How I Learned To Control My Emotions

How you can control your emotions in order to handle them better and use them for your goals

Find Out How Your Emotions Affect You

Emotions aren’t bad.

“Emotions make our lives exciting, unique, and vibrant,” Botnick says. “Strong feelings can signify that we embrace life fully, that we’re not repressing our natural reactions.”

So emotions are the things that make life worth living.

And having intense emotions is an indicator that we’re living life to its fullest.

We often tend to say that being anxious or afraid are often bad emotions.

But this is oftentimes not true.

They are there to warn you.

You get them because you’re doing something you’re normally not doing.

And that is oftentimes good.

But we sometimes want to change the emotions that we’re feeling or the intensity of it.

To do that we first have to be aware of those emotions and how they’re affecting us.

For that, we can keep a mood journal.

In that, we can write down the feelings we want to look at and the responses those feelings lead to in order to uncover any disruptive patterns.

Try to recognize specific circumstances in which you felt this feeling.

For example a family conflict or trouble at work.

Once we’ve identified those specific triggers we can come up with ways to manage them more productively.

For example, if you’re nervous about giving a presentation and you’ve analyzed the situation, you may realize that you’re nervous because you didn’t think you were prepared enough.

This will help you focus more on your preparation, which will alleviate your nervousness next time.

Accept All of Your Emotions

Another important factor when trying to control your emotions is to accept them.

We oftentimes try to say:

“Don’t be so nervous”

or

“It’s no big deal, so don’t freak out”

But this represents not the true emotions we’re feeling right now.

It is a big deal to do right now so you just have to accept your emotions.

Because when you try to suppress your emotions, they often get worse.

And if you keep suppressing them, they can build up to something bigger, which costs you motivation and energy and can lead to psychological problems.

Also when you accept your emotions you’re learning to get comfortable with those more intense emotions.

Through this, you won’t freak out the next time you’ve some more intense emotions.

For example, when you’re really angry at your boss it can help you to hold yourself back and not say anything wrong.

Accepting emotions also leads to greater life satisfaction, and fewer mental health symptoms, and it may even lead to higher levels of happiness.

The First Step of Controlling Your Feelings: Recognize them

Now that we know which emotions we want to control better, which circumstances trigger them, and we’re accepting those emotions it’s time to get real.

To control your emotions the first step we have to take is to recognize them.

Oftentimes emotions build up and we don’t have experiences that we could have journaled about.

But even if we did.

Each situation is individual and we have to find out what we’re truly feeling.

How is this different from the last time?

Through this, we can localize the trigger of the emotions and focus more on that.

Also, emotions often tend to build up before they lead to bad decisions.

That’s why we want to identify them before that and not after we made a bad decision.

Now, to become aware of the emotions, try to develop a continuous awareness of them.

Try to focus entirely on your emotions the first couple of days till it becomes normal.

It also helps to ask yourself throughout the day what you’re feeling.

Challenge Your Thoughts

Once we can recognize our feelings through which we can localize the trigger that makes us feel this way, challenging our thoughts can now become effective.

We may have tried this before but we’ve often didn’t get calmer.

That’s because we didn’t know exactly what the trigger of this feeling was.

Our subconscious mind doesn’t believe us when we say everything is okay when we don’t really know why we’re feeling for example anxious.

Also instead of saying everything is okay, we should try to challenge our view of how we’re seeing the trigger to get results.

For example, to say the dog is not bad when we’re running away from it screaming is not a challenge to the view we have about the dog.

Because the real view is that we’re afraid of the dog because it could bite us for example.

Then try to challenge the view of it to say something like this:

The dog could bite me but it is really small.

It also doesn’t flinch its teeth.

And even if you would bite me he probably can’t hurt me that I’ll have a harm to life.

So probably it isn’t as worse as I thought.

Through this, we’re able to see the trigger from a new view and this will lower the intensity of the emotion.

Use Simple Techniques For Out of Control Emotions

Now that we know how we can control our emotions there is the question of what we can do when the feeling is so intense that we can’t think clearly anymore.

For that, there are several techniques we can use to take a step back and get focused.

Please keep in mind that those techniques won’t make the feeling disappear but rather lower the intensity.

The first technique is to take a deep breath.

To have the most calming effect follow these steps:

• Breathe in slowly
• Hold your breath for 3 seconds
• Breathe out longer than it took you to breathe in

This will help you to get your heart rate down and thus we’ll become more relaxed.

It also helps you to focus on the moment and it clears the mind.

The second technique we can use to reduce the intensity of our emotions is the sensory grounding method.

It means basically that we’re trying to focus on our senses.

To do so we can for example splash cold water on our faces, or sing and hum.

You can also do this by using the 5–4–3–2–1 technique.

The goal of this technique is to name

• 5 things you can see
• 4 things you can touch
• 3 things you can hear
• 2 things you can smell
• 1 thing you can taste

Another effective method that can be used for lasting results is to meditate regularly.

Meditation can help you increase awareness of your feelings and experiences.

This way you’re also teaching yourself to sit with those feelings, without judging them or trying to avoid them.

That’s exactly what we were already trying to achieve.

To achieve the best results you should optimally meditate for 10–20 minutes 3–4 times per week.

Conclusion And Additional Tips

In conclusion.

To control our emotions better we have to find out how our emotions affect us.

We can achieve this by keeping a mood journal.

Optimally we do this every evening.

Once we have them identified it is important to learn to accept our emotions rather than trying to avoid them.

Before we can change our emotions we first have to recognize them.

This can be achieved by creating a lasting awareness of our emotions.

After we have identified the trigger of our emotion we can go on and challenge our thoughts to get a different view about the trigger.

Through taking a deep breath, sensory grounding, and meditation we can learn to stay focused and clear-minded whenever we’re having intense emotions.

And that is all it takes to control your emotions.

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Until next time!