Emotional confusion – why it arises.

I began calling it “whatever-ness”. A combination of emotions and their unique relationships between each other.

As a human being, you’re capable to feel emotions that conflict with each other at the same time: sadness and joy, hope and despair, stress and inner peace… how is it possible? But also… how to navigate such conflicting state?

The challenge becomes greater when you try and label those emotions too soon. Because if you’re experiencing two (or three, or four) emotions at the same time, you will also feel the unique relationships between them, too.

I call that state “whatever-ness”: this phrasing creates an ease of feeling “whatever” and express it in a “whatever way”. This way, no pressure to express anger in the way that anger is usually expressed, because what might be arising is an interaction of my anger and my joy.

We receive stimuli from all fronts – people we interact, information we consume, things we touch and words we speak – so no wonder it’s possible to feel joy over our new project at work and greater, existential sadness over the state of the world…

The emotionally intelligent amongst us might have even a greater challenge – because labelling the emotions too soon would mean that you dismiss the subtler feelings to be named, too. You place your feelings in boxes too soon.

So what do you do? What do you do when you’re emotionally confused? This episode opens a conversation about this.