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Managing your Emotions
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Emotions are felt by everyone – love, hate, fear, joy, and so on. However, while these emotions are an inextricable part of life, they need to be controlled in order to ensure that you respond to a situation in the right way. This is especially important when it comes to negative emotions. Read on to find out more about how you can control your emotions.
Why are Emotions Necessary?
Emotions are a necessary part of life, as they are needed in order to be able to live life fully. But what are emotions? They are the language of everyone’s mental and emotional state of being, and are tied to a person’s social and physical sensory feelings. Emotions are the feelings that are used to react to fear, joy, love, sadness, hate, disgust, and pleasure. However, emotions need to be managed in order to ensure that they are appropriate to any given situation in order to prevent consequences or negative behaviours. If an emotion is strong enough to take over the brain, it can override logical reasoning and cause a loss of inner peace.
What Happens when Emotions are not managed?
People that do not know how to control their emotions can show this in a number of ways. Firstly, anger may be uncontrolled and intense. They may show impulsiveness in areas such as substance use, sex, driving, and so forth. There may be uncertainty in relationships, values, self-images, and the goals that have been set. People may show a lack of self esteem, be chronically bored, or have a fear of abandonment. They can even show suicidal tendencies. Personal relationships may be unstable or volatile. Finally people may show extreme mood swings that include recurrent depression and anxiety.
When Emotions are Effectively Managed
When a person knows how to manage their emotions in an effective manner, they can be described as:
- a person with high emotional intelligence
- a person that can effectively handle conflict
- a person that has logical reasoning
- a person that has inner peace
- a person that is secure and confident within themselves
Tips for Managing your Emotions
Managing your emotions means that you will become happier, more confident in yourself, and more able to deal with the challenges in life. The first way to manage your emotions is by managing your thoughts. Negative thoughts affect your energy, and you will feel less likely to take action. Pessimists are generally insecure, depressed people that do not know how to manage their emotions, especially in times of stress. Positive thinkers focus on the good side of things in order to deal with situations in a rational manner without letting emotions cloud their judgment.
Anger also needs to be controlled. Anger, improperly controlled, causes people to say or do hurtful or destructive things that cannot be undone later on. Hold back your anger by learning self-control – visualise the possible consequences of your anger. Usually this is enough to allow you to sit back for a while. A balanced diet and regular exercise can manage your emotions, as both of these have been proven to have good effects on the way that people feel.
Start to believe that you can control your emotions. Also pay attention to your emotions – this will allow you to focus on what is happening at the moment and help you to respond appropriately. Never ignore your emotions or suppress them in the hope that they will simply disappear. Try and determine the source of your feelings. Is it caused by something that is happening now or as the result of a prior experience? Talk about your feelings but do so in a non-confrontational manner. This could be as simple as using “I” instead of “you”. For example, “I feel sad when you…” instead of “You did this to me…” When talking to someone else, always acknowledge their feelings as being legitimate. Even if you feel differently, dismissing their feelings is likely to exacerbate the situation. If you need one, take a time out or walk away for a while in order to let things calm down. Wherever possible, focus on the positives.
Other tips for managing your emotions include:
- get enough rest
- talk to someone your trust
- learn to solve problems
- listen to your self talk
- get all the facts before you act
- take a mini mind vacation
- help somebody else
- seek help
- be yourself
- ask for what you want
- compromise
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