them straight in the eye.

Acknowledging one’s feelings is a very powerful tool in the emotional well-being kit. Because it centres you within yourself, you are able to make more informed decisions and act in ways that serve your priorities better.

It is also a powerful tool in the relationships well-being kit. When you acknowledge negative feelings, it gives you and your partner more information to work with and can spark conversations that enable you to recognise and resolve situations better. When you acknowledge and share positive feelings, it reinforces the positives that you have nurtured in your relationship. Vitally, the sharing of positive emotions also has a cumulative effect, filling up the reservoir you will need to later draw on to make it through the inevitable vicissitudes of life.

(Simran Mangharam is a dating and relationship coach and can be reached on simran@floh.in)