Hello everyone, I hope all is well with you. I’m back today talking about negative emotions. These feelings are tough to deal with even as adults, so I thought it’d be a good topic for today, especially with the holidays coming up. It seems like gathering with families can bring these emotions to the surface rather quickly.
Part of the problem when dealing with these emotions is that they have a label of bad or negative, so not only are we dealing with the powerful negative emotion, we’re feeling bad because we have it.
In reality, these emotions aren’t negative, they’re telling us something. They’re a signal designed to alert us. Maybe a situation isn’t a good one and our fear is igniting our fight or flight response.
I did a little research on how to control our negative emotions. It just seems like those negative ones are so strong and they can take us right over, wouldn’t you agree? Well, this is what I found at http://www.self-improvement-mentor.com/controlling-emotions.html
First of all, let us identify some of those negative emotions.
Fear- That feeling that something bad is going to happen.
Hurt- That feeling you get when you suffer a loss. A loss is any unmet expectation.
Frustration- When you’re not getting the returns for your efforts that you want.
Disappointment- When you feel you’ve lost out on something forever.
Anger and Guilt- These emotions are the result of the violation of your own internal standards or guidelines.
First, let’s re-label these emotions from “bad” or “negative” to signals. That’s right; they’re signals that alert us to something. For example, when we’re feeling frustrated we need to look at our efforts and see if they need to be tweaked. Maybe talking to a mentor about our results will help us tweak our strategy so we can improve our results.
Our frustration is a signal that we needed. It told us that we needed to take action. In my opinion, that’s what these emotions do for us, they tell us to take action, to make a change. The only problem is that when we feel these emotions we don’t always know what action we need to take.
The first thing we need to do is take control of our emotion. So how do we do that?
I found these steps at http://www.self-improvement-mentor.com/controlling-emotions.html
The first step is:
1) Break your pattern immediately and disassociate. Do something crazy to break out of the emotion.
2) Now get curious. Become a third party observer and ask questions. What’s going on here? Where did this emotion come from? Remember to do this as a third party. Don’t make it personal.
3) Then identify the real issue of what you want.
4) Then come up with an action that will get you what you want.
The key to this process is the disassociation. We need to become an observer so that we can identify what we want without being blinded by raw emotion.
These steps are clear and practical, but like everything else in life, it’ll take practice to master them. Don’t be disappointed if you don’t master them right away.
In my opinion, these steps would be great to teach teens that are experiencing some of these emotions. They can be incredibly intense and many teens don’t have the tools they need to deal with them. By using the following steps above, they can start practicing now and master their emotions at a younger age. Just think how the quality of their lives will improve.
Thanks for reading my post today. I hope you found it helpful. If you have any tools that work for you on dealing with negative emotions please leave a comment, I’d love to read it!
****For more information on dealing with negative emotions go to:
http://www.self-improvement-mentor.com/controlling-emotions.html