By Kayla Nguyen
Do you control your emotions? Or do your emotions control you? Emotions are such complicated parts of our lives that play into our actions, our personalities and the way that we live and enjoy each day. The fact that everyone experiences emotions in their lives differently led me to write this article. Will people agree and emphasize with what I have to say about these emotions? Or will they disagree? Why? I want to evoke these questions in you about how you feel your feelings. Happy reading!
10. Disappointment
As you open your birthday gift, you hold your breath. Is this it? Is it the bracelet I wanted? You lift the lid to the gift and – it’s a pair of socks.
Oh, okay … you think to yourself.
The feeling of disappointment, or something not meeting your expectations, takes the bottom of this list. It could make you very sad, especially if you were anticipating something great, but the feeling subsides quickly.
9. Annoyance
Being annoyed at someone or something can lead to feelings of wanting to rip your hair out. It can be triggered by something as small as getting annoyed at how your pencil keeps rolling down the table or how annoying your sibling is because you guys fought over something petty.
To me, annoyance is rated pretty low because it’s only at that moment do you find yourself feeling aggravated. I’ll find myself getting so annoyed at someone sitting next to me who constantly talks to me while I’m trying to concentrate, but then I’ll completely forget the unpleasant feeling as soon as I leave the classroom.
People also don’t associate the feeling of annoyance with anything too intense. You wouldn’t say that you felt “annoyed” about world hunger. If you feel annoyed, it’s only ever about something small, built up with some other things that have been ruining your mood.
8. Embarrassment
This is another emotion that feels bad in the moment, but once it’s over you think, Oh, that wasn’t really a big deal.
When I think of embarrassment, I just think of the feeling of messing up a part of your presentation or speech in front of your class. I associate it with the traumatic feeling of redness creeping into your face as your legs turn to jelly and you break out into cold sweat.
Of course, when you sit down after your presentation, you’ll feel better. However, I think the feeling of embarrassment is still pretty horrifying. If it’s especially embarrassing, the memory will be etched into your mind on replay every night when you fall asleep. Therefore, it earns the eighth spot on this list. It’s pretty horrible, despite the actual embarrassing moment often lasting just a few seconds.
7. Guilt
Guilt is the feeling of conflict due to having done something you believe you shouldn’t have done. I hate the feeling of guilt because it’s not something that goes away. Rather, it’s something that eats at you and makes you feel so bothered every time your thoughts happen to drift to it.
Guilt often develops into a person’s ideas of their mistakes and shortcomings. It lowers your self-esteem and makes you feel an over-dramatized version of what a bad person you are, when you really aren’t.
6. Anxiety, or worry
Anxiety means unpleasant feelings of dread and uneasiness. I found that it has a wide range of intensity. It can be anything from a mild “I’m worried about the test tomorrow” to an overwhelming breakdown with sobbing and hyperventilating.
In addition to how horrible it makes you feel, anxiety also stops people from doing things due to fear. For example, social anxiety happens because you are worried about other people’s judgments about you. Overall, not only is anxiety a horrible feeling in the moment, but other aspects of it can hinder your life, which I find to be unfair because an emotion shouldn’t have that much power over you.
5. Loneliness
We’re getting into some of the emotions I consider to be the worser ones on this list because the feeling of loneliness constantly eats away at you like a worm, making you wonder why you feel like an outsider. Finally, your thoughts settle at the conclusion that you must be the problem.
Feeling lonely is complicated because you can feel lonely when you have no friends, or you can be in a room full of people and still feel lonely. Conversely, some people don’t have an active social life, but they feel at peace with themselves and not at all lonely.
However, through my experiences and what my friends have told me, loneliness at a teenage age seems to come from feeling left out. It can result in losing motivation to come to school and participate in other activities, such as going to practice or clubs. This also leads to people trying to change their personalities to fit in.
4. Stress
Stress is something we’re all familiar with. I believe that every student in this school has a pent-up rant in them about how stressful they are.
Feeling stressed for a little while is not too bad, but when things start piling up with one another, it starts to become too overwhelming. Then, you put off thinking about this thing that is stressing you out, but not confronting it will only make it get worse. This is the cruel and vicious cycle of stress.
While this is a dramatized description of it, it gets the point across of how much I dislike the emotion of stress.
The only reason why stress wouldn’t be on top of this list is because it doesn’t really hit hard until after a while. Even though it’s bad, in your everyday life, you aren’t super conscious about the stress that you feel. This is why stress would be our fourth emotion on this list.
3. Frustration
I won’t get super philosophical or explanatory about this emotion. There isn’t much to say, I just dislike frustration because logically, it should not be so awful. There is no reason that a simple math problem should have me screaming inside and wanting to cry.
Getting frustrated with something can just ruin a person’s whole mood, as well. Your day can be going well until you face a small problem that gives you a headache and that tightness in your chest and red creeping into your face.
I also dislike the inability to express or relieve this emotion immediately. By the time I call my friend to rant, the boiling rage has died down, and I’m left with just the reminisce of my irrational anger I had just moments before. Sometimes, all I want to do is scream and cry right during that moment of frustration, which I can’t do. Nonetheless, here is a helpful article in case you struggle with frustration often and wish you knew how to relieve it.
2. Jealousy
Jealousy means desiring something that a person has that you don’t. You can also have “friend jealousy,” if you know what I’m talking about. It’s when you feel jealous of your friend hanging out with someone else.
From my own experiences and my friends’ experiences, I would say that one of the worst things is how jealousy makes you feel completely irrational. It can cause you to feel conflicted between thoughts of, do I dislike this person? Or do I just feel jealous of them?
I often think about this quote Theodore Roosevelt said: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
People often don’t feel discontented about their lives until they see someone who has it better than them, whether it’s in an academic, social, or financial aspect of their life.
We are always seeking ways for our lives to be better, so we lose sight of how good it is already. Jealousy of others can easily get in the way of your happiness.
1. Regret
I’m not sure how to express the genuine horribleness of this emotion. None of the emotions linger around quite like regret does. The thought that you could have done something that could have made your situation a lot better, but you didn’t do it is like an ever-present shadow on a person’s life.
It’s just an emotion you can never seem to shake. Everything else is temporary, but regret is forever. Regret can plague us until the end of our days. I might be decades older, yet still wonder what life would be like if I did that one thing. You can never get over regret because you don’t get a chance to redo it. I often think of it in terms of a disease: you can’t get rid of it, you can only prevent it.
Using this logic, something I’ve started to live by is not having any regrets. You only have one life, so talk to that person you found interesting, spend more time off your phone and with your loved ones, take that risk you’ve been debating whether or not to take. Whatever it is, live your life with no regrets!
