Your Emotion Is Your Super Power

And then others are hard… Eating a bowl of nails for breakfast hard.

If you’re a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) like me, you may tend to overreact, blowing up at the little stuff, taking things way too personally, or even just incessantly sobbing during your favorite anime, Naruto got me there, then what I’m about to share with you will be music to your ears.

Stick around if you’d like to find out how I went from flailing under pressure to being the boss of my emotions.

First of all, I think I should clear the air because as humans we tend to embellish or romanticize reality. So let me be the one to say, “Life is not your friend.” But it’s also not your enemy. Remembering to stay neutral will be key to surviving this thing…well until you don’t, anyway.

I don’t know why some of us are softer inside. Like jello, my experiences resonate and reverberate throughout my body coloring most of what I perceive with emotional tones. And then others are hard… Eating a bowl of nails for breakfast hard. My grandad was like that. Stoic? Stubborn? Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is our ability to develop emotional resiliency.

“What is that?” You ask…

That, my friend, is your ticket out of the internal chaos brought on by our experience of what we go through in life. As someone who has had to train myself to compose my emotions, there were, and are, 3 main things I do no matter what chaos comes knocking on my door.

But before we deep dive into what helped me get to the boss level, let me tell you where I started. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

I’m a high-energy person, though I wouldn’t call myself extroverted. I am open to my environment and the feedback of those I care about. That being said, my little heart had a very difficult time adjusting to harsh feedback and undue criticism projected on me by the very people I cared about. This caused whatever emotional resiliency I had to deteriorate over time, and before I knew it, I was highly emotionally reactive.

I was battling an internal war that couldn’t perceive myself the way I was projected on, but also couldn’t make peace knowing the truth of the matter, which was, that my family members weren’t always helpful to my authentic growth, and more often than not, they were harmful.

It would be a separation occurring years later that allowed me to see what part I played in my emotional suffering, and even longer for me to do something about it.

I left a dysfunctional household a little over two years ago now, and it’s taken me all of that time to come to grips with the way I perceive and interpret what I experience.

Here’s how I did it and you can too…

1. Know thyself

This old saying, stemming from Ancient Greece, is one I have personally tattooed on my brain. Self-awareness is the foundation in building a resilient mindset. Understanding intimate aspects of yourself, like what you care about, triggers, insecurities, likes and dislikes, can give you a massive insight into how you will respond in situations that encourage and discourage the particular thoughts and feelings that accompany those likes, dislikes, triggers, etc.

Getting an honest account of yourself may take a while, but the cost-to-benefit ratio always lands in your favor.

A good way to build self-awareness is by keeping a daily journal.

2. Meditate

I cannot recommend this enough. Meditating is both a mental and physiological act that is full of benefits. But the main ones we will focus on are the ones that help us build emotional resiliency. Namely, consistent meditation helps us to,

• Reduce Stress • Increase our Resiliency towards Adversity • Enhance our Cognitive Function in Coping with Difficult Emotions

Creating a consistent practice of meditation is a great way to observe the relationship between your thoughts and your mind.

3. Reframe the Scene

Have you ever realized how much we color our circumstances by believing we know what happened and why?

I used to get myself all worked up in thinking I knew exactly why someone was attempting to short-change me when, in reality, 9 out of 10 times, my assumptions were way off the mark. That’s when I came across a video on YouTube that helped me learn the art of reframing.

Reframing is a practice that allows me to deescalate a potential outburst by first admitting my faulty judgment to myself in a manner that doesn’t give my emotional pain body the green light on fixing the scene so I can feel justified in hating the guy who just cut me off on the road.

Instead of saying, “He did that on purpose,” I would now question myself, asking, “What other possibilities exist for him to need to cut me off?” Maybe he’s in a hurry because he needs to use the restroom or is late for work, to name a few.

Reframing allows me not to take the undesired event so personally and saves me from what may be a pointless conflict.

What are your thoughts and experiences in dealing with your emotions? Is emotional composure an issue for you too? I’d love to hear about it in the comment section.

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