Increased emotionality and explosive character are characteristic of a person who violently expresses his own feelings for any reason and cannot control them. An event of any nature (joyful or negative) will be the impetus for a violent emotional reaction and can cause emotional burnout.
You want to laugh and cry, scream or break something in a fit of anger and irritation, the conversation tends to turn into a showdown with breaking dishes and remarks in a raised tone. Any news causes a flurry of sensory experiences: from overwhelmingly joyful to decadently depressive, failures generally drive you crazy, you want to destroy, break, scream, be indignant. If you are familiar with such conditions, then you are the owner of increased emotionality and you probably know firsthand that the result of such emotional outbursts can be emotional burnout.
Emotions help us express our own feelings, but sometimes their power is so strong that it begins to get out of control. Here a person may wonder: is it possible to learn to control your emotions and how to cope with them in especially stressful moments? This can be done, but to achieve the desired harmony with yourself you will have to work hard and get acquainted with the mechanisms of functioning of your own inner world.
Emotional balance - why isn't it there?
Of course, vigorously expressing one’s emotions is not normal for the human psyche. Moreover, sometimes it even has a destructive effect on his worldview, scattering calm and balanced perception of reality to pieces, but it can also serve as an impetus for the development of a bunch of related problems: depression, apathy, the development of psychosomatic diseases.
It is also wrong to consider a heightened emotional character trait: they say, “I was born this way and nothing can be done about it.” This is exactly what you can do if you understand that any so-called “character trait” is a set of a huge number of response machines triggered within you under the influence of your subconscious, which stores all the information about your past, all your beliefs and ideas about yourself and the world:
- past grievances, especially those received in childhood,
- unspoken bitterness, tears,
- fears, phobias and suspiciousness, the habit of making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating the scale of any problem,
- past failures and failures and the conclusions drawn as a result of them, the habit of “expecting the worst” and fear of change,
- a lot of personal ideas and rigid beliefs about how “things should be”, how “right”, which flow like a fountain when the situation goes beyond its expected ideal model.
And also many other reasons that each person has their own. All this baggage accumulated over life is not only stored by the subconscious, but also determines the patterns of a person’s emotional response. It’s as if an automatic machine goes off inside - and we again and again feel anger, rage, depression, anger or envy, without understanding why.
Each person has his own personal “baggage” accumulated over his life, so we are all different and react differently, worry, suffer and laugh under the influence of different reasons. But achieving emotional balance is universal, since it lies in freeing the subconscious from all negative information stored in it, all suppressed emotions.
How to control your emotions and live in harmony with yourself
You can reassure yourself every time, saying that “everything is fine,” you can visualize and try to radiate “love and light,” or turn to the all-knowing Internet for help and ask for advice on forums or look for it in psychological columns. BUT. All these measures will be a kind of cosmetic repair, because they will not reveal to you all the true roots of the problem. It’s hard to radiate light if you’re fueled by anger from within and overflowing with aggression. Forcing yourself and smiling through tears is not only difficult, but also harmful. Logically trying to convince yourself that you need to remain calm in a given situation is also useless. Consciousness is involved in about five percent of the mechanisms of functioning of the human essence, everything else is the work of the subconscious, it does not heed logic, exhortations and temporary measures.
By eliminating the response programs embedded in the subconscious, it becomes possible to truly effectively manage your emotions. You shouldn’t treat the subconscious as an enemy, of course. By accumulating information within itself, the subconscious strives to protect us, and not to destroy, because it preserves all our traumas, everything that has hurt our psyche, and tries, through automatic means, to prevent these traumas from occurring again. Through anger, aggression, depression, we protect ourselves, like little children, from beatings and punishments.
If you try to remove these machines, then the expression of emotions becomes free. Your experiences are no longer determined by what you have experienced in the past or what “thoughts” you have about how you should behave, but by your emotional balance. Harmony with oneself is not insensitivity, it is an emotional balance in which emotions do not overwhelm and do not lead to emotional burnout, it is a calm and even state. Failures, if they occur, are perceived as a working moment: “it was and is past,” and joy is experienced the way you want in the moment here and now.
The information in this article is the result of the personal experience of its author, all articles are written based on their own results of using the system and are not intended to convince anyone of anything.
This site is a personal initiative of its author and has no relation to the author of the Turbo-Suslik technique, Dmitry Leushkin.
How we succeed in life is largely determined by our emotional intelligence: our ability to motivate ourselves and persist in achieving goals, to control impulses and delay gratification, to control our moods and not allow suffering to deprive us of the ability to think, empathize and hope.
The books “Emotional Intelligence” and “Emotional Flexibility” tell you how to learn to control your emotions. We publish some interesting thoughts and useful tips from them.
