How to give yourself first psychological aid?

Working with emotions

First, it is important to recognize your feelings. Many find it difficult to do this due to the low level of development of emotional intelligence.

Traditionally, there are seven basic emotions:

• happiness joy);
• anger (anger);
• disgust;
• astonishment;
• fear;
• sadness (sadness);
• contempt.

However, the «emotional cocktail» of a person is actually much broader: it is both delight, and tenderness, and gratitude, and admiration, and anticipation, and indignation, and fury, and hostility, and despair, and pity, and excitement, and awe, and embarrassment… The list goes on and on.

To understand and describe your feelings, I suggest keeping an emotional diary: in the evening, take a notebook and write down a few situations that happened to you during the day. Describe not just an event (who and what said, did, saw), but your inner state (what you experienced and felt).

After that, think about what emotions you are experiencing «here and now.» Record your thoughts on paper. Keeping such a diary daily for a month will teach you to better understand yourself. It will be much easier for you to manage your feelings.

How to relieve stress

To relieve emotional tension yourself, try to follow the following recommendations.

• Change the environment. If you are at work, go to another office, to the kitchen area, to the restroom. If at home, go for a walk outside.
• Listen to soothing music or meditate. This will help you focus on something else and take your mind off the stressful situation that caused the tension.
• Call a loved one and share your condition with him. Or just talk about abstract topics.

If these methods are not available to you now, start using others. There are methods for which nothing extra is needed.

• Breathe in your belly. The exhalation should be twice as long as the inhalation (you can do this on the count).
• Start tensing and relaxing your muscles in turn (arm, face, leg, life).
• Try to focus on a specific subject in your field of vision. Examine and describe it in detail in such a way as if you are doing it for an alien who knows nothing about this thing.

I also recommend opening up to other people and talking to them about your feelings. This will help to establish closer contact and relieve emotional stress.

preventive measures

Frequent emotional stress, especially if it is prolonged, turns into constant stress. To avoid exhaustion, it is important to engage in prevention. For this it is desirable…

• find activities that bring you pleasure: what you want to do, even if you don’t get paid for it;
• exclude from your life events and people that cause you emotional stress;
• in the event of a conflict or discomfort, do not isolate yourself, do not live the problem alone. This will help to avoid the “transition” of stress into the body and the appearance of many diseases.

Every day we have to deal with all sorts of problems that can cause emotional discomfort. To maintain a normal state, it is important to be able to independently cope with emotions. Taking care of yourself and your feelings will keep you happy and healthy.