How to manage your emotions?

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Emotions often arise in the wrong place, in the wrong place, not when needed or with the right intensity. Not always the usual reaction is the most adequate response, sometimes you can hurt other people with your emotions. When we are overwhelmed with emotions, we think much worse than in a calm state. Sometimes you just need to relax, and then unnecessary emotions are useless. It is useful for a developed personality to be able to manage emotions, and the ability to manage emotions is a matter of education. It is an educated person who differs from an ill-mannered one in the first place by the fact that he knows how to control his emotions even where it is difficult and undesirable. A developed personality controls his emotions, knows how to manage his emotions and states, knows how to control himself.

In familiar situations, the necessary emotions are triggered directly, as directly and naturally as raising your hand: to raise (or lower) your right hand, you do not need special techniques and techniques. You just raise your hand and you just put it down. It is just as easy for you to be surprised when you need it, and you exchange surprise for warm attentiveness when attentiveness is needed.

How to manage your emotions, if necessary?

Watch your face. Keep a calm face.

The most important “recipe” is so simple that it even annoys many: “To remove an unnecessary emotion, just remove the wrong face. Fix your eyes and lips. The main thing is to do it right away, while the emotion has not yet unfolded. If you know how to do this, the intensity of emotions will immediately subside. If this is difficult for you, train the skill of calm presence.

Developing the skill of calm presence is one of the easiest and most effective ways to manage emotions. Indians know how to control their emotions because they know how to keep a calm face. The training of recruits in the army begins with the stand «Attention!» and numerous other procedures and rituals aimed, among other things, at mastering a calm presence. Recruits are ordinary children, it is natural for them to grimace and rattle, so they tend to be afraid, offended and upset. The army teaches them to keep a calm face and through this — to manage their emotions, to be able to maintain self-control and fortitude in the most difficult and responsible situations. See →

Watch your breath

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​Changing the strength and rhythm of breathing almost instantly changes the emotional state. If you need to calm down, begin to take a calm breath in and out. When you need to raise energy, it is enough to do energizing exercises. Someone arranges a mini-workout from karate, someone uses special yoga exercises — the essence is the same everywhere: these exercises are accompanied by strong sharp exhalations.

Manage your thoughts.

Our thoughts direct our attention. If we pay attention to the bright sides of life, we trigger positive states. If attention is riveted to real or possible troubles with the help of thoughts, then negative arises more often. At the same time, wisdom does not consist in not seeing the difficulties of life, but in treating them constructively: removing the position of the victim and turning problems into tasks.

If negative thoughts go around in circles, they need to be stopped. How? It is best to switch to other, more positive thoughts, and doing this out loud is best for reliability. Talk to yourself out loud — yes, it is sometimes necessary. Other options are to switch yourself to bright, positive pictures — to imagine a rainbow, beautiful flowers … As a rule, this helps women and children well.

A separate big job is working with beliefs that are behind most emotional reactions. See Declaration of Acceptance of Reality.

Emotion Keys

In a large number of situations, people control their emotions without noticing how they do it, even if they use special emotion keys to start or stop emotions. The simplest and most effective key of emotions is facial expression and body drawing: if guests come to you and you need to express your sincere joy to them, you begin to joyfully greet them, take care of them carefully, you will probably hug them, and your face will be alive, warm and open: almost immediately after this, you already feel sincere joy.

Most people explain this by saying it’s «because people are nice» without realizing that the real reason is 1) they trigger kinesthetic emotion cues and 2) exchanging positive emotions with the guests, supporting and spinning each other.

On the contrary, the indignation that has begun, until it is hyped, is easy to remove only by relaxing your face, exhaling, lowering the volume of your statements, softening your wording and, especially, your intonations. Whoever wants, he will always find ways to raise or change his mood, remove unnecessary emotion or set himself up for this or that business. Meet friends, turn on upbeat music, go shopping, just get some sleep… – everyone knows a lot of household and at the same time effective ways to improve mood. In addition to everyday ways to change your condition, there are many special exercises. These are autogenic training, emotion intensity management, Aliev’s Key and many others. However, in most cases, in order to manage one’s own state, one does not need knowledge of special techniques, but the timely and careful use of the arsenal that is known to everyone and is always at hand. The main thing is desire and training.

DIFFICULTIES IN MANAGING EMOTIONS

Emotion management should not be presented as a particularly difficult task, but it should not be simplified either. In fact, not everyone knows how to manage their emotions, and not all emotions can be controlled in principle. The ability to control oneself in difficult life situations is a separate task that requires special knowledge.

The task of managing emotions usually turns out to be difficult precisely because it is set by people who have already missed the moment when an emotion arises, who did not prevent this occurrence, who did not prevent the actions of other people who created these emotions for them. At the same time, if a person moves into a more active, leadership position and launches his own and other people’s emotions himself before the waves of other people’s emotions pour over him, he no longer needs to control his own emotions. He got ahead of himself and manages the situation himself.

Whether or not a person can control his emotions is easy for a specialist to determine just by looking at his body. If a person’s body is collected and at the same time calm, most likely the person owns his emotions. If the body is loose, arms and legs and facial expressions wander randomly and as if of their own free will (this happens), the person most likely is not used to monitoring and controlling his emotions. It is even worse if the body is very tense, when there is a general tightness in the body or the body “rattles”.

“Rattle” is observed when uncontrolled tension runs through the body, as a result of which a careful look will notice twitching of the shoulders, fingers, lips, muscles under the eyes … To remove the “rattling”, train a calm presence. This is one of the most important conditions for managing emotions.

Another prerequisite for managing emotions is the ability to confidently relax in a variety of conditions and circumstances, the habit of monitoring the calm state of your body. This skill can be developed, training gives excellent results.

We list other skills without which the management of emotions is impossible or difficult:

• The ability to control your attention. In particular, draw your attention to what you need and distract yourself from what is unnecessary.
• The development of facial expressions, the training of facial expressions and gestures, the use of a rich set of voice timbres.
• The development of the imagination, the ability to believe what has just come up with, the ability to act «as if», to immerse oneself «in the alleged circumstances.»
• Breath control. The ability to control one’s breathing, the ability to play with one’s breath, the ability to calm or excite oneself with different types of breathing.

And one of the most curious moments in the management of emotions is the realization of internal benefits in certain seemingly negative emotional states for us. As a rule, people do not realize that this anger or resentment, this fear or terrible frustration, this hysteria or fatigue that has suddenly piled on are not quite “natural reactions”, but our not quite conscious personal choice, beneficial to us in this situation and decisive some of our tasks. And until you realize WHY you are now experiencing what you are experiencing, attempts to remove this state will be ineffective: just get distracted, the state will immediately return to you again. Is it easy to catch in ourselves this inner spring that makes us hold on to habitual experiences, is it possible to “catch” our inner benefits ourselves? Trained people who are accustomed to being honest with themselves track the intrinsic benefits of their emotions without much difficulty, but most require the help of a psychologist in this matter.

Bottom line: not everyone knows how to manage their emotions. Not all emotions can be controlled in principle. But you can develop your ability to manage emotions if you set yourself such a task. You can learn to manage emotions on your own, or contact specialists in specialized centers. In the latter case, it is important that the specialists are highly qualified, and the centers are time-tested. The largest training center in Russia is the Sinton center. Come to the training «Management of emotions: energy, happiness, freedom» — master the ability to manage your emotions.