Emotions and Reason
The name Homo sapiens - homo sapiens - is misleading. We all know from experience that when it comes to making decisions and determining courses of action, feelings often play a larger role than thinking.
All emotions are essentially instantaneous action programs that evolution has gradually instilled in us. Actually, the root of the word “emotion” is the Latin verb moveo, meaning “to move, set in motion.”
This evolutionary adaptation served us well when we were daily threatened by snakes, lions, and hostile neighboring tribes. Faced with a predator or enemy, primitive man did not have time for abstract thoughts: “I am in danger. What options do I have?” Instantly flaring up anger or fear provided decisive chances for survival.
Fortunately, in the modern world, most of the problems we face are vague and distant in time. It’s no longer “Ah-ah!” Snake!". This is “Will they fire me?”, “Will my savings be enough for my old age?” But because of our close connection with emotions, our thoughts can trigger an automatic response of anxiety, fear, and a sense of immediate threat.
In a sense, we have two different faculties of thinking: rational and emotional. And both of them are important. We do not at all need to get rid of emotions and put reason in their place; it would be better to try to find a balance between them, to establish harmony between the head and heart.
Emotional flexibility
Even if a situation makes you angry, anxious, or sad, you can control your behavior. By choosing how to react to a stimulus, a person realizes his opportunity for development and his freedom.
Emotionally flexible people don't let negative feelings get them down; on the contrary, they only move more confidently - along with all their “cockroaches” - towards the most ambitious goals.
Many people look for solutions to their emotional problems in books or courses on self-development, but the problem is that such programs often present work on themselves in a completely wrong way. Those that call for positive thinking are especially far from reality. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to force yourself into happy thoughts.
You can’t brush aside unpleasant feelings, but you shouldn’t dwell on them either. There is a third approach: openly, with interest and without criticism, accept all your emotions.When we are truly ready to recognize and accept our inner problems, sooner or later even the worst demons will recede. Often it is enough to look fears in the face and articulate them for them to lose their power.
Emotional flexibility is the process that allows you to live in the moment by understanding when you do or don't need to change your behavior to stay in alignment with your intentions and values. This process does not mean that you ignore difficult experiences and thoughts. No, you simply stop clinging to them, consider them without fear or criticism, and then accept them in order to let grandiose changes for the better into your life.
Distance yourself and learn to recognize your feelings
Separate your thoughts and feelings from yourself and consider with an open mind: you think about this and experience that, but you are not your thoughts and feelings. This creates the same gap between feelings and reaction to them. If there is this gap, we are able to become aware of complex and unpleasant emotions immediately at the moment of their occurrence and choose how to react to them.
Observation from the outside does not allow fleeting experiences to take over us. By distancing ourselves, we discover a broader picture of what is happening - we learn to see ourselves as a chessboard on which countless games can be played, and not as a piece with a strictly limited set of moves.A cool awareness of violent or violent feelings is the maximum that introspection gives. At a minimum, it manifests itself in the ability to distance itself from the experience.
Self-awareness is a neutral mode of operation in which self-awareness remains even in the midst of a stormy sea of emotions. There is an obvious difference, for example, between states when one person is simply terribly angry with another, and when the same person thinks: “But I’m furious.” This is the first step to establishing some control.
Self-awareness has a more powerful effect on strong hostile feelings. Once you think: “But I feel anger,” a greater freedom of choice will arise - not only not to be guided by it in your actions, but also, in addition, to try to get rid of it.
Manage your emotions
Extremes—emotions that build up too intensely or for too long—undermine our stability. Once out of control, they turn into pathological ones, as with paralyzing depression, insurmountable anxiety, raging anger, manic excitement.
Of course, a person does not have to be happy all the time. Ups and downs, although they give life a peculiar spice, must remain in balance. It is the ratio of positive and negative emotions that determines the feeling of well-being - as evidenced by the results of studies of the mood of hundreds of men and women.
The goal is to gain peace of mind, not to suppress emotions: each feeling is valuable and important in its own way. But when emotions are extremely strong and last longer than a certain acceptable time limit, they gradually turn into painful extreme forms.
The brain is designed in such a way that we very often have little or no control over the moment when we are overcome by any emotion, and we have no control over which emotion will capture us. But we can have some influence on how long it lasts.
Fury
Imagine someone unexpectedly cuts you off on the expressway. If your first thought is “What a son of a bitch!”, this almost certainly means that you will soon be overcome by a fit of rage.
