Mind4Youth

Written By: Adasia Hawkins

An explosion; sadness, pain, anger, hurt, unresolved problems preventing your happiness. Have you ever heard of the Pepsi and Mentos experiment? It is a famous experiment in which the more Mentos a person adds to the Pepsi bottle the more the bottle expands until it explodes and soda squirts out
everywhere. Would you rather your emotions be helping or explode similarly to the Pepsi bottle? Teens today tend to bottle up their emotions, causing a significant decrease in their mental health and increasing mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and stress levels, which can significantly affect their daily life, including their social skills, academic performance, and physical health. Instead of following up on their emotions, this article intends to introduce teens to different mechanisms and coping skills to improve their mental health and overall well-being.

I can relate to you. As someone who is continuously working on not keeping my emotions locked away. Emotional expression is much more important than we realize. Being able to express how you truly feel about a situation can be a detrimental factor to your health whether it be physical, mental, or
emotional. The repressing of your emotions is very pivotal to how you will face situations in your life, look at relationships, and live your life daily. There will be many situations, whether a minor or major in your life, that you may explode at the tiniest, but the most major situation that you should react to you won’t even bat an eye. Thankfully, they’re very helpful, coping mechanisms and strategies are needed to help you start learning to release these emotions instead of repressing them and finding a healthy outlet to
which you can release them.

Furthermore, the beginning of learning to release your emotions is learning when you begin to repress them. Many people do not realize that an instance no matter how big or small can cause repression. It can start from your childhood. During one’s childhood, an event that led to a distressing or
painful outcome, for example, the loss of a loved one, parental separation, moving to a neighbourhood, worrying about academics, or social issues. As these individuals progress into their teenage years, they struggle with the idea of expressing their feelings because of a lack of understanding, fear of judgment, and the pressures of society.

Additionally, I mentioned at the beginning of my article that I can relate to you, so I will share my story. I come from a loving household, and a caring family, however, my medical troubles caused me to suppress my regular emotional connections. I had lost a huge part of myself and I suffered with
depression and anxiety at such a young age. As I progressed into my teenage years, I repressed my emotions so much that I began to think it was normal. Many people would refer to the term as ‘nonchalant’. It is easier to hide your emotions behind a smile or anger instead of actively feeling them.
However, there are many coping strategies I use to help me learn how to express my emotions.

First of all, I would like to start with journaling. It is simply the practice of writing down your thoughts, feelings, experiences, and reflections regularly. People journal in various ways, it can be done on paper, in a notebook, on a computer, on a tablet, or in the notes section on your iPhone. Journaling was one of the first steps in my journey to emotional expression. It can help individuals gain control of their emotions, develop self-awareness, understand a better self of themselves, and enhance creativity. My journey with journaling created a love for poetry. So, when I find myself upset and unsure of how to handle my emotions I write them down and form them into a poem.

In addition to journaling, enhancing my creative expression, and improving my emotional expression, I have taken up other expressive hobbies such as listening to music and painting. When people think of these hobbies, we do not tend to think of them as things that can help us express how we
feel but as something we just do. Those who listen to music completely get lost in it. While you sing the lyrics, you shift your brain away from any negative feeling, while you feel whatever emotions the song washes over you. If you’re a dancer, you dance your heart out to the song feeling all the emotions, letting them force through your body, and instead of suppressing that you’re letting them out. Similarly, listening to music, painting or any form of art is a way of letting out any repressed emotions by what you create
whether you paint the whole campus black splatter paint or spend hours painting a grass field. It’s all about the difference from how you felt when you started the activity.

Another coping mechanism of mine is physical activity, I use this in a way to help me with emotional belief. One of my favourite activities is going to the gym and spending about 30 minutes to an hour working out. It helps me clear my head and when I’m focusing on my workout, it helps me get out of
that negative headspace and get into a clear mind. When I leave the gym all of those negative thoughts, I work out kind of like the sweat. All that physical activity helped me release pent-up emotions and improved my overall mood. When I’m in the gym, I think of my mind as the equipment, my body has the workout and my sweat as every negative thought and feeling just dripping away and leaving so when I exit the gym, I leave with a clear mind, smile on my face, and I look at the world around me as if everything has gotten a little brighter.

Consequently, these are only a few of many other strategies that can help you with an emotional release such as meditation confiding in a trusted loved one, or even professional health therapy. These three methods are much more common and seem to be much more avoided, in particular professional help. Most people feel like talking their problems out with a stranger is crazy because they never know what they’re gonna do with that information or if that stranger knows where they’re coming from. Well, I do understand that point of view to some degree. I’m here to inform you that speaking to this is extremely beneficial. About 3 out of 4 people who sit down and talk to a professional noticed benefits and results, and notice themselves becoming much happier because they work out their troubles, and take the time to dig deep down and figure out what is wrong.

Similar to talking to a trusted loved one. This one may be a little bit harder because it’s a lot harder to open up about something so personal to people who love you and are very close to you. As we all know, they want the best for us. Sometimes they can overreact under-react or give us a reaction that
will scare us back into repressing however, sometimes it takes that one person that you know, you can lean your shoulder and cry on once you can fight them and start expressing yourself little by little you will start to understand what you’ve been feeling how you’ve been feeling and then you were start to feel. But when trusting someone you love, the amount of support, perspective, and love received makes it all worthwhile.

With the pressures of today’s society, today’s generations of teens tend to bottle up their emotions. This causes a significant decrease in their mental health leading to an increase and mental health issues and stigma in society. Because of the limited teachings and practices of mental health coping
mechanisms and strategies many teens decide that repressing their emotions is better than researching and figuring out the best outlets for living a fulfilling lifestyle. One of the expressions that I live by is that a closed mouth does get fed. I bring that up to say if you don’t express yourself or if you don’t reach within yourself, then you’ll never find the root of the source or the problem in the article there are many coping mechanisms and strategies such as journaling, physical activity, creative expression, meditation, and mindfulness, etc. that are just a few of many ways to learn how to express yourself as well as taking professional health such as therapy. As someone who has been down this journey before you’re not alone, everyone has their struggles and nobody’s struggles are bigger than anybody else. Try your absolute hardest to reach into the depths of your inner feelings and become in touch with yourself in all aspects because the world becomes so much brighter and you become so much happier when you acknowledge the problem. Never be afraid to reach out for support; help is always ready and able to stand by your side.

Crisis Text Line: Text “HOME” to 741741

The Trevor Project (for LGBTQ+): 1-866-488-7386

Teen Line: (310)-855-HOPE

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Works Cited

Raypole, C. (2020, March 31). Repressed Emotions: Finding and Releasing Them. Healthline. https://www.healthline.com/health/repressed-emotions#physical-effects

Rose Gould, W. (2021, November 11). The Dangers of Bottling Up Our Emotions. Verywell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/the-dangers-of-bottling-up-our-emotions-5207825

The Importance of Emotional Expression: Encouraging Teens to Open Up BPC Houston. (2024, October 11). Brittani Persha Counseling. https://brittanipershacounseling.com/the-importance-of-emotional-expression-encouragin g-teens-to-open-up/