Psychologists Reveal 5 Ways to Remove Emotional Baggage From Your Life to Be Happy Again

If you are stuck in emotional stress or old traumas, you prevent yourself from living a happy and beautiful life. Also, emotional baggage can cause you to have negative behavior regarding changes, adaptation, and suppression of emotions while increasing the risk of emotional suffering.

We all carry emotional baggage through life … but if they end up interfering with our lives and weighing too much, influencing our present and deciding our future, then it means it's time to eliminate them one by one.

What is emotional baggage?

Emotional baggage is any negative emotion, unprocessed, unaccepted, from past experiences. These could be memories we think about very often, past traumas, unpleasant experiences, or things that have created a lot of stress. Keeping these memories can interfere with our lives.

Why is emotional baggage so harmful and dangerous?

If you are stuck in emotional stress or old traumas, you prevent yourself from living a happy and beautiful life. Also, emotional baggage can cause you to have negative behavior regarding changes, adaptation, and suppression of emotions while increasing the risk of emotional suffering.

What does emotional intelligence entail?

Mature and healthy emotional intelligence means being able to understand and manage emotions. Being emotionally intelligent means that you can …

• deal with difficult conversations without losing control;
• resolve painful conflicts;
• manage emotions when you face stress;
• encourage other people;
• manage emotions when you feel overwhelmed by the situation;
• be a person that people want to talk to when they have a problem;
• grow in your relationships.

5 ways to erase the emotional baggage from your life

Here are the tips offered by psychologists to give up negative feelings and, implicitly, to eliminate emotional baggage:

1. Change your thinking

If you regret the past or some decisions you have made / some things you have done, it is time to change your mind. If you can do something to ease your regret (example: apologies to someone for what you did), then try to do so.

Otherwise, it is time to give up these regrets and move on. Learn lessons from the past to make better decisions now and in the future.

2. Confront your emotional baggage detail jobs

It's time to have a long discussion with you. Don't start a long list of the wrong things you've done - it's not helpful or healthy at all. No one can bear the weight of unpleasant memories.

All you can do is apologize to yourself, the person from the past, for everything you did, to truly forgive yourself, and then move on.

3. Learn to live in the present

Don't let the past hold you captive. Living in the present means not delving into the past, not repeating the bad things that happened to you, and not having negative thoughts about the things you did wrong. Everything is there, in a place that no longer exists.

It no longer allows you to be affected by what happened to move on. Focus on the moment here and now.

4. Accept what happened

Instead of rebuking yourself and thinking about past injustices and mistakes, you can learn to accept these things as part of your past. Give up your emotional baggage to find healing. Learn to accept what it was and move on with your life.

5. Learn your lesson

If you feel burdened by emotional baggage, take a step back and try to figure out what lesson you can learn from that situation. Find a lesson that can help you today, now, and in the future.

Example lessons:

• gradually take it in the relationship, do not rush things;
• set healthy limits;
• learn how to say "No";
• do not please people, do not place yourself on the last place;
• enjoy the present moment, live the moment.