How to control emotions : 6 Powerful Hacks to Take Charge of Your Emotions and Feel Empowered
How to control emotions, From rage to anxiety, sadness to embarrassment, emotions arise and sway us frequently, often catching us off guard with their intensity. Learning constructive ways to respond to overwhelming or confusing emotions helps us better navigate life’s ups and downs.
How to control emotions : 6 Powerful Hacks to Take Charge of Your Emotions and Feel Empowered
This article explores the nature of emotions, the importance of emotional regulation, strategies for feeling your way through intense states, and achieving balance through self-mastery. Read on for empowering ways to relate to your inner world.
The Purpose & Origin of Emotions
To understand emotions, first recognize their evolutionary design and utility:
Primal Signals Emotions are primal impulses originating in the most ancient part of the brain called the limbic system, home to instincts around survival and safety. Emotions served our early ancestors by spurring quick reactions to danger before higher cognition kicked in.
1. How to control emotions : Universal Experience
While personal triggers differ, core human emotions span vastly different cultures throughout history. Fundamental experiences like anger, joy, fear, disgust, surprise and sadness arise in all people, signaling universal psychological needs.
Information Messengers Emotions convey urgent information about our wellbeing and environment. Pain protects with the impulse to change conditions. Anxiety alerts to potential threats. Joy affirms worthiness. Guilt checks ethics. Each feeling provides feedback, guidance and motivation around fulfilling core needs.
2. How to control emotions : Innate Reactions
Emotions manifest physically within seconds through heart rate changes, facial expressions, nervous system activity alterations etc. Humans innately and involuntarily display feeling states because primitive survival depended on communicating distress, triumph, affection etc.
3. How to control emotions : Environmental Influence
While many scientists assert natural emotional ranges tied to DNA, others argue life experience shapes emotional sensitivity and regulation abilities via brain wiring early on. In reality both biology and life environment collaborate.
Overall, emotions serve us through their raw wisdom formed long ago. Learning to dialogue with these ancient inner signals guides the way forward.
The Perils of Emotional Dysregulation
Yet left uncontrolled, overwhelming emotions severely undermine functioning through:
Muddied Guidance Systems Failing to constructively relate with our emotions distorts their helpful wisdom into feeling attackers. Without the proper decoding lens, guidance goes missing and emotions escalate through panic.
Hijacked Reasoning In severe emotional states, the raw limbic brain overrides higher order thinking in the prefrontal cortex, leaving minimal access to logic, objectivity and moderated response. Blazing anger, anxiety or hurt hijack reasoning capacity.
How to control emotions, Wellbeing Sabotage Chronic emotional chaos stresses the nervous system throwing hormones out of balance contributing to inflammation, impaired immunity, cardiovascular damage, digestive disruption and insomnia long term.
Suffering Spreads
Lashing out angrily, stonewalling partners after conflicts, and withdrawn depression hurts relationships. Similarly, anxious irritability and dramatic mood swings strain professionalism. Emotions ripple outward.
Self-Concept Confusion
Feeling frequently tossed about emotionally with minimal control leaves us feeling disoriented and at the mercy of inner chaos. Constructing stable self-concept proves difficult leading to low self-regard when regulation remains elusive.
How to control emotions, Therefore mastering management of turbulent feeling states proves foundational for overall health and happiness. Committing to emotional self-mastery empowers thriving.
4. How to control emotions : Essentials Underpinning Emotion Regulation
How to control emotions, Before detailing techniques, first cultivate essentials below empowering constructive responses to intense inner states:
Self-Awareness
Knowing our emotional patterns, triggers, sensitivities and histories allows recognizing rising intensity early to respond thoughtfully versus reactively. Create space for self-reflection through journaling, meditation and open conversations with trusted supports.
Mindset Shift
Release judgments branding emotionality as weakness and reframe intense inner states with compassion instead. Emotions convey valuable information if related to constructively. Framing them as teachers rather than torturers transforms their impact.
Distress Tolerance
Commit to building capacity to sit with painful emotional states that arise without immediately acting to suppress them. Tolerating distress leads to clarity on what a feeling state requires longterm versus short term relief often backfiring.
Coping Skills
Stock your mental toolkit with healthy adaptive strategies to deploy when emotions surge so you avoid harmful impulsive reactivity. This includes everything from breathing practices and time outs to counseling and social support.
With these pillars in place, employ the strategies below for feeling your way through turbulence.
5. How to control emotions : Healthy Strategies for Mastering Emotions
How to control emotions, Numerous research-backed techniques foster emotional equilibrium. Tailor tactics to your triggers and temperament:
Name To Tame
Simply labeling the discrete emotion you’re undergoing (ie- frustration) begins activating the rational brain, taking intensity down a notch in the process. If no words initially come, just acknowledge “I feel intensely right now” until the smoke clears some.
Get Curious
Instead of resisting the emotion or getting wrapped up in its storyline, get curiously inquisitive about the feeling. Investigate the physical sensation. Trace rising and falling energy shifts. Ask what it most wants you to know. Allow this How investigation to dismantle the Why anger towards it being there. Curiosity builds the muscle tolerating distress.
