Ways to Get Your Unwanted Emotions Under Control

Ways to Get Your Unwanted Emotions Under Control

Stanford University psychologist James Gross (2001) proposed a 4-stage model to capture the sequence of events that occurs when our emotions are stimulated. In what he calls the “modal model,” a situation grabs our attention, which in turns leads us to appraise or think about the meaning of the situation. Our emotional responses result from the way we appraise our experiences.

Some emotional responses require no particular regulation. If the emotion is appropriate to the situation and helps you feel better, there’s no need to worry about changing the way you handle things.

Expressing road rage may also make you feel better, but it’s not appropriate or particularly adaptive. You could express your frustration in other ways that allow you to release those angry feelings, or instead try to find a way to calm yourself down.

your emotions could be costing you important relationships, your job, and even your health.

Knowing your emotional triggers can help you avoid the problems in the first place. Being able to alter your thoughts and reactions will build your confidence in your own ability to cope. With practice, you’ll be able to turn negatives into positives, and, each time, gain emotional fulfillment.

By preparing yourself ahead of time, you’ll find that the problematic emotion goes away before it interferes with your life:

Select the situation. Avoid circumstances that trigger unwanted emotions. If you know that you're most likely to get angry when you’re in a hurry (and you become angry when others force you to wait), then don’t leave things for the last minute.

Modify the situation. Perhaps the emotion you’re trying to reduce is disappointment. You’re always hoping, for example, to serve the “perfect” meal for friends and family, but invariably something goes wrong because you’ve aimed too high. Modify the situation by finding recipes that are within your range of ability so that you can pull off the meal. You may not be able to construct the ideal soufflé, but you manage a pretty good frittata.

Shift your attentional focus. Let’s say that you constantly feel inferior to the people around you who always look great. You’re at the gym, and can’t help but notice the regulars on the weight machines who manage to lift three times as much as you can. Drawn to them like a magnet, you can’t help but watch with wonder and envy at what they’re able to accomplish. Shifting your focus away from them and onto your fellow gym rats who pack less punch will help you feel more confident about your own abilities. Even better, focus on what you’re doing, and in the process, you’ll eventually gain some of the strength you desire.

Change your thoughts. At the core of our deepest emotions are the beliefs that drive them. You feel sad when you believe to have lost something, anger when you decide that an important goal is thwarted, and happy anticipation when you believe something good is coming your way. By changing your thoughts you may not be able to change the situation but you can at least change the way you believe the situation is affecting you.

In cognitive reappraisal, you replace the thoughts that lead to unhappiness with thoughts that lead instead to joy or at least contentment.

Change your response. If all else fails, and you can’t avoid, modify, shift your focus, or change your thoughts, and that emotion comes pouring out, the final step in emotion regulation is to get control of your response. Your heart may be beating out a steady drumroll of unpleasant sensations when you’re made to be anxious or angry. Take deep breaths and perhaps close your eyes in order to calm yourself down. Similarly, if you can’t stop laughing when everyone else seems serious or sad, gather your inner resources and force yourself at least to change your facial expression if not your mood.

Introspection

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• Mastering yourself
• Introspection
• Self reflection

How and why?

Why?

Pause for a moment and look at the decisions and projects you’ve started over the past month. All over the place, right?

All you have left in your wake are a bunch of unfinished projects, and trails that lead nowhere. You dream of having your next project be your best work.

Today we’re so wrapped up in a culture of doing that we’re rarely ever given downtime to sit and reflect. This constant cycle of doing even plagues us in our sleep. The moment you open your eyes in the morning your mind starts racing and the cycle begins again. Never a free moment from your thoughts and the distractions of the modern world.

We have over 50,000 thoughts a day, over half are negative and over 90% are just repeating from the day before. That doesn’t leave much room for growth and change

All you need to do is create a little more space. By adding just a little time each day for self-reflection and soul digging you’ll be on your way towards building a wealth of understanding about yourself.

We’re constantly wrapped up in seeking behavior. We never stop for a moment to ask why we’re consuming and doing these things in the first place. The values of our culture condition you to become a passive consumer who fuels the current economic model.

You’re always left with a feeling of emptiness no matter how much money you make, or new objects you buy.

Introspection and reflection are all about getting to know yourself at the core, uncovering your values and then deciding for yourself what’s the best action to take. You take the power away from the way you’ve been conditioned, away from the systems that try to hold you in place and bring your focus of control back to where it belongs, within you.

By taking the time to become an expert of yourself first you have the power to make decisions that make you feel good.

