Algorithm for controlling emotions

Oh, this emotional world inside us – how many people struggle when it comes to dealing with emotions and feelings in general!

“What feelings? I am a rational person! ” – exclaims Irini.

“I am drowning in my emotions. I can’t do anything about them!” – says Alesha.

“I try not to pay attention to my emotions – I just move on. Things will fix themselves somehow” – declares Kyle.

“But I live according to my heart. I follow what my feelings say – they will not deceive me!” – this is romantic Darlene.

In fact, people use even more approaches when dealing with their feelings. They can avoid them, worship, suppress, ignore, hide, and parade them in front of the whole world – the possibilities are endless! But not all methods lead to a good result.

The emotional world requires our attention and must be respected. At the same time, you cannot just leave everything at the mercy of emotions. It is unsafe. And to pretend that they are not there – will not work either. The emotions will take revenge by overwhelming you at the most unexpected moment.

You must manage and regulate your emotions and understand the mechanisms of their birth and development. Then everything will work out.

The algorithm for regulating emotions looks like this:

1. Understand exactly how you feel.

We experience emotions all the time. If it seems to you that at some point you do not feel anything – you are wrong. Differentiating emotions is not so easy. If you do not have this skill, it needs to be honed.

Here is Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. It presents the whole gamut of our feelings and emotions. It would be extremely useful to get to know this wheel better and remember it when you experience a certain emotion.

2. Name the emotion you are experiencing.

When we say what we are feeling – using words and out loud, or by writing it on paper – the stress level decreases. And it becomes easier to manage it.

3. Trying to accept emotions without judgment is not easy. Especially considering that in childhood many of us were taught that there are “right” and “wrong” feelings.

4. Try to study the emotion as it arises, trace it from emergence to attenuation. How it develops, grows, or subsides.

5. Be an observer: look at the emotion as if from the outside: I feel angry, but this does not mean that I am an angry person. You are not your emotion.

6. Try to control your emotion. Imagine a TV screen and a brightness control knob: try to decrease or increase the brightness (intensity) of the emotion. It takes practice.

7. Search for the roots of the emergence of emotion: for this, it is necessary to find (remember) the thought that launched it. Emotion always follows thought and never vice versa. It is the thought that triggers the emotion, and the emotion triggers the subsequent reaction.

For example, you feel hurt. It did not come out of the blue but arose about an hour ago. At that time, you were talking with a friend and she told you that she was at a concert by your favorite artist. The thought that occurred to you: she did not invite me to join her.

8. Adjust the emotion that you noticed:

– through the transformation of the thought: she did not invite me, not necessarily because she didn’t want to, perhaps she had only one ticket. In addition, I never said that I love this performer – she might not know that I would like to go. At this stage, the resentment may diminish or turn into another emotion, such as regret.

– through the body (breathe, dance, etc.). The main thing is not to leave it inside, but to “release” it outside.

It is not easy to regulate your emotional states, especially if you do not have the skill to do it. But skills are formed in the process of repeated practice. They can be learned.

In our “Mind cleaning” course, we help you to learn this skill by gradually getting to know all the emotions and consolidating the knowledge with practical exercises.