Dr Radha: Healthy ways to express your feelings

It can be really hard to process our feelings sometimes, especially when we're dealing with challenging situations.

We caught up with Dr Radha Modgil – a practising NHS GP, broadcaster and campaigner for wellbeing – to get her top tips for expressing your feelings healthily. Here's her advice…

How to express your feelings

"Each moment of every day brings each one of us lots of different emotions – some that feel good and some not so good. Some psychologists think there are about eight primary emotions, but that there could be up to 34,000 unique feelings within these! That’s a lot of feelings. You might feel a whole range; sadness, fear, joy or anger, for example. The key to living well is to learn how to notice and name what your feelings are, understand how they feel in your body and which thoughts or events may have brought them up, and practice different strategies to help you let them pass or process them."

"The thoughts we have can set off a particular feeling that we feel in our bodies, and our feelings determine how we behave and the actions we take. Getting comfortable with our emotions changing and learning how to express them in a healthy and helpful way can help us form stronger relationships and friendships with other people, allow us to get to understand ourselves more, and enable us to be authentic and shine out in the world – so it’s worth taking some time to learn how to do just that! Here are my top five tips to help."

Dr Radha's tips for expressing your feelings

1. Make friends with your feelings

"Even though some feelings are not as nice to feel as others, recognising them, understanding them and working with them, rather than pushing them away, helps us to process them and feel better."

2. Recognise the reasons for your feelings

"Each feeling has a reason for being there. Different emotions may help us to learn something, prompt us to think more deeply about why we're feeling that way or lead us to understand ourselves better."

3. Share your emotions

"Talking about how we feel with someone we trust and reaching out to let someone know how we feel helps us so much. We don't feel alone in how we're feeling, we can get a clearer sense of what is bothering us and can get support to work through our feelings."

4. Get creative

"Writing, music, art, sport, reading and hobbies can really help us express our feelings. If we're feeling angry, putting on a loud tune and singing, or watching a film where we can relate to how the character is feeling can really help us feel better."

5. Give it time

"Recognise that it takes time to learn about our feelings and how we respond to different feelings, but if we take a bit of time to learn the most helpful way to work with them, we have those tools for life whatever comes our way."

For more awesome advice and top tips for before, during and after results day, check out our results day section of our Exams and Revision page.

If you need support

You should always tell someone about the things you’re worried about. You can tell a friend, parent, guardian, teacher, or another trusted adult. If you're struggling with your mental health, going to your GP can be a good place to start to find help. Your GP can let you know what support is available to you, suggest different types of treatment and offer regular check-ups to see how you’re doing.

If you’re in need of in-the-moment support you can contact Childline, where you can speak to a counsellor. Their lines are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

There are more links to helpful organisations on the BBC Bitesize Action Line page for young people.