You grip the steering wheel with all your might. Your body is mobilizing for battle: you are shaking, drops of sweat appear on your forehead, your heart is pounding and ready to jump out of your chest, an angry grimace is frozen on your face. You are ready to kill the villain. Then, if the driver of the car behind you honks his horn impatiently, you can, maddened by rage, attack him at the same time. Anger grows on anger, and the emotional brain “heats up” more and more, and as a result, rage, not restrained by reason, easily turns into violence.
For comparison, consider another process of increasing rage with a more merciful attitude towards the driver who cut you off: “Maybe he didn’t notice me, or maybe he had some good reason for driving so carelessly, for example, someone urgently required medical attention." Such thoughts dilute anger with compassion, or at least force one to look at what happened without prejudice.
To stop the chain of indignant thoughts that support rage, you first need to destroy the beliefs that feed it. Reflections add fuel to the fire. But a different way of looking at things will extinguish the flame. One of the most effective ways to completely calm anger is to describe the situation again, but from a different point of view.
Try to grasp the thoughts that cause waves of anger and doubt their correctness, since it is this initial assessment that reinforces and maintains the first outbreak of rage, and subsequent ones only fan the fire.The sooner you stop the anger cycle, the greater the effect you can achieve.
There is another way to calm down. To “cool passions”, in the physiological sense - release from the surge of adrenaline, requires an environment that does not involve additional mechanisms for inciting rage. For example, during a dispute, you need to stop communicating with your opponent for a while.
Vigorous exercise also helps a lot against anger. Various relaxation methods, such as deep breathing and muscle relaxation, have no less effect. They change the physiology of the body, transferring it from a state of high to a state of low arousal.
However, not a single method of calming down will work if you go through thoughts that provoke anger in your head one after another: each such thought in itself is a small trigger for the gradual activation of irritation.
Anxiety
Anxiety appears seemingly out of nowhere, is uncontrollable, creates a constant noise of anxiety, is inaccessible to reason and can ultimately result in real fear neuroses, including various kinds of phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder and panic attacks.
Most people with anxiety seem unable to shift their attention to anything else. The reason is associated with frequent anxiety, which becomes extremely intense and becomes a habit.
There are several simple measures that can help even the most incorrigible worriers control this habit. The first step is self-awareness. You need to track anxiety-producing episodes as close to the beginning as possible, ideally as soon as or immediately after a fleeting image of a catastrophe starts the anxiety cycle.
It is necessary to learn to identify situations that cause anxiety, or fleeting thoughts and images that stimulate it. Having noticed the beginning of anxiety, you can use different relaxation methods, abouthowever, this is not enough.
If you're struggling with worrying thoughts, the first thing you can do is learn how to confront them head-on.Try to take a critical position in relation to your predictions: is it likely that the event that frightens you will actually happen? Is there only one scenario? Can any constructive steps be taken? Will it really help you to endlessly ruminate on the same anxious thoughts?
If anxiety is not prevented from returning again and again, it will acquire the “power of persuasion.” And if you fight back, considering several equally probable options, then you will stop naively accepting every disturbing thought as truth. The combination of thoughtfulness and healthy skepticism will act as a brake and stop the nervous excitement that feeds mild anxiety.
On the other hand, people whose anxiety has become so severe that it has developed into a phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or panic attack might be wiser—as a sign of self-awareness—to seek help from medication to break the cycle.
Melancholy
Self-loathing, feelings of worthlessness, despair, inability to mentally focus, insomnia, feeling as uncaring as a zombie are just a few manifestations of depression.
Most people with this serious condition will benefit from psychotherapy, as well as medication. But with ordinary sadness, the upper limit of which reaches the level of “asymptomatic depression,” people can cope on their own.
One of the main factors determining whether a depressed state will persist or dissipate is the degree of immersion in despondency. The standard scenario: isolate yourself from everyone and everything and think about how terrible you feel.
People in a depressed mood sometimes evaluate their reflections as an attempt to “understand themselves better”; in reality, they feed their despondency without taking any steps to actually help themselves.
One of the most powerful remedies for depression is changing the way you look at things. It's so natural to mourn the end of a relationship and wallow in self-pity. A sure way to make your feelings of despair worse! However, if you step back and think about why your relationship didn't last as long and why you and your partner weren't right for each other, in other words, look at the loss differently and try to learn a valuable lesson, you will find a cure for sadness.
Here are some more ways to improve your mood:
1. The most popular tactic for fighting depression is socializing—going out to eat, go to a baseball game, or go to the movies—in short, activities you can do with friends or family. All this works very well if the end result is to get rid of sad thoughts.
2. Aerobics is also an effective means of helping to lift a person out of mild depression.
3. A constructive method of improving your mood is to organize a modest victory or easy success: you can, for example, energetically take on a long-delayed general cleaning of the entire house or finally do some other things that have long needed to be put in order.
