5 Ways To Get Your Unwanted Emotions Under Control
Dealing with certain emotions in a negative way can have big consequences. Letting yourself be overcome with joy or peace is different than letting yourself be overcome with anger or impatience. It’s often easier to let your emotions rule your actions unless you retrain how you respond to stress. You will experience more peace and less regrets if you learn to respond to situations and people instead of react.
Follow these suggestions so you can be proud of your responses even when you’re feeling emotionally charged:
Understand Your Triggers
Once you understand what causes you to have a knee-jerk reaction, you have more control over yourself! Do you feel rushed because you never give yourself enough time to transition from task to task? Allow for extra time so you don’t feel stressed. Do certain people put you on edge? Make an effort to limit your time around them.
What’s the Meaning of the Situation?
Your intrepretation of the situation impacts how you feel about it. Your feelings dictate your actions. If you want to change how you react, ask yourself, “What’s another perspective to this situation?” “What else could be going on here?”
Look at the Big Picture
When you’re super upset it’s easy to miss important details. There’s always something to learn, someway to grow as a person. You’re being given an opportunity to role model for others what a healthy way of dealing with anger looks like. This is your opportunity.
Ask for Divine Help
You weren’t meant to carry the world on your shoulders. If you don’t know how to handle a person or situation, ask for help. You can even do it in the moment without anyone else knowing! If you need more love or patience to extend towards someone, ask for it.
Focus on the Positive
Keep your attention on your goal of emotional management in the moment. Remind yourself of when you handled your emotions well and what helped. Even if you can only think of one example or one point that helped you last time, focusing on this ‘positive’ will help decrease the emotional intensity.
Get Control of Your Body
Close your eyes, breath deeply, change your facial expression, relax your shoulders, hands and jaw. This takes your focus away from the intensity of your emotions and helps you physically let go.
Find a Healthy Way to Calm Down
One things for sure, you don’t want to stuff your emotions down and not communicate your feelings at all. I used to escape from arguments because I didn’t know how to express my anger. We lived on our sailboat at the time and I would jump ship and walk around the marina until I figured out my feelings. In some ways it was a healthy response and on the flip side I left mid conversation sometimes which didn’t always help my husband!
What’s one healthy way you could calm down? Going for a walk, beating up a punching bag?
Identify Your Anger
What are you really angry about? What happened last week, this morning or does is have anything to do with the person in front of you? Deal with your emotions so that others don’t have to deal with the brunt of it.
Plan Ahead
If your day is jam packed and you’re not ready for it, emotions can fun high! Plan for a schedule that’s 3x as full as you think it will be. The unexpected always sneaks its way into your day! Then you’ll be ready for almost any scenario and will be able to handle your emotions with much more grace.
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