Focus The High Beam
The spotlight attention paid to unpleasant emotions often exacerbates them, while positive feelings fade quickly from lack of focus. Inhabit the peace or joy just as intensely. Make good feelings prominent guests too instead of only struggling ones.
Converse Compassionately
Talk to stirred up emotions like you would a child having a meltdown, with gentle empathy about feelings belying the behavior. Help this part of you feel truly heard and understood rather than reigning it in harshly. Coax coherence compassionately.
Get Moving
Emotional energy seeks expression through either destructive or constructive flow pathways. Channel it beneficially through movement like aerobic exercise, dancing, yoga asanas, or just shaking tension out. How to control emotions, This physically processes turmoil helping prevent blow ups.
Employ Creativity Artistic self-expression anchors swirling emotions into something tangible you can resolve. Whether drawing, painting, journaling, singing original songs or writing poetry, creativity catalyzes inner metamorphosis needed.
Go Back To Basics
Strong feelings often arise from unmet primitive survival needs. Revisit your diet, sleep, fresh air, hydration and community. Make pleasurable, healthy activities that reconnect you to basics a medicine when turbulent.
Release Control
Allow emotions space for expression socially and privately without immediately trying to prematurely solve, suppress or escape them. Tolerating the waves returns you organically to peaceful equilibrium in time as all states are transient. Suffocate sadness and its longing for life prolongs.
Everything In Season
Embrace an ebb and flow life rhythm. The natural world enters dormant winter not a dead end. Trust spring always comes next. Similarly ease down cycles receptive, slowing activity. Then inspiration eventually returns for stepping fully into life again. Cyclical clearance sustains passion long term.
How to control emotions, Your emotions offer a weather report on inner conditions. Sunny, stormy or calm- commit to riding all seasons without judgment, learning their wisdom in time.
6. How to control emotions : Achieving Emotional Self-Mastery
How to control emotions, Learning to skillfully ride the waves of anger, anxiety, sadness and even happiness establishes mature emotional regulation with immense benefits:
Peace Of Mind
When no longer identifying with each passing turbulence, greater stillness and objectivity anchors perception even amidst outer chaos allowing discernment towards wise action.
Stability & Flow
Ever changing external conditions synchronize with equanimous inner stability like ocean waves meeting steadfast lighthouse rather than capsizing boat. You control your reactions.
Confidence & Resilience
Constructively shepherding emotions through many storms instills faith in your capacity to navigate intensify. Having endured the unskillful, no intensity will upend you. Confidence weathers all things.
Enhanced Relationships
Regulated emotions prevent projecting inner unrest onto uninvolved others. You own your feelings, freeing loved ones from blamed savior/protector exhausting role. Conflict resolution skills blossom.
Embodied Wellbeing
How to control emotions, With emotions kept constructively in check long term, the body harmonizes instinctively through balanced nervous system functioning, steady hormone levels, healthy immunity and peak physiology promoting vitality.
Watch the video : Control your emotions
Conclusion
How to control emotions, In Buddhist psychology, radical zen masters speak of one’s ability to sit undisturbed like a mountain amidst swirling storm chaos all around. This apt visual encapsulates the ultimate prize- inner calm and liberation even amidst outer unrest. Regulation promises as much.
Commit to the journey. An emotionally skillful life awaits.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Why do my emotions sometimes feel bigger than me or out of control?
The limbic emotional center of the brain sits underneath higher cortical functioning, hence emotions feel primal, bigger and arise “uncontrollably”. Their evolutionary basis reminds us they served survival long before reasoning existed. Their roar captures attention, not to overpower you but ensure you hear their message.
- Do I need therapy or medication if struggling with emotional regulation?
Not necessarily, though both can help in many cases. Improving regulation first centers establishing self-awareness then building distress tolerance through exposure while learning healthy diffusion tactics overtime. If coping fails despite sincere efforts or dysregulation stems from clinical diagnosis like mood disorders, anxiety, PTSD or addiction, then absolutely seek professional support.
- Am I repressing emotions if I temporarily distract myself from very painful ones?
No, healthy distraction provides space for intensity to settle so clarity emerges on next right steps. However, continual emotion avoidance often backfires by allowing denial of core issues needing unpacking. Use distraction judiciously, not chronically. Process genuinely in little doses.
- If I feel emotions intensely, does it mean something is wrong with me?
Absolutely not! Emotional sensitivity correlates to environmental factors, temperament and often flows from immense creativity and compassion. It indicates deeper processing and rich inner world. Support sensitivity through self-care. But relieve “faulty wiring” judgments exacerbating struggles. Intensity is a super power once harnessed.
- Why are my emotions often conflicted, feeling sad and happy simultaneously?
Humans are complex beings with myriad needs and yearnings. We want intimate connection and personal freedom. We desire safety while craving adventure. This emotional tug-of-war sparks mixed feelings. Allow inner contradictions rather than judging them. Mixed emotions convey our multidimensional humanity.
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