Individuals who encounter microaggressions may experience a variety of emotional responses including, but not limited to:
- Stress
- Distress
- Anxiety
- Frustration
- Anger
- Insecurity
- Worsened well-being
Categorize emotions
Emotions can be categorized in multiple ways. One model suggests all emotions are derivations of five core feelings:
Happiness
Sadness
Anger
Fear
Shame
Intensity of emotions
The same model suggests that complexity of emotions are revealed through varying forms of intensity. For example, consider the emotion happiness.
- High-intensity descriptors of happiness may include: Elated, thrilled, exuberant, or ecstatic.
- Medium-intensity descriptors of happiness may be described as gratified, relief, and satisfied.
- Low-intensity descriptors of happiness may be described as contented, glad, pleased, or pleasant.
Question
Self-awareness is your ability to accurately perceive your emotions in a moment and understand your tendencies across situations. Being able to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships can be an incredibly valuable quality for healthcare professionals.
The ability to use self-awareness of your emotions to actively choose what you say and do is self-management. “Ample self-awareness is necessary for effective self-management because you can only choose how to respond to an emotion actively when you’re aware of it—a high level of self-management ensures you aren’t getting in your own way and doing things that limit your success.” It could be as simple as taking a deep breath or more complex like journaling.
Question
In the book Emotional Intelligence 2.0, the following self-management strategies are suggested:
- Breathe right.
- Create an emotion vs. reason list.
- Make your goals public.
- Count to ten.
- Sleep on it.
- Talk to a skilled self-manager.
- Smile and laugh more.
- Set aside some time in your day for problem solving.
- Take control of your self-talk.
- Visualize yourself succeeding.
- Clean up your sleep hygiene.
- Focus your attention on your freedoms, rather than your limitations.
- Stay synchronized.
- Speak to someone who is not emotionally invested in your problem.
- Learn a valuable lesson from everyone you encounter.
- Put a mental recharge into your schedule.
- Accept that change is just around the corner.
In addition to these strategies, consider using a timeout. You may use timeouts in our synchronous microaggressions session if you feel emotionally charged. A time out is a quiet or cooling off to allow an individual to calm down and to offer an opportunity to regain control of emotions.