Open to Emotion: How Acknowledging, Understanding, and Regulating Your Feelings Can Improve Your Mental Health

A practical, engaging resource that offers a clearer understanding of the science of emotion and a helpful path forward in regulating your emotions. Rates of anxiety and depression are high and continue to rise. Substance use and associated overdose deaths constitute a public health emergency, and many people suffer consequences from exposure to traumatic events. All these are, at their root, problems with emotions. People can get help navigating their emotions via therapy, but stigma toward mental illness and reticence to seek therapy continues to make it difficult for people to get the help they need. An understanding of how emotions work and empirically supported strategies for flexibly regulating emotions is relevant to virtually all of the problems that bring people to psychotherapy, including relationship problems discussed in couples and family therapy. A broad understanding of emotional functioning also has the benefit of helping people cultivate more compassion for those who might experience emotions differently than they do. This reader-friendly book illustrates that emotions are messages; they provide information, like an email, a physical postcard, a letter from a pen-pal, or even a medical bill. Information isn’t inherently good or bad, and narrowly aiming to minimize unpleasant emotions and maximize pleasant ones ignores the research-based fact that the unpleasant emotions can have value too. This book teaches you about the science of emotion and the best research-based practices for coping and regulating emotion. It shows you how this understanding can then be applied toward solving a variety of problems, including self-realization and self-compassion, as well loving others in a deeper way. This is an essential guide for anyone seeking to improve their overall emotional health.