Changing Your Emotional Approach
Practice breathing techniques. Breathing can help calm you down when you’re experiencing overwhelming emotions such as rage, endless crying, or deep disappointment. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by emotional intensity, pause to focus on your breathing. Breathing techniques can help you manage your emotions more effectively and help you handle intense emotions better. You may notice that as you experience intense emotions, they bring you further from experiencing yourself and your body. Breathing helps bring you back to your body and back into the present moment. Learn to moderate your emotions by using your breath. Start by lengthening your breaths, noticing that you feel more and more relaxed. Breath deeply into your lungs, and feel your stomach rise and fall. Count slowly as you exhale, and feel your body, mind, and emotions relax. For more breathing exercises, check out How to Breathe Deeply.
Learn from past events and move forward. If you spend much time dwelling on the past or wondering “what if...”, you may start to feel low, negative, or depressed. While it’s good to learn from past mistakes and reflect on your behavior, it can become overwhelming when your thoughts and feelings live more in the past than the present. When ruminating, you may have a more difficult time forgiving yourself or other people or harbor negative feelings. If you find yourself ruminating, take your mind and emotions off of the situation. Exercise, read a book, or call a friend (but don’t talk about what you’re ruminating on!). Use the past to learn and grow from, yet know when to let it go. If reflections in the past causes distress or you find yourself returning over and over to a situation you “messed up”, learn to let it go, knowing you cannot change it. Instead, determine to let the event change your future behavior. Rumination is linked to depression. Depression can make a difficult past hard to move forward from, and often finds relief through therapy. If you think you may have depression, check out How to Know if You Have Depression and How to Overcome Depression.
Avoid jumping to conclusions about the future. If you feel anxious, you may notice you burn a lot of emotional energy worrying. You may experience fears such as not doing tasks correctly or getting sick from germ exposure. You may even know your fears are irrational, but you can’t help but worry or fear them. You may fear catastrophes anticipate the worst in situations. If this sounds like you, learn ways to calm your anxiety, such as using relaxation techniques like visualization, and practice cognitive approaches, like accepting uncertainty. For more information, check out How to Control Anxiety.
Change your coping strategy. If you’re trying to deal with unpleasant emotions and find you’re struggling to remove yourself, try a different strategy. You may not be able to remove the emotional experience, but you may be able to cope with it better. For instance, if you’re trying to cope with rage and still feel angry even after removing yourself from the situation, try drawing or coloring or doing some exercise. Try distracting yourself with music or going for a walk. Play with your pet, read a book, or garden.
Use a stress diary. Write in a diary throughout the day about your stressors and how you deal with them or react to them. Assess what events you responded well to and which ones were more difficult. Find ways to cope with emotions consistently that help you move past them quickly. Using a diary can help you track what methods work well, which situations trigger your emotional reactivity, and how you work through each situation.
Monitoring Your Emotional Health
Monitor your expectations. Sometimes, the way you feel may be mediated by how you expect to feel. For instance, if you expect that watching a movie may make you sad, you may end up feeling sad. If you notice yourself placing expectations on how you ‘’should’’ feel, hold off on making that judgment until you’ve completed the situation. Or, you may consider which situations you want to enter into beforehand.
Adjust your routines to reduce stress. Think about what events trigger your strong emotions, and problem solve how to either avoid them or curb your response. For instance, if you tend to get anxious because you often run late for work, adjust your morning routine so you are not rushing, and budget extra time for traffic or other surprises. If there is a group of people that bring out lots of unpleasant emotions, decrease your time with them. When you have control of a situation, take it.
Modify the situation. If you find yourself constantly disappointed in yourself or your abilities, modify your expectations. You may be a perfectionist and feel like if something isn’t 100% perfect, it’s not worth sharing with other people. Especially if you have a deadline, it’s okay to modify the situation in order to manage your emotions more effectively. For instance, you can say, “While my project isn’t 100% perfect, I’m proud of it and I know I did good work.” If you tend to have lofty ideas and expectations, start modifying how you accomplish them. For instance, you can call in help from other people, or choose a goal that's less lofty, but attainable.
