Emotional awareness is an ability to recognize your own emotions and their effects. People who have this ability:

•  Know what emotions they are feeling at a given time and why

• Understand the connections between their emotions and their thoughts and actions

• Understand how their feelings will affect their performance; and

•  Are guided by how they feel and their personal values.

Being aware of your own emotions and how they affect your behavior is essential to interacting effectively with others.

When we are tired, we are less well equipped to deal with life. Sleep deprivation can affect our ability to control and regulate our emotions, as well as our ability to think proactively.

According to William Killgore, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology and Medical Imaging at the University of Arizona, a simple bad night can compromise your ability to “put the brakes on the emotional center of your brain.”

This makes you likely to over-react (good or bad) in certain situations. You are more likely to feel frustrated, hurt, and hypersensitive, or anxious or overwhelmed.
When you are tired, each interaction may seem worse than it really is and undermines your happiness.

So, before you resign or, worse, stay in a job that you think you hate, try to significantly improve your sleep, and see if you wake up being a new person, more fit and brighter.

Faces can provide vital clues about a person’s mood, but the most reliable way to ‘’read’’ someone may simply be to listen to them.

Yale psychologist Michael Kraus tested the ability to evaluate someone’s emotional state using different types of sensory information.

The experiments determined that voice-only interactions led to more accurate perceptions than visual-only or multisensory versions.

One reason is that faces can be misleading: while we sometimes hide our emotions by feigning a smile or a straight face, the cues contained in our voices may be harder to mask.

Emotions routinely swirl within us, and they aren’t easily named. It may be useful to stop, examine them,

and try to put them into words. When we label an emotion, it makes it more manageable.

It might not change the emotion, but it does allow us the possibility of choosing our response.

Les émotions tourbillonnent régulièrement en nous, et ne sont pas facilement identifiables. Cela peut s’avérer utile de s’arrêter, de les examiner, et de tenter de les décrire en mots. Lorsque nous identifions une émotion, cela la rend plus facile à gérer.

Cela ne changera peut-être pas l’émotion, mais nous donne la possibilité de choisir une réponse.