How?

1. Create Quiet Space. This can come in many forms. For some it may be taking a quiet walk through the woods. For others, it might be grabbing a cup of tea and sitting at the table. For some, it might even be taking a few extra moments to lie in bed in the morning. The crucial element is to make sure no one is going to interrupt you.

2. Ask Deep Open Ended Questions. Make sure it’s very peaceful and relaxing for you. If it helps take a few deep breaths. Really try to follow your breath, in and out. Let the sensations lull you into a relax state. If you want to start digging with your own questions, just start by asking yourself “what would I love to know more about?” Give yourself permission to roam.

3. What is my deepest passion?

4. What sets my soul on fire?
5. If I had all the money in the world how would I spend my time?
6. What do I love most about myself?

7. What are my deepest values?

8. See What Comes Up With No Judgement. Make sure you hold your heart and mind wide open to any potentials that may arise. If this is one of your first times doing this you may be shocked or amused with what you find. Remember, nothing is to outlandish, don’t judge whatever comes out. It’s all a part of you.

9. Take Notes

10. Reflect and Repeat. After you’ve gone through this process let it sit with you and see how it feels. The more often you ask yourself these questions the more clarity you’ll get. Think of it as practice.

Main goals

Continual Learning. You need to focus on always learning new things. Whatever you do, never stop learning. Never stop growing.

Attack Your Distractions. Look at your life. Look at everything that you’re trying to achieve and my guess is the things that hold you back are distractions.

What I want you to think about is how can you start to create a routine? How can you start to create discipline in your life so that you aren’t being reactive, but you’re being proactive so that you’re setting the agenda for the day? Don’t let everybody else do it.

Nine ways to do it

1. Catch yourself when you start the blame game

This is a big clues you’re acting the victim. When you blame other people for your experience, you’re giving away your power, and making your experience dependent on other people.

2. Take responsibility

3. Catch yourself when you’re resisting life

Resistance to the way that things are is another victim behaviour that seriously hampers your ability to play master at life. Anytime you catch yourself thinking, or saying, things like…:

I wish this wasn’t happening…

If only I hadn’t have done that…

If only that…

I wish…

I don’t want to…

I can’t…

… you’re resisting life. And resistance takes an extraordinary amount of energy, achieving exactly nothing. Except suffering.

4. Cultivate acceptance, and asking, Ok, now what?

Once you’ve got over resisting life, then you can take it one step further and ask;

Ok, this is happening, now what?

That short question is magical. It shifts your energy from resisting what’s happening to focusing on solutions. And that’s when magic can happen. You engage both the power of your conscious mind, and the power of your unconscious mind. Solutions come to you while you’re running, or in the bath, or dreaming. Plus you discover that it uses more energy to resist than it does to solve. Forward flow always gathers momentum.

5. Recognise that difficult circumstances are there to test you

Life is not about cruising through easy street banking cash and playing to your heart’s content. Difficult stuff will happen. Illnesses, accidents, deaths, losses, betrayals, divorces, failure… it will all happen to you, at one time or another. What’s more important is how you perceive it and what you do with it.

hen the going gets tough, remind yourself that you can choose to struggle, or you can choose to grow. When the going gets tough, celebrate, because you’re about to get tougher.

6. Establish practices that keep you connected

That means a daily spiritual practice, or five.

The practices that work for me are daily morning pages, walking, pranayama, meditation and movement (dance or asana). Cooking and cleaning are also valuable practices.

What works for you could be totally different and include everything from horse riding to landscape painting to welding. What it is doesn’t matter, only that it brings you into the present because it requires 100% of your attention on the now. And that it connects you to a state of flow, to something bigger than yourself.

7. Learn to pay attention to what you need

Sounds simple right.

Oh I’m hungry, I need to eat. Oh I’m thirsty, I need to drink.

Oh, I’m mentally scattered and ungrounded, I need to meditate.

Oh, I’m emotionlly upset and leaving my body, I need to go for a run and then have a bath.

However, we’re so damn good at deferring and denying our needs, that most of us have no skills at all around meeting our needs.

Our body needs rest, we plough on.

Our liver needs a break, we drink on.

We need to be heard, we don’t speak up.

8. Learn to overrule your mind

Lets get one thing straight. You are in charge. Not your mind.

It’s your mind that chimes in when you take your energetic pulse and realise you need a bath with:

But it’s 2pm, who has a bath at 2pm in the afternoon?

Get used to talking back and saying things like:

I do, that’s who, now leave me in peace.

