How to manage your emotions

How to manage your emotions

There are plentiful techniques for regulating our emotions, as well as one context to understand these methods is known as the Process Model. This model explains how we can control our feelings by understanding how our emotions work. After a week of learning, you and your friend feel confident that you got good grades on Friday's exam. But when you get your scores back, they are much lesser than you both anticipated. This makes you overwhelmed, but your pal seems unaffected, which makes you wonder why it's harder for you to recover than it is for them. However, controlling our emotions is possible, and numerous strategies are available.

Psychologists use this tool to determine when and how to enter the process of emotion formation. The four steps of that process are as follows: first, we join a situation, either actual or envisioned, and it grabs our attention. Then we assess the circumstance to see if it advances or obstructs our objectives. Finally, this evaluation modifies our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. We are referred to as an emotional reaction.

A chance to actively intervene and alter our emotions is presented at each stage of this procedure, and the Method Model describes some tactics for doing so. Imagine being invited to the same event as your most disliked ex and their freshly arrived partner to watch this in action.

Your first action might be skipping the party to avoid the scenario altogether. But if you go, you might also try to change things by deciding not to speak to your ex. If this is challenging, consider concentrating on something else instead of your ex's new partner, such as playing an activity with your pals. Reassessing your perspective on the circumstance is another approach.

You can realize that you don't care whom the other person dates after giving things a second severe thought. If neither of these tactics is successful, you can always attempt to control your emotions after the fact.

However, this can be challenging. Many of the simplest ways for doing this, such as pretending your emotions don't exist or attempting to manipulate them using medicines, often result in longer-term negative emotions and health issues. Here, having a long walk, inhaling slowly and deeply, or speaking with a member of your support network are more enduring solutions. The first part of the battle is learning to recognize your emotions and think about where they are coming from. It takes experience to use all these techniques effectively. And when you've accepted the idea that you can control your feelings, doing so gets much more straightforward. But should you rely on these methods all the time to stay cheerful? What constitutes a "good mood" relies on how you interpret it. Although it's easy to believe that we should always attempt to avoid feeling sad or frustrated, the truth is that no emotion is fundamentally good or bad; rather, depending on the circumstance, it can either be beneficial or detrimental. For instance, experiencing and expressing sorrow when a friend confides in you about the death of a loved one is not only acceptable and enables you to empathize with and support them. Contrarily, faking a grin to overcome a single discomfort is understandable, even though it's wrong to suppress your feelings daily.

We frequently receive conflicting messages regarding emotions. Some people counsel us to keep a positive attitude, while others advise us to accept our feelings as they arise.

But in actuality, everyone needs to establish their equilibrium. So, in response to the inquiry, "Should you constantly strive to be happy?" No, is the response. According to studies, persons preoccupied with happiness frequently feel secondary negative emotions, such as guilt or annoyance for feeling disturbed and dissatisfaction that they are not happy. This does not imply that you should give in to grief or rage. But techniques like reassessment may assist you in reconsidering your perceptions of a circumstance, enabling you to acknowledge your sadness and foster optimism that things will turn out better.