3 ‘Micro Habits' Of An Emotionally Aware Person, From A Psychologist
They tend to exude confidence, have strong leadership skills and influence and even better mental health compared to those with low emotional awareness. In a 2024 study published in Scientific Reports, researchers explored two types of emotional awareness:
The researchers found that people who understood what they were feeling and why exactly they were feeling that way had better resilience, a strong sense of self and better mental health.
Those who only understood what they were feeling tended to ruminate more, with higher symptoms of anxiety, depression and low self-esteem. Lastly, those with both low attention and clarity had generally poorer mental health outcomes.
Here are three science-backed micro habits that emotionally aware people practice, each taking just a few minutes but building powerful self-understanding over time.
1. The One-Minute 'Feeling Check'
Emotionally aware people tune into their emotions. When they're in difficult situations, they tend to know what they're experiencing at the moment. They may say to themselves, 'I'm anxious, I need to take a break,' or 'I'm restless, perhaps going for a walk will do the trick.'
Labeling your feelings loosens their hold over you and presents you with an exit strategy. For example, if you've been scrolling on your phone for hours and the content begins to upset you, rather than dismissing your feelings, you can label it: 'I think that's enough for today, scrolling too much is stressing me out.'
The inverse is true as well. When something makes you feel good, you begin to notice what you need more of. After a good workout, for example, you might notice, 'Exercising makes me feel energized and better about myself.'
By becoming aware of your emotions, you stop feeling like you are stuck in a loop. Instead of avoiding your emotions with harmful coping mechanisms, you start treating them as signals from your body and guide yourself out, gently and intentionally.
Here's how you can build this micro-habit:
Doing this two to three times daily, before a meeting, after lunch or at bedtime, primes your brain to pay attention to emotions as they come and go and not be swept away by them. Gradually, monitoring your emotions will come naturally to you and become second nature.
2. Managing Their Triggers
Emotionally aware people understand their triggers well. Triggers can be events, certain words, behaviors or circumstances that evoke strong emotional reactions. They may be linked to your past, how you see yourself, your beliefs and values. For example, when someone talks about a high school memory you are not fond of or ignores your feedback at work, it can trigger an intense emotional response. You may shut down or lash out.
People with emotional awareness know their triggers. This also helps them communicate their boundaries beforehand. When they find themselves facing unavoidable situations that trigger them, they can better regulate their emotional reactions because they can anticipate it happening.
A 2014 study published in PLOS One with over 2500 participants found that explicit emotional awareness may be a prerequisite for adaptive emotional regulation strategies such as reappraisal, where you consciously take a pause and intentionally reappraise a situation, event or feeling to change its emotional impact.
In contrast, implicit emotional awareness is associated with more maladaptive strategies such as emotional suppression, where you bottle up your feelings or pretend it didn't affect you.
Emotionally aware individuals are adept at changing their internal narratives. Here's how you can build your own 'trigger journal' to spot your emotional patterns and manage triggers better:
When you journal, even in short bursts, it can help reveal your hidden emotional triggers and recurring themes. Over time, you get apt at spotting what sets you off and use that awareness to respond instead of reacting.
3. The Empathy Pause
One of the most helpful aspects of having emotional awareness is the ability to take multiple perspectives into consideration. This micro habit is responsible for slowing down impulsive reactions, shifting the direction of your interaction from conflict to connection and boosting empathy.
Even brief 'empathy pauses' can flip the entire narrative on its head. When you speak and listen not to win or defend but to connect and understand, you instantly become more open-minded and favorable to others.
Here's how you can incorporate this practice day-to-day.
When someone else's words spark a strong emotional reaction such as annoyance, anger or defensiveness, try the following:
Curiosity is the thread that connects each habit, where you treat your emotions like interesting clues, not problems to 'fix.' These habits take under five minutes a day but have big pay offs.
Becoming emotionally aware doesn't just help you in your everyday life, it builds a deeper connection with yourself — one where you get to know yourself, sharpen your emotional vocabulary and catch emotions early, before you're overwhelmed.
Take this science-backed test to learn how emotionally aware you really are: Emotional Quotient Inventory
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