4. There is another effective way to get out of depression - to help those who find themselves in difficult circumstances. Depression is fueled by self-thinking and preoccupation with one's own interests. Helping others takes us away from these worries because we connect deeply with the feelings of people experiencing suffering.
Motivation
Controlling your emotions—delaying gratification and suppressing impulsivity—is at the core of all achievement. People who master this art tend to be more productive and successful in whatever they undertake.
The impulsive, reward-seeking system in our brain (passion) constantly comes into conflict with rational long-term goals (reason).
For example, you decided that you will eat more healthy foods. But then you notice a delicious chocolate mousse in the dessert window. There is activity in the area of the brain associated with pleasure. Oh, how much you want this chocolate mousse! But no, you remind yourself. It is forbidden.
While you are working up the courage to refuse dessert, the area of the brain associated with self-control is activated. When both of these areas are active, the brain is literally fighting with itself - and we decide whether to have dessert or abstain. What complicates matters is that more primitive instincts have a head start. The brain rewards certain decisions before willpower even kicks in.
Our brains are designed to allow primitive impulses to take precedence over thoughtful judgments, but fortunately, one small adjustment can save you.We can formulate our goals using the word “want” rather than “should” or “should”. When we change our motivation in this way, we no longer need to worry about whether passions or reason win in the confrontation - our “I” is in harmony.
Want goals reflect a person’s true interests and values. We pursue such goals because we get pleasure from it, because the goal is important to us in itself or is perceived by us as an integral part of the personality. And most importantly, we chose these goals ourselves.
On the contrary, should-goals have an external origin: either they are instilled in us by a persistent relative (“It’s time for you to lose fat!”), or we are obliged to follow them by a subconscious script or external goal, usually associated with the need to avoid shame (“Lord, I looks like an airship! I can’t go to a wedding with sides like that!”).
You may be driven to eat healthier out of fear, shame, or concern about your appearance. Or you can choose a healthy diet because you consider health a necessary condition in order to feel good and enjoy life.
The need-motivation increases temptation many times over, because you feel that you are limited or deprived of something. Although it will encourage change for the better for a while, sooner or later your resolve will waver. There will inevitably be times when impulse overtakes intention.
By adjusting your motivation, you will no longer be powerless against temptation. Want-motivation reduces the automatic craving for stimuli that can lead you away from your chosen path (previous love, the shine of a glass of cocktail on a waiter’s tray), and pushes you towards a line of behavior that will really help you get closer to your goal.
Based on books
A huge number of different myths are concentrated around human emotions and feelings. This is due to the fact that people have a poor understanding of their diversity and importance. To learn to understand each other correctly, you need to understand what types of emotions exist and find out their characteristics. In addition, you need to learn to distinguish genuine feelings from mere window dressing.
What are emotions and feelings?
The emotional sphere of a person is a complex intricacy of elements that together make it possible to experience everything that happens to him and around him. It consists of four main components:
- Emotional tone is a response in the form of an experience that sets the state of the body. It is this that informs the body about how satisfied its current needs are and how comfortable it is now. If you listen to yourself, you can evaluate your emotional tone.
- Emotions are subjective experiences relating to situations and events that are important to a person.
- A feeling is a person’s stable emotional attitude towards some object. They are always subjective and appear in the process of interaction with others.
- An emotional state differs from a feeling by its weak focus on an object, and from an emotion by its greater duration and stability. It is always triggered by certain feelings and emotions, but at the same time as if on its own. A person may be in a state of euphoria, anger, depression, melancholy, etc.
Video: Psychology. Emotions and feelings
Functions and types of emotions
Emotions, to a greater or lesser extent, regulate the lives of each of us. Usually they have four main functions:
- Motivational-regulatory, designed to encourage action, guide and regulate. Often emotions completely suppress thinking in regulating human behavior.
- Communication is responsible for mutual understanding. It is emotions that tell us about a person’s mental and physical state and help us choose the right line of behavior when communicating with him. Thanks to emotions, we can understand each other even without knowing the language.
- Signaling allows you to communicate your needs to others using emotionally expressive movements, gestures, facial expressions, etc.
- Protective is expressed in the fact that a person’s instant emotional reaction can, in some cases, save him from danger.
Scientists have already proven that the more complex a living being is organized, the richer and more varied the range of emotions that it is capable of experiencing.
Emotions and feelings
In addition, all emotions can be divided into several types. The nature of the experience (pleasant or unpleasant) determines the sign of the emotion - positive or negative. Emotions are also divided into types depending on the impact on human activity - sthenic and asthenic. The former encourage a person to act, while the latter, on the contrary, lead to stiffness and passivity. But the same emotion can affect people or the same person differently in different situations. For example, severe grief plunges one person into despondency and inaction, while the other person seeks solace in work.
