Grant yourself the license to start feeling again!

Our brain doesn't seem to want to stay confined within our skull. It ventures out, affecting our emotions and physical sensations. It even affects it's own self as it repeats thoughts of it's choice over and over again. Our brain chooses when a certain thought should start and when it should repeat itself. It controls everything within your physical form and as a result it fully controls you and acts as a dictator.

An emotion is a mental state associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, pleasure or displeasure. Unfortunately, the modern world looks down on emotions. Specifically showing your emotions or your vulnerabilities is considered weak. We hide behind our workplace culture, fake it till you make it, peer pressure and the need to show your best in order to be accepted. We choose to show the mask of a happy, well-functioning, successful individual to the world when, in reality, we are like a sensitive softy from inside.

We are told to hide our emotions, so we choose to hide it from ourselves also. And then we choose to stop feeling them also. It is easier to hide them when we are ourselves unaware that they exist. When we are asked, how we feel, we say, We're Just Fine! We do it day after day until we become comfortable with our own lie. To add on to this, boy's are told they're not supposed to cry, they're expected to 'man up' and suppress their emotions. This becomes so much engrained in us that we say, "it doesn't hurt". The result is that many men become numb and oblivious to how they feel, and then we blame them for not being emotionally available or not opening their hearts.

For many years, when asked how I was, I used to say, "I'm doing great", but then I stopped and realized that I was lying. Now so many people come to me and compliment me for being authentic and many of them try to get closer to me. When asked why they want to be friends with me, they would say because you are real, and this is so refreshing in the modern world.

Suppressing our emotions does not only end at work but goes in personal life as well. So many people have a long list of things they need and deserve from there family members, but they keep on bottling it up inside until the mounting emotions finally explode one day. Unfortunately, nowadays we do not have infrastructure to handle emotions, life is only about delivering results.

Those who don't show emotions are just pretending. In recent years, with the rise of awareness around mental health and it's impact on the wellbeing and productivity of everyone around us, we have realized that this kind of a challenge can no longer be ignored. Emotions left unexpressed is a disaster and the results are showing up in the cost that we need to bear in terms of burnout, lower engagement levels and high medical bills which all add up to the balance sheets. Emotions are surely predictable, when someone pisses you off, you get pissed off. We should be allowed to live like complete humans who not only think but also feel.

It's high time now, we should grant ourselves the license to start feeling again. Perhaps then we would open up and express how we feel, and we humans would find a way to connect again with each other.

When are you planning to start feeling again?