9. Love yourself

Listen, little man

In other words, a great man knows when and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else's strength and greatness. He's proud of his great generals but not of himself. He admires an idea he has not had, not one he has had.

You are "free" in only one respect: free from the self-criticism that might help you to govern your own life.

I've never heard you complain: "You exalt me as the future master of myself and my world. But you don't tell me how a man becomes a master of himself, and you don't tell me what's wrong with me, what's wrong with what I think and do."

"In order to progress from the status of faithful slave to a single master and become an indiscriminate slave, you must first kill the individual oppressor, the tsar for instance. You cannot commit such a political murder without revolutionary motives and a lofty ideal of freedom."

"Have you ever noticed how ridiculous the common people are made to look in the movies?"

"You are not always small, little man. I know you have your "great moments," your "flights of enthusiasm" and "exaltation." But you lack the perserverance to let your enthusiasm soar, to let your exaltation carry you higher and higher. "

"I tell you, little man, you've lost all feeling for the best that is in you. You've stifled it. And when you find something worthwhile in others, in your children, your wife, your husband, your father or mother, you kill it. Little man, you're small and you want to stay small."

"You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you, even if it costs you your backbone or wrecks your whole life. Since you have never learned to seize upon happiness, to enjoy it and safeguard it, you lack the courage and integrity. Shall I tell you, little man, what kind of man you are? "

"Who am I to have an opinion of my own?" If once you knew that you do count for something, that you do have a sound opinion of your own, that your field and factory are meant to provide for life and not for death, then, little man, you yourself would be able to answer the question you've just asked. You wouldn't need any diplomats.

"That's all very well and good. But now they've made these atom bombs. A single one of them can kill hundreds of thousands of people!" Use your head, little man! Do you think Prince Blowhard makes atom bombs? No, they're made by little man who shout hurrah, hurrah instead of refusing to make them. You see, little man, it all boils down to one thing, to you and your sound or unsound thinking. And you, the most brilliant scientist of the twentieth century, if you were not a microscopically little man, you'd have thought in terms of the world and not of any nation. Your great intellect would have shown you how to keep the atom bomb out of the world; or if the logic of scientific development made such an invention inevitable, you'd have brought all your influence to bear to prevent it from being used.

You are "free" in only one respect: free from the self-criticism that might help you to govern your own life.

I've never heard you complain: "You exalt me as the future master of myself and my world. But you don't tell me how a man becomes a master of himself, and you don't tell me what's wrong with me, what's wrong with what I think and do."

You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion; when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life--you have it in you, little man, somewhere deep down in a corner of your being; when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings; when you've learned to recognize two things in their season: your gifts and the onset of old age; when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors: when you cease to set more store by a marriage certificate than by love between man and woman; when you learn to recognize your errors promptly and not too late, as you do today; when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats; when instead of enraging you as it does today, your adolescents daughter's happiness in love makes your heart swell with joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory of the days when small children were punished for touching their sex organs; when the human faces you see on the street are no longer drawn with grief and misery but glow with freedom, vitality, and serenity; when human bodies cease to walk this earth with rigid, retracted pelvises and frozen sex organs.

You are great, little man, when you're not mean and small. Your greatness, little man, is the only hope we have left. You're great when you attend lovingly to your trade, when you take pleasure in carving and building and painting, in sowing and reaping, in the blue sky and the deer and the morning dew, in music and dancing, in your growing children, and in the beautiful body of your wife or husband; when you go to the planetarium to study the stars, to the library to read what other men and women have thought about life. You're great when your grandchild sits on your lap and you tell him of times long past and look into the uncertain future with his sweet, childlike curiosity. You're great, mother, when you lull your baby to sleep; when with tears in your eyes you pray fervently for his future happiness; and when hour after hour, year after year, you build this happiness in your child.

Self-Acceptance

Self Acceptance

Make a list of all the negative judgments you have towards yourself and clear them.

This stuff robs you of true enjoyment of being YOU. Now take each item on your list and resolve to release it and to let it go. You can do this through journalling.

For instance: “I release and let go of all the suffering and guilt relating to....... (fill in the blank). I am willing to forgive myself for what happened. I did the best I could. I forgive myself and everyone else involved. I am not going to beat myself up any longer about this."

Learn to validate your emotional reality.

we refrain from dissociating, daydreaming, suppressing or numbing our emotions. This is not about having a dialogue with yourself about who’s right or wrong - it’s not about rehashing a drama, but about acknowledging how you feel and what it’s like being you in the moment. It’s about being there for yourself and affirming that you are valuable and that you matter to yourself.

