Anxiety: Emotions

The last component of anxiety to cover is emotions. Many of us may experience anxiety very emotionally, through feelings of sadness, anger, disappointment, etc.. Sometimes, we might find it hard to even identify the emotions we are feeling in anxious situations.

Take a look at this worksheet. A guide like this can be helpful when we are in an anxious state of mind and feel overwhelmed by emotions. By going through a list of basic possible emotions and evaluating how you currently feel, we can better identify the emotions we are feeling. When we know exactly what we feel, we are able to self-evaluate the situation, our possible actions, and current state of mind and body.

It can also be important to keep track of our emotions when we are feeling anxious for a long period of time. You can use a planner type mood chart like this to document your emotions throughout your day. When we identify our emotions across time, we can determine how they change in relation to different times and if they vary or stay the same.

Like grounding exercises, sometimes even just identifying your emotion and linking it to the experience during anxiety can be surprisingly helpful in making us feel better. We also sometimes need to know what emotions we are feeling to turn to other strategies or figure out how emotions may be interconnected to other components of anxiety.