How do I control my emotions?

Do you find yourself asking: “are my feelings real?” Or wondering how to know if your feelings are valid?

YOU ARE YOUR FEELINGS

You feel something and your whole body responds, chemically as well as physiologically. Feeling good, you find you run farther, pitch better ideas, or make stronger social connections. Feeling bad, you struggle to get out of bed, drop things more frequently, or struggle to focus. Your feelings are intricately related to how you show up and your outcomes.

As a starting point, take the body: in an oversimplified example, you are only as healthy as the elements of which you are composed; thus, the phrase: you are what you eat. If your kidney or liver fails, you are only as stable as the next dialysis treatment or transplant. If you aren’t eligible for or don’t move up quickly enough on the donor list, you don’t pass go, you don’t collect $200. If one of your body systems is out of whack, you don’t feel good.

The same can be applied to emotions. Your emotional environment is as integral to your health and daily functioning as your kidneys. And like your physical body, your emotions are influenced by your social, mental, environmental, physical, and spiritual environment. The impact these influencers have on your emotions may be hard to see, or conversely, so obvious that you cease to notice it, like breathing. Your emotional environment, like your nervous systems, is intimately interconnected, and like the autonomic nervous system, difficult to monitor. As when your liver fails, if your emotional environment is also sour and acidic, you don’t feel good. You could say you are what you think and also what you feel.

If you apply Einstein’s Law of Attraction to your emotions, what you feel and the energy that emotional response emits is what you get back. Where you feel positive and optimistic, the energy you attract vibrates at that same emotional frequency. Equally, negative energy attracts its like. Where your emotional state is depressed or isn’t stable, you will focus on and put your energy into negative things, creating unattractive outcomes.

If you consider that all of your life choices are based on how you think and feel, this idea suddenly becomes important.

When you are down in the vortex, not only are you attracting more undesirability in your life, you are also making all your choices from this state of mind. And in this state of mind, you probably aren’t choosing anything that serves you. Personally, when I found myself in that state, I chose doughnuts, not carrot sticks. I chose bingeing series, not personal development courses. I chose all the things that I could never get enough of that created more wanting, so the cycle never ended.

Your choices made from a negative space mean you are likely to abandon yourself in favor of whatever temporarily and instantaneously makes you feel better.  When you don’t know what to do with negative emotions, one of the most common things that happens is that they get internalized and become personality traits. Getting more of what you don’t need only reinforces feeling like you don’t matter, you aren’t enough, or you can’t do it.

Let’s look at how this works. You feel disappointed in an outcome, a situation or another person. Disappointment is a hard emotion to bear. You want to stop feeling disappointed, so you start looking to fix it. In fixing it, you search for a cause, which either must be other people or you. If you decide it’s other people and they resist the idea that they are the cause, or they just flat out don’t change, the disappointment (or myriad of other negative emotions) continues. And damn that’s a hard emotion to continue feeling….At this point, you either fight, walk away, or you decide that you must be at fault. If you go with the latter, when you assign fault to yourself, you internalize the feeling of disappointment, deciding that you need to fix yourself in order to stop feeling disappointed.

AND THAT’S WHEN THE SHIFT FROM FEELING DISAPPOINTED TO BEING A DISAPPOINTMENT OCCURS. BECAUSE IN SOME WAY, YOU MUST NOT BE ENOUGH, HAVE DONE IT RIGHT, OR MAYBE YOUR STANDARDS ARE TOO HIGH.

And so you make all of your life decisions as someone who is a disappointment, not enough, who doesn’t matter. Making decisions from this space will mean you are likely to play small, choose easy over hard, and prioritize what makes you feel good now, rather than tomorrow. This is the road to stuck.

But imbalance in favor of positive emotions is also not the route to being able to make values-based decisions. Feeling high on emotions is not necessarily freedom. You may be addicted to feeling good, avoiding what you don’t want to feel.

Often what makes you feel so good is both external and temporary. You feel like flying when you are on the scene with your gang, distracted, amused, drunk. You are on top of the world when you get that promotion you’ve been angling for. You walk with pep when you have a lot of tinder activity. You LOVE that series; it feels more real than your own life. In any of these situations, you ARE flying-successful-magnetic-LARGERthanLIFE.

What happens when you wake up with a morning full of shame – what possessed you to do that last night? What do you do when your gang isn’t around or everyone is fighting? What happens when you realize the promotion means more of the same, that you never actually go over the mountain of success? How do you cope when you wake up feeling lonelier after an endless series of dates?

If the distraction and validation continues to be available, you are going to need another hit. You are going to keep returning to the source because without it, you start detoxing and THAT is NOT pleasant. So you go out with your friends night after night even when you don’t feel like it because you associate it with good feelings and where else are you going to get your hit? You delete tinder because you know it’s not the road to fulfillment, but a week later you are cruising again because how else are you going to feel connected-beautiful-wanted-excited? Making your decisions based on the feeling you are craving means you will choose something that gives you an immediate hit, rather than choosing something that honors your values and will be permanently rewarding and fulfilling. Using an external source for those feelings means you are giving away your power; in this equation, you are not at choice in how you feel. You make your decisions based on the availability of your source, rather than your values, which puts you at the mercy of the source. How much do you want tinder or boss to be able to decide how good you feel? For me, I shudder thinking that my well-feeling could depend on the whim of my boss or tinder, neither of which has my welfare at heart.

