By Keena Page
“When awareness is brought to an emotion, power is brought to your life. ”
What color is frustration? Where does anger reside in your body? What texture does sadness have?
I vaguely remember coming across a post where someone described the habit they had developed with a friend. They asked each other what the other was feeling at a particular time, wherein that person took some time to find the perfect photo with the color of the emotion they were experiencing. Sometimes the emotion was a bright orange, sometimes a soft pink. I remember thinking that it was such a fascinating idea and I saved the post, but soon forgot about it as life went on.
Later, while taking Dr. Warren’s Positive Psychology class at Brigham Young University, we started learning about mindfulness and specific kinds of mindfulness practices. Honestly, this was the first time I was ever seriously introduced to mindfulness. Up until then, I saw “mindfulness” as just yoga or meditation practices which were sleep-inducing, boring, or only helpful when you felt like doing them. Being introduced to mindfulness as a means of organizing and making sense of my thoughts and feelings was a game changer.
But I digress… (see our mindfulness module for more information)
As we practiced some guided meditations, one in particular caught my attention. This guided meditation took me through the process of looking at my emotions as a scientist. Instead of ignoring the feeling or overanalyzing the reason behind the feeling by thinking about the “why,” I was encouraged to focus on the emotion and just the emotion, an exercise which is widely considered to be a part of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). This is an incredible practice, backed up significantly by research such as one conducted just this last year which showed a significant decrease in negative mental health measures (such as depression, anxiety, and stress) and a significant increase in positive mental health measures (such as mindfulness and hope) for participants of a short 12-month DBT program (Warlick et al., 2022). Through this guided meditation for navigating difficult emotions, I was reminded of that post about colors and emotions from years before, and, remembering how intriguing it looked (especially for a visual learner like me), I decided to try to make that a habit in my life. Trying to get as close to that post as possible, I even enlisted the help of a close friend so that I could share my thoughts with them.
As a sneak peak into my personal process (inspired by the guided meditation), I have the following experience to share:
“One day, frustrated after some friends fell through with their commitments, I went about my morning routine in a huff. Deciding that it was as good a time as any to try to practice my awareness of emotions, I paused to describe the emotion I was feeling. As mentioned in the first sentence, I identified my emotion as frustration. But what color was my frustration? Was it red, like anger? No. That didn’t seem to fit. Maybe orange? Hm. That still seemed to be too warm for how I was feeling. Then, it suddenly hit me. Purple. A light, almost ‘lilac-y’ purple is exactly what my frustration was! After identifying the color, the rest came easy. I concluded that the particular frustration that I was feeling was wispy, very difficult to grasp. It originated, interestingly enough, in my throat, causing the emotion to come up into my head but also dissipated throughout my body. Almost like a circular mass of fog that clouded, but did not obscure, my vision and seeped everywhere else.”
This idea of a physical representation of emotions is neither unique to myself nor a small population of mindfulness practicers. In 2014, Finnish psychologists asked participants from around the world to identify where a particular emotion presented itself in the body, creating “bodily maps of emotion” consistent across a variety of cultures (Nummenmaa et al., 2014). Isn’t it intriguing that emotions can be concentrated in different parts of your body? Next time you do a body scan meditation, see if your experience of emotion is the same as what these psychologists found (You can look at these body maps by clicking on the link and scrolling to “Fig. 2”).
So, why was this effective? In my experience, once I identified and described my frustration, I found that it no longer seemed so overwhelming or even real. In describing my emotion, I had to take a step back from my emotion and instead observe it with curiosity. I was no longer concerned with this tangible “thing” that I could see in my mind’s eye, and it no longer seemed overwhelming. If anything, it seemed like a particular zoo animal that I had paused to observe, but I was ready to move on to the next creature. The practice of observing my emotions like a discoverer or scientist was almost fun, becoming even more exciting later as I compared it to how I saw it with my friend’s perception of the same emotion.
Why don’t you give it a try?
“There is no thinking without feeling and no feeling without thinking.”
References
Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(2), 646–651. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321664111
Warlick, C. A., Poquiz, J., Huffman, J. M., DeLong, L., Moffitt-Carney, K., Leonard, J., Schellenger, B., & Nelson, J. (2022). Effectiveness of a brief dialectical behavior therapy intensive-outpatient community health program. Psychotherapy, 59(1), 125–132. https://doi.org/10.1037/pst0000388