How to Properly Cope with Your Emotions to Achieve “Chronic Happiness”

To feel good we must cope better

Experiencing positive emotions is essential, not just because they feel good, but because they help us transform ourselves into more creative, knowledgeable, resilient, socially integrated, and healthy humans.

That means that it is important to include properly taking care of your emotions in your daily self-care routine.

However, we often tend to take care of our emotions — or cope with them — in rather unhealthy ways. These include drinking alcohol, smoking, or ruminating.

If we don’t watch out, these unhealthy ways might become habits, or even worse — addictions. In order to avoid this, and experience more happiness, we need to identify our coping mechanisms and replace them with healthier ones.

The emotional domain of self-care

In their article on the 6 domains of self-care, Butler et al. (2019) identify emotions as one of the domains to include in our daily self-care.

According to them, emotional self-care includes “practices that are engaged in to safeguard against or address negative emotional experience as well as those intended to create or enhance positive emotional experience and well-being.”

Taking care of your emotions is therefore mostly about the practices that you implement to cope with negative emotions and to feel positive emotions.

However, some of the practices that you currently use to cope with your emotions might not be so good for you. Actually, in the long run, they might even be harmful.

Coping with difficult emotions

While some of us cope with difficult emotions in healthy ways, others might cope with them in not-so-healthy ways.

To recognize whether you are coping with your emotions in an unhelpful way, ask yourself if you usually cope with difficult or unpleasant emotions by doing one of the following things:

• Drinking alcohol
• Smoking
• Drinking coffee or other caffeinated drinks
• Taking over-the-counter medications or illegal drugs
• Over-eating or restricting eating
• Spending money
• Engaging in self-injurious or reckless behaviors
• Watching television
• Surfing the internet
• Playing video games
• Ruminating, lashing out, or withdrawing
• Or ignoring your own distress.

You might feel unsettled at this moment because you might recognize that you practice some of these ways for coping with difficult emotions. However, doing one of these might not be that big of a deal. As long as these behaviors are done in moderation (well, not all of them of course but you get the gist), they might not be that harmful for now.

However, if these behaviors take the upper hand, and become the frequent and main way of dealing with difficult emotions, that is when to stop and think.

I’ve been guilty of coping with my difficult emotions using some of these negative coping practices. I used to overeat, lash out, drink tons of coffee, watch loads of television, and ignore my own distress.

But, I noticed that in the long run, it started to affect my health. I started gaining weight, I was tired most of the time and I felt unhappy, anxious, irritable, and down.

So while in the short term it didn’t have that bad of an effect on me, and it momentarily made me feel better, in the long run it affected my health and my emotional well-being.

The message here is: don’t be alarmed to know that you use some of these coping mechanisms to deal with your emotions. But, become aware of it and start to slowly make a change. This will help you avoid worse health and worse emotional well-being down the line.

How can we do this? Well, there’s another way.

Another way to cope

Changing the way we cope with difficult emotions can be hard, especially if these ways have become habits.

However, it is better to change them to avoid negative consequences in the long run. Changing them will also help you feel better emotionally, in a consistent and sustainable way (which is ultimately what we want to achieve when we practice coping mechanisms!).

To do this, Butler et al. (2019) suggest using your current coping mechanisms in mindful moderation while looking for activities, people, places, and objects that are truly stress-lowering and comforting, and that elevate your mood consistently.

Then, you can work on substituting those when you experience difficult emotions. This is a process, of course, but it is one that will truly help build you up when you are feeling down.

Personally, I’ve worked through most of my negative coping mechanisms and have replaced them with constructive ways of coping. Of course, I still have some of the negative coping mechanisms, but I either use them in moderation or I am still working on fazing them out and substituting them with healthier coping mechanisms.

It is important to note that while we should strive to cope with our emotions in healthy ways — it is also important not to ignore the message that our emotions bring us.

They are often there for a reason, and it is wise to take time to consider how and whether to address the situation. Distraction techniques are not meant as a substitute to deal with unfinished business.

“Your emotions make you human. Even the unpleasant ones have a purpose. Don’t lock them away. If you ignore them, they just get louder and angrier.” ― Sabaa Tahir, A Torch Against the Night

Healthier coping mechanisms

When we have decoded our emotions, and we have dealt with our unfinished business, it is time for us to find healthy and constructive ways to lift our spirits.

Research has shown that meditation, yoga, tai chi, self-hypnosis, guided imagery, and progressive muscle relaxation (amongst other things) are healthier ways to cope with difficult emotions. It also helps cope with negative emotional states, such as anxiety, depression, and more.

Mindfulness has many benefits for our well-being, which you’ve probably heard of already. But if you haven’t, mindfulness is shown to reduce stress, negative emotions, rumination, and state and trait anxiety. It also helps increase positive emotions and self-compassion.

Personally, I have replaced my negative coping mechanisms with practices such as:

• Daily meditation (I’ve been trained in Transcendental Meditation, but sometimes I like to try new things. So then I switch it up with a guided meditation by dr. Joe Dispenza or another one on YouTube)
• 30-minute walks (preferably in nature)
• Affirmations (when I am experiencing negative emotions or stress, I often recite a few sentences to myself that calm me down. Such sentences can include: “I am healthy”, “I am strong”, and “all is well”)
• Talking with others (I usually tend to keep everything to myself to avoid relying on others or bothering others, but I recently opened up more and started to share what I struggle with. This honesty and vulnerability helped me lighten the load, see things from a different perspective, and get out of my head)

You can try these ways for yourself, of course. But it is important that your new healthy coping practices really make you feel better. So, identify what it is that truly calms you down, in a way that is consistent, sustainable, and healthy — and then do more of it!

Achieving “chronic happiness”

I talked a lot about how to deal with negative emotions, but emotional self-care is also about doing things that bring you pleasant and happy emotions.

One term that best describes this, is chronic happiness. This is defined as the product of the relative presence of positive affect and absence of negative affect, and an overall sense of life satisfaction.

According to one study, chronic happiness can be achieved by three factors: a genetically fixed happiness set point, life circumstances, and intentional activity.

While the first two ways are fixed and out of our control, the third one is something that we can actively influence.

Intentional activity might even be at the center of emotional self-care because it is necessary to be intentional about our actions in order to overcome our bad coping mechanisms and choose healthier ones.

By intentionally choosing activities that enhance our happiness and other positive feelings, we play an active role in our self-care and have a real chance of achieving chronic happiness.

“Happiness is not the absence of problems, it’s the ability to deal with them.” — Steve Maraboli

Key takeaways

Negative coping mechanisms might feel good in the moment, but they are harmful in the long run.

To feel better and achieve chronic happiness, we should intentionally practice healthier coping mechanisms.

And even though it is important to properly cope with your emotions, you shouldn’t ignore the message they are trying to send you.

Are you aware of the way you cope with difficult emotions? What are the ways in which you cope with them?

Let me know in the comments below! Always love hearing from you.

Take good care of yourself, you deserve it.

Love,

Jelena

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