Not only people have emotions, but also animals. For example, when experiencing severe stress, they may change their behavior - become calmer or nervous, refuse food, or stop reacting to the world around them.
Also, the type of emotions determines their modality. According to modality, three basic emotions are distinguished: fear, anger and joy, and the rest are only their peculiar expression. For example, fear, worry, anxiety and horror are different manifestations of fear.
The main human emotions
As we have already said, emotions are usually associated with the current moment and are a person’s reaction to a change in his current state. Among them, several main ones stand out:
- joy is an intense feeling of satisfaction with one’s condition and situation;
- fear is the body’s defensive reaction in the event of a threat to its health and well-being;
- excitement - increased excitability caused by both positive and negative experiences, takes part in the formation of a person’s readiness for an important event and activates his nervous system;
- interest is an innate emotion that spurs the cognitive aspect of the emotional sphere;
- surprise is an experience reflecting the contradiction between existing experience and new one;
- resentment is an experience associated with the manifestation of injustice towards a person;
- anger, anger, rage are negatively colored affects directed against perceived injustice;
- embarrassment - worry about the impression made on others;
- pity is a surge of emotions that occurs when the suffering of another person is perceived as one’s own.
Most of us easily distinguish the emotions of another by external manifestations.
Types of human feelings
Human feelings are often confused with emotions, but they have many differences. Feelings take time to arise; they are more persistent and less likely to change. They are all divided into three categories:
- Moral (moral or emotional) feelings arise in relation to the behavior of others or oneself. Their development occurs in the course of any activity and is usually associated with moral standards accepted in society. Depending on how much what is happening corresponds to a person’s internal attitudes, he develops a feeling of indignation or, conversely, satisfaction. This category also includes all attachments, likes and dislikes, love and hatred.
- Intellectual feelings are experienced by a person in the course of mental activity. These include inspiration, joy from success and stress from failure.
- A person experiences aesthetic feelings when creating or appreciating something beautiful. This can apply to both objects of art and natural phenomena.
- Practical feelings give rise to human activity, its results, success or failure.
It is impossible to single out more or less important feelings. Different people strive for different feelings and they are all equally important for a person’s normal emotional life.
Often it is the emotional sphere that regulates a person’s life, and our state is formed from emotions and feelings. But emotions are short-term sensations relating to certain things or situations, and feelings are much longer lasting, but they are formed from emotions. Their different types have different effects on our lives and our decisions.
In everyday life, conflict situations often occur between people due to differences in temperament. This is due, first of all, to a person’s excessive emotionality and lack of self-control. emotions? How to “get the upper hand” over your own feelings and thoughts during a conflict? Psychology provides answers to these questions.
Why do you need self-control?
Restraint and self-control are something that many people lack. This is achieved over time, constantly training and improving skills. Self-control helps to achieve a lot, and the least of this list is inner peace of mind. How to learn to control your emotions and at the same time prevent intrapersonal conflict? Understand that this is necessary and gain agreement with your own “I”.
Control over emotions prevents the conflict situation from worsening and allows you to find someone with completely opposite personalities. To a greater extent, self-control is necessary to establish relationships with people, no matter business partners or relatives, children, lovers.
The influence of negative emotions on life
Breakdowns and scandals, in which negative energy is released, have a detrimental effect not only on the people around them, but also on the instigator of conflict situations. your negative emotions? Try to avoid conflicts and not succumb to provocations from other people.
Negative emotions destroy harmonious relationships in the family and interfere with normal personal development and career growth. After all, few people want to cooperate/communicate/live with a person who does not control himself and starts a large-scale scandal at every opportunity. For example, if a woman cannot control herself and constantly finds fault with her man, which leads to serious quarrels, then he will soon leave her.
In raising children, it is also important to restrain yourself and not give free rein to negative emotions. The child will feel every word said by the parent in the heat of anger, and will subsequently remember this moment for the rest of his life. Psychology helps to understand how to learn to restrain emotions and prevent their manifestation in communication with children and loved ones.
Negative emotions also have a great impact on business and work activities. The team always consists of people of different temperaments, therefore self-control plays an important role here: negativity can spill out at any moment when a person is put under pressure and required to do overwhelming work. And instead of the usual dialogue where the parties can reach a consensus, a scandal develops. How to learn to control your emotions in the workplace? Do not react to employee provocations, try to start a casual conversation, agree with your superiors in everything, even if the assigned tasks are difficult to complete.
