Certain habits result from emotions like frustration, anxiety, sadness, and confusion. Your inability to control your emotions keeps you from reaching your full capabilities, including experiencing true happiness.
While you cannot control your life's events, you can control your emotions. People are always going to encounter stressful times. How we react to them determines whether we build the life we desire or allow obstacles to prevent us from reaching our dreams.
5 Tips to Help You Control Your Emotions
1. Change Your Perspective
It’s easy to take control of your emotions until something bad happens. It could be losing a job, illness, or losing a loved one. The point is that something bad happens despite you, and it leads to your frustration.
American author Tony Robbins explains this: “Stress. Anger. Sadness. These feelings don't come from the facts. They come from the meaning that we give the facts.” Undoubtedly, these terrible things that happen to us are real and not just illusions, but the real question is how you will respond to them and let them change your life.
You can let them frustrate you or invest them as inspiration to reach your goals. You definitely don't want tension and anger to rule your life, so figure out how to change your perspective and keep negative emotions from destroying it. It’s all about the meaning you give to any experience.
Robbins asks us a crucial question: Have you ever considered that everything bad that has happened to you, including the most agonizing and tragic experiences, was to better rather than destroy your life?
You can change your perspective and ultimately transform your life by finding a positive meaning in a tragic event.
2. Change Your Beliefs
The next logical step is to change your beliefs after determining the meaning you assign to your life experiences. We constantly do this without realizing it.
Our beliefs determine the quality of our lives, impacting our friendships, romantic relationships, career aspirations, and other aspects of our lives. However, these beliefs are frequently derived from our emotions rather than from actual experiences. This means that you can alter the way that life's events affect you as soon as you learn to manage your emotions, which will, in turn, alter your beliefs about the world and yourself.
For example, consider the economic recession. In response, one person may think, "I will definitely go bankrupt," while another may think, "If there is anything I can do, it is hard work and trying to save in innovative ways." Each of the two previous thought patterns will undoubtedly have a different effect, as they will each react differently to the recession. Then, each of them will experience a different emotion. This means that each of the two individuals assigned to the economic recession is the source of all of this.
Let's go more personal. Consider an orphan woman who had been adopted as a baby. She may feel unworthy of love and inferior to other kids because she did not have a typical childhood. Conversely, she may view herself differently and consider that someone chose her among all the other kids and chose to love her. Can you see how important it is that she chooses the meaning she gives to her story? And what impact will that have on her daily life? And what impact will that have on her bigger decisions?
In the first scenario, the woman from the previous example feels deprived, but she affirms the worth of her life and herself in the second. Your life will change when you master emotional regulation and self-storytelling. This is because the decisions that impact us are those that are connected to the meaning we assign to the events in our lives, not the events themselves, and all of our emotions result from the meaning we assign to these events.
3. Focus on the Positives, Not the Negatives
You are not alone in adopting morale-dampening beliefs; we have all occasionally engaged in some depressing self-talk. We force ourselves to feel sadness, anxiety, fear, shame, guilt, and anger at a time when we could be overcome by happiness because these emotions are imposed upon us by our human nature. The brain does not have an automatic mechanism to help it eliminate these destructive emotions, and it's your task to train it. It may seem illogical, but your mind constantly tries to protect you by focusing on what you could lose entirely or partially and what you might not have gotten in the first place.
Our biological nature tends to make us anticipate and plan for the worst-case scenario. Therefore, it is up to you to deliberately consider the stories you tell yourself and the emotions they elicit. You need to replace your expectations with gratitude if you want to control your emotions. Once you do this, your entire life will change, and as long as you maintain this thinking pattern, you will get better.
Let's go back to the woman who was raised as an adopted child. In the first instance, she expected to receive care from her biological parents, which could have affected her entire life. However, she was able to change her outlook on life by learning to be grateful for the existence of someone who chose to raise her and show her love without being her biological parent. This illustrates the transformative power of replacing expectations with gratitude.
4. Develop Self-Awareness
It is impossible to control your emotions unless you recognize them first. Self-awareness is recognising, categorising, and assessing your thoughts and feelings. Although some people are extremely self-aware and some people don't have any self-awareness, most of us are probably not self-aware.
Let's go back to the woman who was adopted as a child. She may live her life depending on luck to succeed in relationships and feel as though no one loves her. Still, when she develops self-awareness, she can connect her relationship experiences and her fear of rejection. She will realize that she must love herself before creating healthy relationships. In other words, her ability to modify her beliefs and change her perspective depends entirely on her capacity to recognize her feelings and comprehend how they relate to her past. This is known as self-awareness.
If you find it difficult to regulate your emotions, try developing your self-awareness through self-analysis, journaling, meditation, and changing your perspective. This is the fundamental basis for developing your emotional intelligence, empathy for others' feelings, and capacity for healthy emotional expression.
5. Take Responsibility
Finally, decide to take responsibility for your emotions. To do this, resolve that you will never again allow fear and anger to rule your life. Decide what you want to focus on and what beliefs will enable them to do so.
Then, choose a meaning for everything that happens to you and commit to it. We all can do this, and we should use it because it has the power to transform everything. Your beliefs are the only things that stand in the way of realizing your dreams and the things that sabotage your happiness.
Remember what Robbins says: “Have you ever considered that everything bad that has happened to you, including the most agonizing and tragic experiences, was to better rather than destroy your life?”
What if everything that happens to you, including the painful events, prepares you to lead a better life and increases your capacity for happiness and giving?
In Conclusion
"Real freedom comes when you decide to stop allowing external events to shape your emotional experience," Tony says. Only by developing emotional self-control and discovering the empowering meaning in everything that happens to you will you be able to achieve this freedom.
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