Notifications surround our daily lives, and play a big role in what we focus on, and what is brought up to our attention. The beep of your phone, the red color at the corner of every app on your screen, the email alert sounds and many other notifications alert dominate our minds.

They became part of our brains, to the point that we sometimes hear them without them being real. In this constant alerted world, we find ourselves easily drowned in the numerous updates around us, and forget about the most important sensor notification of our lives: our Emotions.

Emotions serve many purposes. Back in the cavemen days, our emotions were crucial to our survival. We had to stay alert, provide, and belong in order to stay safe, reproduce and live. Therefore, emotions were developed to be powerful messengers that try to tell us when something is important. They motivate us to take action and allow us to communicate with others and ourselves.

Our emotions give us the ability to make responsive decisions. We converse with them to grow and develop.

Our emotions are sensors to our brains, they are the alert system that triggers our minds into feeling that something is happening.

Paying attention to those triggers requires constant Mindfulness Attention and Perspective (MAP).

Mindfulness

The very first aspect of embracing our emotions is to be aware of them. To allow ourselves to feel them, live them, and experience them.

Emotions are not permanent, they come and go, it is important to be mindful of them when they are around.

Attention

Following our state of awareness, we ought to pay attention to what these emotions mean, what they are trying to say. As previously explained, emotions are detectors of a something happening. Positive or negative, they have a meaning and an explanation. More importantly, they want us to know something about ourselves.

Below are a few negative emotions with their respective meaning for better understanding:

Anger: Someone or something has treated me unfairly.

Sadness: I have lost something important to me

Fear or Anxiety: I am in danger or there is a threat.

Guilt: I have done something bad or have failed to do a good thing.

Embarrassment: Others will have a negative opinion of me.

Perspective

Considering that emotions are messengers, once mindful and attentive, gaining perspective on the situation as a whole will allow us to protect ourselves and guide us to act in ways that are congruent with our wellbeing. We should allow time to understand our emotions instead of avoiding them. Allow them to empower you to identify your values and live a life that is rich and meaningful.

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