Suppression of emotions
Constantly restraining yourself within certain limits and preventing the release of negativity is not a panacea. Suppressing accumulates negativity, and therefore increases the risk of developing psychological diseases. Negativity must be periodically “thrown out” somewhere, but in such a way that the feelings of other people are not harmed. How to learn to restrain emotions, but without harm to your inner world? Go in for sports, because during training a person spends all his internal resources, and the negativity quickly goes away.
Wrestling, boxing, and hand-to-hand combat are suitable for releasing negative energy. It is important here that a person mentally wants to give vent to his emotions, then he will feel relief and he will not want to take it out on anyone. However, it is worth considering that everything should be in moderation, and overwork during training can provoke a new influx of negativity.
Two ways to control your emotions:
- Do you dislike a person so much that you are ready to destroy him? Do this, but, of course, not in the literal sense of the word. At the moment when you feel uncomfortable communicating with him, mentally do whatever you want with this person.
- Draw a person you hate and write down on a piece of paper next to the image the problems that appeared in your life thanks to him. Burn the sheet and mentally put an end to your relationship with this person.
Prevention
How to learn to restrain emotions? Psychology gives the following answer to this question: to control your feelings and emotions, prevention is necessary, in other words - emotional hygiene. Like the human body, his soul also needs hygiene and disease prevention. To do this, you need to protect yourself from communicating with people who cause hostility, and also, if possible, avoid conflicts.
Prevention is the most gentle and optimal way to control emotions. It does not require additional human training or specialist intervention. Preventive measures allow you to protect yourself from negativity and nervous breakdowns for a long time.
The main thing is that it helps you gain control over your emotions - over your own life. When a person is satisfied with everything in his home, work, relationships, and he understands that at any moment he can influence all this and adjust it to himself, then it is easier for him to restrain the manifestation of negative emotions. There are a number of preventive rules that help manage your own feelings and thoughts. How to learn to control your emotions and manage yourself? Follow simple rules.
Unfinished business and debts
Complete all planned tasks in a short time, do not leave the work unfinished - this can cause delays in terms of deadlines, causing negative emotions. Also, “tails” can be reproached, pointing out your incompetence.
In financial terms, try to avoid late payments and debts - this is exhausting and prevents you from achieving your goal. Understanding that you have not repaid a debt to someone causes negativity and helplessness in the face of current circumstances.
The absence of debts, both financial and other, allows you to fully spend your own energy resources and strength, directing them to the realization of desires. A sense of duty, on the contrary, is an obstacle to mastering self-control and achieving success. How to learn to restrain emotions and control yourself? Eliminate debts in a timely manner.
Cosiness
Create a comfortable workplace for yourself, equip your home to your own taste. Both at work and at home, with your family, you should feel comfortable - nothing should cause irritation or any other negative emotions.
Time planning
Try to make smart plans for the day, strive to ensure that you have a little more time and resources to complete your tasks than you need. This will avoid the negativity associated with a constant lack of time and worries about the lack of finances, energy and strength for work.
Communication and Workflow
Avoid contacts with unpleasant people who waste your personal time. Especially with individuals who are called “energy vampires” - they take up not only your time, but also your energy. If possible, try not to interact with overly temperamental people, since any incorrect remark directed in their direction can provoke a scandal. How to restrain your emotions in relationships with other people? Be polite, do not exceed your authority, and do not overreact to criticism.
If your job brings you nothing but negative emotions, then you should think about changing your job. Earning money to the detriment of your soul and feelings, sooner or later, will lead to a breakdown and disorder of mental balance.
Marking boundaries
Mentally create a list of things and actions that cause you negative emotions. Draw an invisible line, a line that no one, even the closest person, should cross. Create a set of rules that restrict people from communicating with you. Those who truly love, appreciate and respect you will accept such demands, and those who resist these attitudes should not be in your environment. To communicate with strangers, develop a special system that will avoid violating your boundaries and creating conflict situations.
Physical activity and self-reflection
Playing sports will bring not only physical health, but also mental balance. Spend 30 minutes to 1 hour a day on sports, and your body will quickly cope with negative emotions.
At the same time, analyze everything that happens to you during the day. Ask yourself questions about whether you acted correctly in a given situation, whether you communicated with the right people, whether you had enough time to complete the work. This will help not only to understand yourself, but also in the future to eradicate communication with unnecessary people who cause negativity. your own emotions, thoughts and goals allows you to fully develop self-control.
Positive emotions and prioritization
Develop the ability to switch from negative emotions to positive ones, try to see the positive sides in any situation. How to learn to control emotions in relationships with family and strangers? Be more positive, and this will help you overcome your own temper.
The right goal is a great help in achieving self-control. When you are on the verge of a surge of negative emotions, imagine that as soon as you stop being nervous and paying attention to provocations, your dreams will begin to come true. You should choose only realistic, achievable goals.