Remind yourself feelings are valid, although not always “truth.” While you are absolutely allowed to feel your feelings, remember a feeling doesn’t equate with truth. This is also true of thoughts. When you feel like reacting to something, remind yourself you may not have all of the information yet, and your thoughts and feelings may change. Your thoughts and feelings change constantly and do not define you.
Interacting With Others
Inquire before judging. You may jump to conclusions instead of getting all of the information first. Instead of jumping to conclusions or making a snap judgment, wait until you have all of the information. And while you’re at it, avoid planning your next move if you’re in an argument. Instead, ask questions and seek to understand the full situation before assigning a judgment or emotionally investing yourself. If you’re upset your partner is late, don’t jump to conclusions as to why he may be late. Instead, gently ask what happened without coming across as judgmental or accusing.
Avoid reacting to emotional outbursts. If someone is emotionally reactive in an argument, don’t meet this reactivity with more reactivity. Instead, practice active listening skills. Reacting to another person’s strong emotions will likely escalate the situation and will not contribute to a solution. For example, if someone is angry and is attacking you, don’t go straight to the defense. Instead, hear the person out, make an effort to understand her thoughts and feelings, ask questions, and calmly reply.
Use “I” statements. By blaming, you automatically put someone on the defensive, which can lead to conflict. The other person may also be more likely to blame you back for something. Claim your emotions as a way of not blaming others and taking responsibility for your emotions. By claiming your emotions as your own, you gain control of them. Instead of blaming someone by saying, “You didn't show up and you blew me off again; you’re such a jerk,” say, “I felt really hurt and abandoned you didn’t show this evening, and felt confused you didn't let me know you weren’t coming.”
Relating to Emotions Positively
Identify emotions. It’s important to know what you feel so you can adequately address each emotion appropriately. Start to reflect on how your body feels when you notice an emotion coming through. If you feel anger, for instance, you may start to notice your breathing quickening, your muscles tensing, or your skin feeling flushed. If you’re happy, you may notice smiling or feelings of lightness in your body. Tune in to your body’s communication. Journal each emotion. For instance, write a journal entry for “sadness” and write down all the things making you feel sad. Do the same thing for “anger,” “joy,” “peace,” “rage,” or any other emotion you want to focus on.
Decode each emotion’s message. Often, you feel emotions as a communication system. For instance, you may feel anxiety as a way to express fear of something. Emotions can trigger emotional or physical perceived stressors that we choose to move toward or away from. When your emotions come up, ask them what they are communicating to you. If you feel sadness, ask yourself, “What have I lost or what do I perceive I will lose?” When experiencing anger, ask, “Do I feel like my values are being attacked?” or, “Is there some action I should be taking?” When happy, ask, “What do I feel has been added to my life?”
Increase your empathy. Empathy means observing your emotions less and the emotions of those around you. Having empathy is part of having emotional intelligence. If you find yourself focusing largely on your own emotions, take a step back and notice the emotions of the people around you. Contemplate their emotional experience and recognize the emotions they feel. Increasing your empathy helps you relate to people more effectively, respect their emotional experience, and take the spotlight off of yourself. Ask yourself, “What is this person feeling and experiencing right now?”
Be mindful. Staying present can help you moderate your emotions. Practicing mindfulness means you allow your thoughts and feelings to come and observe them without judgement. If you find yourself feeling sad, try to turn yourself away from judgmental thoughts like, "I shouldn't still be sad about this. What's wrong with me?" Instead, try to be objective, maybe simply observing, "I still have strong emotions about that incident. That's interesting." Practicing mindfulness can have benefits for emotional, mental, and physical health. Some mindfulness practices to try include tuning into your senses (touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing) and observing them. Focus on your breathing and see how it moderates the way you feel. For more information, check out How to Do Mindful Meditation.
See a therapist. If you find it difficult to relate to your emotions positively or cannot find ways to control your emotions, a therapist can help you. A therapist can help you process your difficult emotions while also providing an outlet for you to release your emotions in a positive and constructive way. If controlling your emotions feels impossible, talk to a therapist to find ways to make this more manageable. Find a therapist you feel comfortable talking to and seeing regularly. Your therapist should be someone you can trust and with whom you are comfortable sharing vulnerable or embarrassing things. If you are uncomfortable with your therapist or just don't feel a connection, it's okay to see someone else.
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