Our society teaches us much about how to manage material things but not a whole lot about caring for ourselves. Self care involves nurturing your mind and body. In a physical sense, our bodies tell us when something is amiss and we nurse it back to health. It’s not so easy to tell how your mind is and we are at risk of limping along, feeling bad, until we reach the point of burnout. Some wellness approaches to a healthy mind include engaging in discussions, thinking, creativity, mindfulness, and finding your project. These approaches help us to understand our world and move towards the positive aspects of it. Part of the process of understanding is to examine how and why we are feeling what we feel right now.

It is easy to keep going about our daily lives while feeling a bit down, confused, worried or frustrated, yet these feelings require attention; at a minimum, they require acknowledging. Sustained negative emotions can become knots in our mind’s processing, and left unchecked, cause sticky spots in our way of thinking and coping.

Discussing feelings and emotions is a first step towards understanding our world. Philosophical Consulting offers a set of life practices that, when discussed with an experienced philosopher, assist clients in reframing the “how’s” and “why’s” of everyday-life events.

One such practice is First Name It, Then Deal with It. We cannot give an answer to something when we don’t know the question. First, name the problem, describe it and then fix it. Be as specific as possible. Language gives you leverage. If the problem is something to do with your values, then changing material things won’t resolve it.

When we have feelings about something but have not yet named it, the feelings we notice are our bodies getting ready for action.  And, not just any action, but actions that safeguard our interest in the near future or immediately.  The feelings are not always about actions to do something.  Sometimes the feelings are such to prevent us from doing anything, so they are acting so as to avoid making the situation worse.  Having our bodies do this for us when dangerous circumstances are recognized, even if we have not yet noticed enough to name them, is a very useful survival trait.

However, our feelings are very good at being a form of radar that has been trained by our life experiences.  When we recognize something that has good or bad possibilities based on our experience, our bodies will get ready to engage.  Being able to name what is setting off our radar helps us bring to ourselves even more capabilities to deal with the situation.