YOU ARE NOT YOUR FEELINGS

Fortunately, there’s a way to break the cycle. Luckily, while you are what you think and feel, you also are separate from it – meaning you are NOT your feelings.

You do, however, control them. Or at least that is what you probably wish you could do.

But that is normal – if you grew up learning PowerPoint, as an adult you can navigate your way around a slide. If you didn’t grow up learning PowerPoint, then it’s foreign territory, but you would simply take an online course and learn it.

Social and emotional learning works the same way. IT CAN BE LEARNED.

How hopeful is that?!

When I first took an emotional resilience test, I scored three times under the national average (in the US) for emotional regulation. I have since learned to regulate my emotions.

By regulate, I don’t mean wrangle them into submission. This is not about conquering. In fact, it’s about becoming aware, separating and softening.

AWARENESS

Becoming aware means understanding what your triggers are, how they show up in your body (learning to see the red flags, so you aren’t surprised by your emotional volcano), and connecting the physical and emotional feeling to the story in your head.

Becoming aware is also learning and proactively managing the things that are in your control that influence your emotions. Being overtired, under or over nourished or hydrated or exercised, being out of your comfort zone, feeling disconnected from a sense of higher purpose, or not getting enough alone time are all examples of one of six different influencers being unbalanced. Take a moment and reflect on your physical condition, physical environment, social environment (professional, friendship, and intimate relationships), spiritual connection, mental and emotional states. If one or more of these is out of whack, it will make it hard to get off the emotional rollercoaster and stop becoming your feelings.

SEPARATING

How many times has hindsight hit you? Hindsight is a reminder that we don’t necessarily see reality, we see our viewpoint in the moment. But what is cool is that like in a car, you can choose to look in several different mirrors to change your perspective.

Have you ever noticed how many things you can do with your mind at the same time? You can make your grocery list, fume about a fight you had with your partner, participate in a work meeting, and plan out your day all at the same time. It’s exactly this talent that helps us understand that at any one moment, we have the capacity to see different perspectives. Like any muscle, this capacity can be strengthened and refined to enable you to detach from your emotions to better use them as data points that point to what you need. Knowing what you need will help you make values-based decisions that serve you. The capacity to make decisions that serve you in spite of your emotions, rather than in the heat of your reaction, empowers you toward emotional stability and conscious choices that add up over time to a life that you want, that works for you.

Did the idea of different perspectives open up a question of rightness for you? If there are different perspectives, which one is correct? How much do you feel you need to accurately identify reality?

Have you ever experienced something with someone and when talking about it, you think “did we even have the same conversation or go to the same dinner, movie, etc.?” No matter how hard you try, your reality will never perfectly match everyone else’s. For example, studies show that your experience of color is subjective. How you see red will change depending on your origin, gender, geographic location, ethnicity, and language. While this might seem scary – what is reality?! – it is freeing in that not having one true reality frees you to choose the perspective, the reality, that works best to help you move forward.

Developing and practicing being an observer of your thoughts and emotions helps you pull back to see the bigger picture. Seeing the movie, rather than a single scene, helps you make better decisions because you have more information.

Sometimes when a trigger hits, however, the emotional storm is so FULL ON that you can’t step back or you don’t want to look for the bigger picture. In this case, you have to calm the storm before you try to separate from your emotion.

Mindfulness techniques are very useful to take you out of the emotional and mental storm and bring you into your body, which is a safe harbor, a place of calm. To start, shift your focus to things in your physical environment. Take a deep breath. Make three flat observations about your thoughts; then name three things you feel; and then identify three things you can see in your immediate environment. Take another deep breath. Repeat this process until the emotional storm has subsided enough that you can realize you are not your emotions: you are feeling your emotions.

SOFTENING

For most people, feeling the emotions – sitting with them, without becoming them – is the hardest part of the process. How often is your normal reaction to armor up against them or disconnect and distract yourself from them? Maybe your typical reaction is to invalidate them, to tell yourself you don’t have the right to feel that way or someone else has it worse or they didn’t mean it, so you shouldn’t be feeling whatever you are feeling. The trick here is that blocking them out or not permitting yourself to have the feelings doesn’t mean they get released. Emotions that get blocked or invalidated don’t go anywhere – they don’t just resolve, which means that they stay in your body and direct your actions, though you may be unconscious about their influence on your choices.

Sitting with your emotions as they are without the need to change them permits you to become aware of the needs that the emotion is calling your attention to. Sitting with them also helps because acknowledgment and validation are doorways through which you can release the emotions. When you accept the emotions without needing to make them different or change them in any way, the tension around the emotion dissolves. As it dissolves, the emotional fog clears bringing awareness and focus. This builds on the next step because as the picture clears, you are more easily able to pull back and see different perspectives to decide which viewpoint serves you best.

This superpower – the ability to process your emotions – empowers you, in spite of your emotional reaction, to make choices that serve you, day after day, which over time transforms your life into one you want.

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With gratitude to agnes-cecile (Silvia Pelissero) for the incredible artwork. Get it here: https://agnescecile.com/