4 tips to learn to manage your emotions

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Charles McCarthy
4 tips to learn to manage your emotions

Before getting into the subject I would like to clarify a couple of things that when you start in this wonderful world of emotions it gives rise to confusion.

Control or manage emotions?

Surely you have read or been told a lot about the emotions and that these cannot be controlled or avoided. That's right, emotions are our body's reactions to a stimulus and depending on the degree to which they are activated, they will be more or less intense..

The strong intensity is what makes us sometimes want to get rid of them or act impulsively. In the intensity is where we will have to carry out the management so that it goes down enough so that our reaction is more adaptive or we can experience that emotion in a normalized way.

What we do with regulation is facing emotion and not flee from it, that is why they insist on talking about regulation or management instead of control or elimination. If this is clear and if you are aware that control does not mean that you can stop feeling the emotion, just like that, you can use the word with which you feel most identified at any time. I will continue talking about regulation or management since they are the ones I feel most comfortable with.

Emotion VS feeling

But they are not the same?

We could say no. The emotion would be the reaction and the feeling the construction What do we do with that emotion? Now I explain it better:

A feeling is when we are able to be aware of that emotional state, when language acts, that is, our thinking.

Emotion + thought = feeling

It depends on what we think we will feel one experience or another; It depends on what we think about the situation, about the emotion that it has aroused we will feel in one way or another. So good news, we can influence how we feel by decreasing the intensity of the most unpleasant emotions and managing our thoughts..

We cannot control the emotion but we can control the thought

After this short introduction I am going to give you the 4 tips that you should take into account to learn to manage your emotions.

4 tips to manage emotions

1. Identify your emotions

The questions What do I feel? At what moment? In front of whom?, they can help you name what you are feeling (you will be putting language, you will be thinking about the emotion and the event). Also notice in which part of the body you feel the emotion.

2. Understand the function of emotion

Emotions have an adaptive function. They exist so that we know how to adapt to our environment and we can survive. After identifying it find out what he has come for.

In general, the function of emotions are as follows:

  • They are an indicator, a signal to ourselves that something is happening.
  • It is always said that prepare us for action, although this may or may not occur.
    • Being indicators also they let us know if something is going well or not.
  • They also serve to identify the emotional states of others, realize what may be happening to the people around us.
  • Serve as help deciding how to act in front of the sign.
  • And for me, one of the most important and my favorite, they serve to learn of ourselves and of others. Learn about the nature of our thoughts and behaviors.

I will give you a small summary of the basic emotions and their function.

Afraid: Its function is to protect us from danger, whether physical or psychological. At present, fears come from finding ourselves in situations that we do not have enough resources, that is why it is related to anxiety. For this reason, on many occasions we feel fear of the unknown.

Anger: Its function is also to protect us. We feel it when our limits have been exceeded.

Joy: Appears when we have achieved an achievement or something good has happened. Its function is that we are aware of it and repeat what produces well-being.

Sadness: Although it is one of the emotions that we least want to feel, sadness appears when we have lost something or someone we love and it accompanies us to pick us up and even have moments just for ourselves.

3. Know your answers

Reflect on how you act, what conclusion do you draw from your behavior: positive or negative? Here you will become aware of your behavior. It will help you to realize if your answer brings you to fruition or not. When there is a lack of emotional management, the resulting behavior is usually impulsive or paralyzing and this makes us feel even worse.

4. Apply emotional management

Faced with a stimulus or an event, we have an innate, almost unconscious capacity that is activated by assessing whether what is happening is a danger to our survival or is good for our well-being. If this stimulus is valued as relevant, what is called the emotional response what It consists of 3 parts:

  1. Neurophysiological: it is the response of our body at the level of muscle tone, neurotransmitters, hormones, etc. They are the changes in our body. These are involuntary responses that we cannot control but can prevent.
  1. Behavioral: is the response at the level of your non-verbal language, like your facial expressions, tone of voice, volume ...
  1. Cognitive: this would be the part that I have commented before about the feeling. When the emotion becomes conscious and our subjective assessment enters. For this reason it is very important to have a broad emotional language, to be able to label in the best possible way what happens to us and to avoid the "I don't know what is wrong with me, I feel bad".

Having discovered these three parts, we can now enter the emotional regulation. This can be done intervening in each of these points.

  • Neurophysiological: it is the emotional regulation through the body (relaxation techniques, breathing, physical body control, physical exercise).
  • Behavioral:emotional regulation through behavior (social skills, the correct expression of emotions).
  • Cognitive: meditation, toma of conscience of emotions, mental training for emotional change, etc..

Applying different tools in these different parts we can decrease the intensity of the unpleasant emotion that we feel and in this way regulate or manage it.

How do emotions work and where do we apply emotional regulation??

Exists A situation what triggers emotional tension Y generates discomfort. As we want to cover this discomfort and make it disappear, normally our behavior is impulsive.

If we learn to identify the situation and the resulting emotion, we will can pause before impulsive behavior, to reflect and become aware of what we are feeling, this is where we will apply emotional regulation.

When you have applied the emotional regulation technique see what your new behavior has been, assesses its result and reflect on the new feeling it generates.

Now already you will have created a new adapted behavior and with this you will also create a more adapted emotion.

Emotions predispose us to action, they exist because they have an adaptive function, they have to be. Although the action may or may not occur, what we must avoid is impulsive behavior, hence the power of emotional regulation. Thanks to this regulation we will be able to give an appropriate response and feel much better.

Resume:

1- Identify how you feel, in front of what or who, where I feel it in the body.

2- Label the emotion and understand why it has come, what is its function.

3 - Reflect on your answer, assess whether it is adapted or not.

4- Rate how it makes you feel

5- Apply emotional regulation

6- Reflect on the new feeling, on the new result.


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