Cultivate a great relationship with failure.

Cultivate the courage to show up and be real. Risk being vulnerable. So many of us get trapped in a spiral of shame where failure feeds into the ‘not good enough’ story we’ve been carrying for so long. Disconnect the experience of failing from feelings of shame and lack of self-worth, and connect it to the wise knowledge that failure is a perfect teacher. Don’t spend your life sitting on the fence – take the risks which will make you feel alive. Don’t hold back from true intimacy with others or from showing your affectionate or playful side.

Don’t compare yourself to anyone else.

We evaluate ourselves on the basis of looks, money, success, possessions – it’s almost impossible not to. We are all incredibly vulnerable to anxiety about how others see us and how they rate us, so stop playing the rating game!

learn to accept that your best is good enough. Comparison with others is a no-win situation.

Learn to accept your imperfections

Begin to see that we’re not unworthy because we have imperfections. The more we can accept the parts of ourselves that we don’t like much, the more personal freedom we create.

You don’t need to do all of these techniques all the time.

Practice relaxed awareness.

As opposed to constant distraction, or concentrated focus, relaxed awareness is a soft consciousness of our thoughts, feelings, pain, self-rating and judgment, etc.

To practice: close your eyes for a minute, and instead of pushing thoughts away or trying to focus on your breath, just softly notice your thoughts and feelings and body. You might see negative thoughts or emotions — that’s OK. Just notice them, watch them. Don’t try to turn them into positive thoughts or push them away.

Welcome what you notice. When you practice relaxed awareness, you’ll notice things — negative thoughts, fears, happy thoughts, self-judgments, etc. We tend to want to stop the negative thoughts and feelings, but this is just a suppression, an avoidance, a negating of the negative. Instead, welcome these phenomena, invite them in for a cup of tea, give them a hug. They are a part of your life, and they are OK.

Hug the bad feeling, comfort it, let it hang around for awhile. They are not bad, but are opportunities to learn things about ourselves.

Let go of rating yourself. Another thing you’ll notice, once you start to pay attention, is self-rating. We rate ourselves compared to others, or rate ourselves as “good” or “bad” at different things, or rate ourselves as flabby or too skinny or ugly.

Gratitude sessions.

Compassion & forgiveness for yourself.

If you judge yourself for not doing well at something, or not being good enough at something, can you forgive yourself for this, just as you might forgive someone else?

Learn from all parts. We tend to try to see our successes as good, and the failures as bad, but what if we see that everything is something to learn from? Even the dark parts — they are parts of us, and we can find interesting and useful things in them too.

Don’t take it personally.

If something offends you, stop and ask yourself why you’re offended. Make a conscious effort to stop assuming you know what people mean. Don’t get defensive about something you’ve internalized. Chances are people don’t want to hurt you to begin with, but they might not know how to communicate effectively either.

Forgive.

You can’t grow without forgiveness. But know that it’s a process, and it will always take time. Forgive others for things they didn’t mean to do. Forgive others for things they didn’t know they did. Forgive yourself for mistakes you think you’ve made. And forgive yourself if things don’t change quickly enough.

Call him back

Este es otro de mis textos encontrado entre borradores antiguos. Su fecha real es 7 de Septiembre de 2014.

I was waiting for a cab, I had booked it a couple hours ago. I had been partying almost all the night so I was tired and wanted to arrive home as soon as possible. It was the agreed time, so the cab was going to appear at one time or another, it had to. However the cab that approached me was not from the company I had talked with. The cab driver asked me where I went and how much the cab that was waiting for would charge me. "28 euros" I said. Then he calculated mentally for a bit and decided to charge me 25 euros if I went with him at that moment. I told him that I was sorry but I had already booked another cab from another company.

"Call him back", he said to me. "What?!, no!", I answered. "Why?!", he asked, and repeated "call him back!" while smirking. I smiled back and said "Nah, you know, I'm one of those people that...", and emitted a bunch of unintelligible sounds because I wanted to say something like "I'm one of those people that keep their word", but my spoken English does not reach that level. However he caught the idea, smiled again, and passed me his business card before going away. Then I had to continue waiting, fuck!

I have had other similar conversations lately. When I moved away and was looking for a flat to rent. Some people wondered why I announced to the owners that I moved with a cat. It complicated to find a good deal, because I could have said nothing and when moving to have brought the cat with me. The same when I decided to lower my wage.

You have to lose sometimes if you want to make a change.