Your emotions might significantly influence your thoughts & actions. Your daily emotions may drive you to action & have an impact on the big and minor decisions you make about your life. It is vital to understand Why Emotional Expression is Important.
Emotions may be fleeting—like an instantaneous displeasure at a coworker—or persistent—like lifelong grief over the end of a relationship. But why do we feel emotions in the first place? What function do they have?
The limbic system is the collective name for a network of linked brain regions that regulate emotions. Emotions & behavioral reactions are greatly influenced by important components such as the limbic cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, & hypothalamus.
Some Significance of Emotional Expression
1. Resisting it May Increase Our Pain
Our natural inclination is to attempt to make pain disappear when we experience it. If it’s emotional anguish, this could result in repressing the agony. Emotional energy, however, builds up in the body if it has nowhere to go.
As a result, by having emotional energy present continuously, the pain we are attempting to escape instead causes us to suffer more. By making our hurt & anguish known, we might increase our tolerance for it, which has the opposite effect.
Allowing ourselves to experience the feelings associated with our emotions might help us become less fearful & uncomfortable about experiencing unwanted energy since we are no longer suffering by rejecting & avoiding it. This is because it increases our capacity to tolerate the experience.
2. It Can Help You Make Decisions
One answer to Why Emotional Expression is Important is it can help us to make proper decisions. Research has shown that our emotions have an impact on our decision-making.
Anything may be a factor, from choosing our breakfast to what to watch on Netflix. According to research, those with brain injury typically experience less emotions, reducing their capacity for making wise judgments.
Additionally, your emotional intelligence & capacity for emotion management and understanding are crucial for making judgments. Although many individuals think that logic & reason serve as the basis for decision-making, emotional expressions nonetheless play a significant role.
3. It Helps To Experience The Emotion Fully
We are unable to numb or suppress emotions selectively, so when we do so about our grief, fear, & wrath, we are also suppressing our capacity to feel love, happiness, and thankfulness. Emotions are a whole experience that includes both difficult and easy feelings.
It is wise to state that the majority of us want to feel good feelings, and we want to feel them more often. But the only way we can feel more good emotions is by accepting & experiencing the complete range of emotions.
Being able to feel a variety of emotions is a necessary aspect of being human, which is why it is so amazing to feel pleasure and happiness after having experienced grief & hurt.
4. It Helps To Maintain a Healthy Relationship
One of the Benefits of Expressing Your Emotions is it helps to develop and maintain a healthy relationship with your partner, family & friends. If you think you are always being misunderstood by the people you love & care for, you may need to express your emotions properly to them.
How often did it happen after a hard day in the workplace when you came back home & your partner asked you to go shopping with her? Instead of expressing your feelings & emotions to her, you lock yourself in your room. Your partner took you as someone uncaring & uninterested person.
If you had expressed your emotions to her, she could have understood why you were in no mood to go shopping with her. She would have made you a hot coffee or played music to cheer you up.
5. It Help Others Understand You Better
Every time we contact strangers or other people, it becomes essential to let them know how we are feeling so that they may continue the conversation in the appropriate direction. These hints are mostly provided by our facial expressions, which reveal a great deal about our emotions.
Making decisions or acting in accordance with one’s feelings, emotions, or mood undoubtedly aids one. It is one answer to Why Emotional Expression is Important.
6. It is Good For our Physical Health
The majority of people believe that expressing our feelings is good for our mental and emotional health, which is accurate. Still, there is growing evidence that expressing our emotions also benefits our physical health.
It takes effort & might be physically exhausting to suppress our feelings actively. Our immune system, heart & vascular systems, brain and nerve systems, and even these might all suffer as a result.
Similar to how taking care of or neglecting our physical bodies may impact how we feel psychologically, the emotional environment we traverse throughout the day provides its physiological response. The mind-body relationship includes it.
Physical issues, including autoimmune illnesses, migraines, sleeplessness, and gastrointestinal issues, have all been connected to suppressed & blocked emotions.
7. It Motivates You To Act
You may feel a great deal of tension when presenting an interview over whether you will be able to pass the interview or not. As a result of this emotional reaction, you could begin to spend extra time getting ready for the interview. You may be inspired to do better since you have previously felt this sensation.
This feeling is also a chance to develop yourself & land a good job. Such feelings are associated with the rush of joy, excitement, & fulfillment. And if you stay out of those kinds of circumstances, it could make you depressed or anxious.
8. It Allows You To Understand Others
Expressions of emotion provide a great deal of social information. Being able to respond & understand in accordance with the emotions of others is crucial since social communication plays a significant role in our lives.
In essence, it enables us to develop more profound & meaningful connections with our loved ones. Effective communication with friends, family, & others is facilitated by it as well. It is one of the Benefits of Expressing Your Emotions.
9. It Brings People Together
People can better relate to & comprehend us when they sense our emotions. We communicate crucial details about who we are as people, our values & passions, and any needs we may have at particular times to other people through expressing our emotions.
When we share vulnerable feelings with the people we care about, such as grief, suffering, or fear, it forges bonding moments, deepening the connection & increasing the intimacy of the relationship. That is Why Emotional Expression is Important.
Dangers of Suppressing Emotions
It is commonly recognized that suppressing emotions has physiological implications on the body. This is usually just temporary and has no long-term consequences. However, repressing sensations on a daily basis might have detrimental physiological and psychological consequences.
If you’ve ever had a deep tissue massage, you know how tension may cause muscles to tighten. The body stores suppressed emotions. Anxiety, depression, and other stress-related ailments are the outcome of suppressed emotions. Alcohol and other substance abuse can arise from such suppression.
People typically suppress what they regard to be “negative” sensations in order to avoid pain. However, continuing emotional suppression involves effort, and this “effort” may have harmful consequences over time. Exertion activates the sympathetic nervous system, which might have detrimental consequences.
Suppressing one’s emotions, according to research, may lead to an increase in violence. According to research, the conscious suppression of unpleasant emotions has both immediate and long-term impacts on stress-induced cardiovascular reactivity.
Grossarth-Maticeck’s 1970 Yugoslav cohort study offered the first evidence for links between emotional suppression and mortality. Long-term depression was associated with cancer, but anger was linked to heart disease. If you want to avoid these, try to understand Why Emotional Expression is Important.
FAQs
Q: Which part of the brain develops emotions?
A: A network of brain areas & structures known as the emotional processing network is in charge of processing emotions. The amygdala, hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, & cingulate cortex are among the brain regions implicated in this process.
Q: Is it a ‘manly’ thing to suppress emotions?
A: The terms ‘Boys don’t cry’ or ‘Men don’t feel pain’ have been proven to be wrong many years ago. Everyone is entitled to express their emotions irrespective of gender.
Q: What is known as the appraisal theory of emotion?
A: According to this theory, people’s cognitive assessments of particular occurrences are separated from their emotions. It means that individuals must consider a situation before responding emotionally, in other words.
