A toolbox for emotions

Everyone feels them: emotions. They help us weigh up, assess, and describe situations. We experience joy and laugh wholeheartedly with friends. We feel sadness after an argument or a disappointing performance. Or we are beside ourselves with anger when someone insults us.

What basic emotions tell us

Joy, sadness, and anger are among the basic human emotions. How we perceive and express them—and how we deal with them—starts developing early and is shaped by our experiences and surroundings. Fear, surprise, and disgust are also commonly counted among the basic emotions.

Beyond putting a smile on our lips or tears in our eyes, all these emotions serve another purpose. Joy tells us that we are safe. Tension eases because we feel comfortable in our surroundings. For many people, joy also conveys a sense of community and belonging.

Anger, on the other hand, can act as a defence mechanism. Something around us conflicts with our convictions, and we feel attacked personally—or at least in our opinion and beliefs. We might also see this as a boundary being crossed. Our mood shifts, anger rises, and a physical reaction often follows: our pulse quickens, our hands begin to sweat, and tension builds. Some feel it in the chest, others in the stomach or as a lump in the throat.

We naturally want to escape this discomfort. A protective mechanism activates and tries to fight the negativity or its cause.

How complex emotions arise

The spectrum of basic emotions alone is vast and can differ from person to person. Personal experiences, the way we grew up, our surroundings, and trauma can all strongly influence our emotional lives.

Complex emotions arise from this foundation. They combine several facets of different basic emotions and depend heavily on culture, surroundings, and personal values. Guilt is one example. As a variation of sadness, it often involves feeling responsible for a negative action. But how quickly guilt appears, when it sets in, and how we connect it to our self-worth differs slightly for everyone.

That makes it all the more important to engage consciously with our emotions.

What emotional regulation means

Emotional regulation means actively using responses as tools for processing emotions. This may sound abstract at first. After all, there are no buttons and levers in our heads that can simply blow melancholy away. It can therefore help to look more closely at what these emotional responses mean.

The following example shows how we might notice emotions in everyday life and then respond to them.

Monday morning at the platform

It is Monday morning. You have had far too little sleep and a correspondingly bumpy start to the day. You slept through the first alarm, got toothpaste on your freshly washed shirt, and your keys decided to hide. You had to run for the train to arrive on time.

Despite all that stress, it pulls away right in front of you. Now you are standing on the platform, agitated, out of breath, and already a little sweaty. You would most like to curse everyone and everything—especially whoever invented Mondays.

This is where the tool of acceptance comes into play. Ask yourself: “Can I still change anything about my current situation?” Most of the time, the answer is “no”. It is now up to you to decide how you deal with the situation.

Would it not be more useful to make something positive of the remaining 20 minutes before the next train? You could sit down and read your book, write out a few thoughts and affirmations for the new week, or answer the five messages you somehow had no time for over the past few days.

With the right attitude, the body can begin to settle from its stressed and bad-tempered state. Even if the frustration is still too strong for complete acceptance, you can regain a clearer head and give the day another chance. Being annoyed about something is entirely fine. It simply should not harm you or ruin the whole week ahead.

Notice the small moment

This example shows how useful regulation mechanisms can be. The key is to notice the small moment between an event and our response, and to check in with ourselves before an emotion completely blocks our thinking.

This is also where the BlickWinkel cards come in. The small set fits into any bag, so it is just as useful on the go as it is at home.

Back at the station, simply draw a card, read the word, and notice what comes up: “What do I want to pay attention to today?” Or: “What have I been feeling more often over the past few days?”

BlickWinkel can help create precisely that small moment: a pause in which you notice a feeling more consciously and ask yourself how you want to respond.