Environment
Take a close look at the people around you. Is there any benefit from communicating with them? Do they bring you happiness, warmth and kindness, do they make you happy? If not, then the answer is obvious; you urgently need to change and switch to individuals who carry positive emotions. Of course, it is impossible to do this in the workplace, but at least limit yourself from communicating with such people outside the work space.
In addition to changing your environment, expanding your social circle will help you develop self-control. This will give you new opportunities, knowledge and a positive charge for a long time.
They say suffering cleanses the soul. However, you can be reborn as a “Phoenix from the ashes” only by learning to manage your emotions, otherwise sadness risks turning into depression.
A friend of mine (let's call her Anna) was literally stuck in a swamp of inescapable sadness. It all started with a breakup with a young man a few months ago. Why the incident caused such a reaction is unclear even to her, because the relationship was not too serious, moreover, she herself put an end to it. “Now,” Anna admits, “any parting causes pain in my heart, even if I’m just getting rid of things that have served their purpose. And stories about other people’s misfortunes actually make you feel depressed.”
Since then, all she has done is cry: she pauses to watch another melodrama - and again bursts into tears. She seems to be enjoying it. “Sometimes sadness seems so sweet,” explains Anna, “sometimes it’s nice to let yourself grieve to your heart’s content.”
This will seem strange to some - and why deliberately make yourself sad? Some of us do not even allow the thought of despondency: it is better to accept life’s challenge with dignity. However, even if you are completely unromantic and have never mourned a lost passion, but have read about the love conflicts of Rumi and other Sufi poets, then you are still familiar with the depth of sensations generated by sadness. Like my friend, you may even notice that sadness is very reminiscent of love.
Anna's tendency to mix love with longing can easily be explained from a psychological point of view: she was the youngest child in the family, her parents were usually too busy, never came to school plays, and generally did not take much part in her life. As a result, she grew up crying endlessly from resentment to sad songs about love. That's when she discovered that following sadness was one of the possible paths.
“No matter how strange it may sound, it’s as if melancholy helps my soul to open up. It is both painful and pleasant at the same time. I watch people on the street, wondering if they are feeling what I am feeling. Sometimes your heart just breaks."
Sadness drags you into a whirlpool. It is like a fugue of minor chords, playing with familiar melodies in a new way. Self-pity, despair, and hopelessness sound in her. If sadness is given free rein, it can develop into depression, which will not have the best effect on the immune system.
Paradoxically, sadness has a hidden essence - a secret door, opening which you experience something very similar to falling in love. Anger turns into strength, sexual desire turns into a craving for creativity, and sadness develops mercy and humility, without which spiritual growth is impossible.
All this fits perfectly into the tantric tradition: fear, lust and anger, which destroy the body and mind, in skillful hands turn into a tool for overcoming negative emotions. Their tremendous power, when used correctly, can take us to new levels of awareness. In tantra it is believed that everything that exists is woven from divine energy. This holistic, non-dual perception helps us recognize the hidden forces that awaken within us if we approach negative states constructively.
True, such work with sadness is not easy for anyone. It's like surfing: to succeed, you need to catch a wave and be prepared for countless falls. It is equally important to understand how far you are willing to go.
Old wounds
On the one hand, sadness is a natural emotion, a normal reaction of each of us to loss. Ideally, you just need to let it pass through you without clinging to it or holding it inside. On the other hand, fleeting sadness often settles on the soul like a gloomy cloud, bringing to life a whole heap of forgotten worries. Oppressive childhood memories and severe emotional traumas that were not processed in time usually find their way into the body, forming strong neural connections with new losses.The “trigger” can be anything, for example, breaking up with a loved one. And then one event pulls behind it a whole tangle of past disappointments, and as a result, what should have been passing sadness turns into an ocean of tears. More often than not, we make things worse by making up a whole story about things that happened long ago in order to make sense of our experiences.
Yes, yes, it is our conjectures about the events that took place that drag out the blues for a long time and even form patterns of behavior that affect the development of events in the future. For example, a friend of mine suffered as a child from the neglect of his seriously ill mother. She never touched her son, and barely even spoke to him. As a result, he grew up with the life attitude “Nobody needs me.” It is not surprising that he attracts only those friends, lovers and business partners who “confirm” his beliefs.
Hello, sadness!
By recognizing that your sadness has many layers, you can find the key to what I call “transformative sadness.” First you need to accept the fact that grief and suffering happen in the life of every person. This way you will stop identifying with sadness and start working with it.I was once very impressed by the short story “The Sorrows of Young Werther” by the great German writer of the 18th century Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The melancholy of the student, the main character of the book, seemed to have no reasonable basis. Goethe dubbed his sadness for the fate of humanity world sorrow (Weltschmertz). The novel touched particularly sensitive chords in the souls of an entire generation, and melancholy even became fashionable, which caused a wave of suicides among teenagers in Germany.
