By Pooja Marwah
There is a warning bell that tintinnabulates inside the mind to signal the onset of any emotion – good or not so good. This is a very vital lesson to learn at school but, sadly, there are none that help a child cope with the myriad range of emotions they go through.
It is easy to segregate them into blocks of happiness, sadness, anxiety, ADHD…and so on, but if you dig just a little deeper, you will learn that there was indeed much more to it than a mere division!
Emotions are one of the most crucial aspects of being human. We are exposed to them at a very young age but a majority of us don’t even have the bandwidth to comprehend the triggers that cause them. In fact, all we end up doing is reacting to another’s emotional upheaval as we are unable to grasp ours. Stress is one such trigger that brings about anxiety, mental trauma and even depression. The body sure feels it and gives out signals, but we aren’t trained to understand those and hence they go by undetected until the brain is forced to exert its power and shake up our core emotions!
To understand emotions, you first need to be aware that your state of mind is yours, and not fuelled by another’s behaviour towards you. It isn’t easy to accept this and chances are that you will keep fighting it. But the only way to stop it is to own it.
With a lot happening in life that was beyond my control, I felt anxious, edgy and even borderline sad. I tried my hand at everything to help brush the negativity away but honestly, I always turned up at a dead end. Sometimes in life, even though you know exactly what you want, you remain clueless. And that feeling of confusion slowly made its descent over me, and unawares, I let it, until I began to feel trapped. I kept fighting it, I refused to believe that it could happen to me, I looked the other way and busied myself with the mundane normalcies of life but all that did was tighten the web of anxiety around me.
Every cell in my brain felt like a ticking time bomb, ready to explode. I was prescribed a pill to calm my nerves and that I believe was a wake-up call! Even though it was a mild dose, it did make me bolt, out of my own oblivion. I am a grown woman and I was able to understand the trigger and own up to the pain it was causing me. But what happens to thousands of people that can’t understand it? What would happen to the children who have been home bound for over two years and are facing issues like introvertism, communication and even mental trauma.
How do they cope with something that they don’t understand?
Change often happens when it is forced. But if you are willing to nurture a mindset that is forever evolving, when change does come, you will be in a place to welcome it instead of oppose it. And, by doing so, you would have taken away its forced entry into your life and you would have given yourself happier emotions to bask in.
A lot of the world today is dependent on external help to understand these triggers that cause an emotional roller coaster. And the reason behind it is that, while we were in our adolescence, we were never exposed to it at school or at home. We didn’t know these things existed until we felt love or went through heartbreak. And, then we never knew how to deal with the emotions that followed.
It is important to change with time and to include life’s greatest lessons at school. For, as children grow and begin to understand their own emotions, they will also be better equipped at dealing with adversity or owning up to the painful experiences they may go through in life.
We all know how to express happiness, but we also need to learn to understand sadness, to be able to keep it at bay.
(Pooja Poddar Marwah is an award winning author and Blogger. She writes on contemporary living and offers incisive reflections on the world around us. Her blog, Random Conversations is a go to guide to deal with the myriad struggles we face each day.)