Be that as it may, in his work Goethe opens our eyes to the true nature of sadness. Left alone with your own sadness, you discover that it is not a personal quality. At a certain level, the sadness of any of us is the Universal Sadness that we experience when we realize that everything is temporary, dreams are rarely realized, and the world is full of injustice. From this perspective, transformative sadness is the embodiment of the Buddha's first noble truth: life is suffering.
Yogis have proven for centuries that suffering serves as a tool for spiritual growth. When the great 20th century Master Chögyam Trungpa was asked what he did when faced with discomfort, he replied: “I try to stay in this state as long as possible.” Trungpa Rinpoche, who experienced exile from his native land, was ill a lot and even suffered from alcoholism, does not at all suggest engaging in self-flagellation. He just described the tantric practice of working with negative emotions, when you are in the present moment and aware of them in the same way as any other energy.
Notice how different this method is from our normal response to sadness. Typically, we escape from any form of suffering by running. Even the most dedicated practitioners, in moments of mental crisis, are tempted to “eat up” sadness with something tasty, lose themselves in front of the TV or plunge headlong into work. You can also take a healthier route by increasing your endorphin levels through aerobic exercise, yoga, or even meditation. There are those who try to understand the situation by analyzing it from a psychological or spiritual point of view, saying to themselves: “Perhaps this will teach me compassion.”
Of course, all of these methods help you get through difficult times, and some of them are also beneficial for your health. However, sadness truly transforms us only when we turn our face to it and stay with it in the present moment, throwing aside all associations and interpretations.
You can't execute, you can't pardon
To begin with, just be with the sadness, allow yourself to feel it. Try to understand in which part of the body you feel it. Direct your inhalations and exhalations there, allowing the sadness to be where it is. Perhaps this experience will open you up to something new. Notice everything that comes to mind and bring yourself back to the present moment. This kind of inner work requires courage and determination. Facing pain and sadness is not easy, especially if, like most people, we identify with our emotions.To process feelings without letting them consume you, you need practice to help you see that behind the “I” that identifies with emotions, there is an “aware self” or “observer” - one who is present in the present with these emotions. feelings without judging, justifying or interpreting them.
For most of us, the easiest way to immerse ourselves in pure awareness is through meditation. The stronger the connection you establish with the “observer,” the easier it is for you to cope with the emotions that arise. By practicing in this way, you may discover another layer of transformative sadness—regret about your own conditioning. Psychologist John Wellwood calls this feeling “cleansing sadness.” This is what we experience when we suddenly realize how limited our perception is. Cleansing sadness can be a powerful motivator for transformation—and awakening—especially if you don't beat yourself up for not being good, aware, or compassionate enough.
Request stop
A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to observe the ups and downs of my student’s life. For ten years she was married to a man who was also her business partner. One day he called from a business trip, admitted that he had been in love with someone else for a long time, and asked for a divorce. She was stunned by his betrayal, blinded by anger and fear of the future, but the strongest feeling was grief.Morning meditation, which usually helped her deal with stress, turned into a stormy stream of experiences of all stripes. The sensations were so painful and intense that she decided to focus her attention on those parts of the body where the emotions were felt most acutely.
With each meditation, she sank layer by layer deeper into her grief. And her husband’s betrayal was just the tip of the iceberg: on her fragile shoulders she carried the heavy burden of parting with loved ones, school grievances and an all-consuming feeling of abandonment, which seemed to have neither beginning nor end. Over time, she realized that she herself subconsciously did not allow herself to be loved and happy. The sadness she felt upon realizing this was sharper than a knife. However, as she continued to observe her experiences, she suddenly felt that she had reached the very core of grief. Waking up one morning, she found herself feeling the suffering of orphans, men and women who had lost their families in war zones... She was choked with sobs, but this time she was not mourning her losses, but the suffering of all humanity. The heart seemed to open to the world, like a gate to heaven. She was filled with tenderness. It was as if an ancient wall had collapsed in her soul, and she found herself in a space of unconditional compassion and love. She experienced divine sadness, in her own words, bordering on ecstasy.
These events marked a turning point in her life. The sadness was transformed, and although it did not disappear overnight, it became possible to cope with it. Now I see how easily she allows emotions to just be, without clinging to them or identifying with them.
After all, sadness, even transformative or purifying, should not become the “terminal station” on life’s journey. This is just a stage that you need to go through with an open heart. When you learn to manage your sadness, you will find gentleness instead of it, and tenderness instead of suffering. After all, the other side of sadness is something very reminiscent of... love.
