Emotional Control: Three Obstacles that Prevent You from Mastering This Skill

Imagine that you are walking on stage in a large hall with thousands of people, your task is to draw the audience's attention with your presence, and you are making your way to the microphone.

Certainly, a situation like this would be intimidating unless you have  a lot of public speaking experience, and at the very least, it would make you very nervous or anxious.

In all cases, what affects you in this situation, and then affects your performance is your emotions. That is, the emotions that cause you distress are what make you tense and anxious.

However, what if you could alter these emotions? You will be able to automatically dispel fear and replace it with enthusiasm, as well as let go of stress and frustration and focus on yourself.

Imagine if you were very good at controlling your emotions, the results would be amazing because emotions are crucial in the life experiences that we have. While the example we gave earlier is slightly exaggerated, its purpose is to clarify the effect of emotions not only on success, but in the quality of life as well, as it is clear that understanding and controlling emotions is critical in life.

What are the emotions?

In order to be able to control something, you must first understand what you are trying to control. In this context, emotions are somehow a complex phenomenon because we are immediately aware of the nature of our emotions, but we might find it difficult to express them through words.

It is like trying to describe the color red without using other colors, or pointing to red things. Likewise, every emotion is a different experience from other emotional experiences, and it is immediately recognized, but it is difficult to describe.  In order for this article to be practical, we will define emotions first.

Emotions are easily classified as thought categories, or thinking patterns that lead to certain behaviors and psychological states. In other words, emotions are a form of categorizing thought patterns that lead to similar results, so when you feel angry, you tend to act aggressively, raise your voice, and grit your teeth. Also, when feeling angry or experiencing thinking patterns that fall within the category of anger, you tend to think violently, you also tend to separate yourself from the reason that caused you anger, and your thoughts become more focused on anger only.

Emotions are like ocean currents, as we can identify a specific current through the general direction of the water flow, and the effects that this flow leaves on the ocean and the land next to it, but there is no physical barrier separating the different currents, which  means that water does not follow a specific pattern. However, If we add the factor of winds and turbulence, we conclude that water does not flow in the same way. We liken emotions to currents to facilitate the complex process and to reduce it to similar patterns only.

Emotions are rarely completely distinct. Rather, they are a diverse and complex collection of thought patterns that can be categorized according to general behaviors and the psychological states resulting from them.
Emotions also change the experience we live in reality, and while it is difficult to express this aspect of emotions in words, this real experience is a pattern and flow of thoughts that you have.

Here we define emotions empirically; That is, anger is the feeling of anger. However,  psychology tends in the opposite direction, as it defines emotions through their biological and psychological effects.

However, since the purpose of the article is to improve our ability to control our emotions, we will not discuss medical tests like ECG and the brain to monitor emotions, and we will settle for the first easy definition.

Can emotions be controlled?

We will not debate between the concepts of free will and determinism, and we will answer directly and say, yes, emotions can be controlled, just as you can change what you think about, so you can change your emotional state, but the difference is that making a small change in thinking is relatively easy, while it can be very difficult to make a big change in emotional state.

Returning to our previous example, we can liken changing thoughts to creating ripples in the ocean, while changing emotion is like making a change in the current. Fortunately, although it is difficult to make a change in your emotional state, there are several techniques and methods that can help you achieve this.

With enough practice of these techniques and tools, you will be able to quickly adjust your emotional state, and then your behavior. Like most things in life, learning how to master emotional control can be easy, but mastering it can take years of practice.

3 benefits of controlling emotions: 

Emotional control is a key skill with a wide range of benefits, but we will highlight a small part of these benefits that you will get by practicing the skills that we will mention:

1. Better Relationships:

Relationships are influenced by emotions, so your ability to control your emotions will make you a likable person that people want to be around. More importantly, your ability to control your emotions ensures that you do not make mistakes when you are down, and whether you are trying to impress your boss, a client, or your partner, controlling your emotions is crucial.

2. Acting rationally:

The more you can control your emotions, the more rational your actions will be. Instead of making bad decisions based on your emotions, you will make decisions that are more effective.
Emotional control also increases the power of your intuition, as it helps you prevent your emotional state from affecting your subconscious intelligence.

3. Increasing your happiness:

The best thing you will get from the skill of controlling your emotions is that it will make your life better, as you will be able to face your fears instead of running away from them, and you will be able to control stress and make it motivate you, instead of getting things out of your control, and you will experience more feelings of satisfaction, gratitude, and peace in your life. So, emotional mastery should be one of the skills you learn in your life. Also, the good thing is that you can practice and refine this skill throughout your life, and you do not need to devote time to practicing this skill, but you can practice it in your daily life.

Why is the skill of controlling emotions such a difficult skill?

It may be reasonable to ask this question. Since this skill is very useful, why do we not have it automatically? Then we avoid making mistakes resulting from our emotional outbursts.

In order to answer, it is necessary to be acquainted with the three obstacles that prevent us from acquiring this skill:

1. Loss of concentration due to the intensity of the emotion: 

The main reason emotional mastery is difficult to master isn’t that changing emotions is difficult, but rather that you remember to change your emotional state when you need to. That is, realizing that you are in a bad state and needs to change is the hardest part of controlling your emotions.

In general, intense emotions lead to a loop of constant thinking. This loop is often semi-closed, but not completely closed. For example, when you are very tense about something, it often takes minutes, hours, and sometimes days to consciously realize that you are nervous about it; That is, this ability to perceive a certain pattern of thinking is a rare ability in humans, but we often do not use it except after the exacerbation of emotion.

Feeling lost and confused because of emotion is a real problem, and our goal is first to provide you with a map that enables you to get out of the maze of emotions.

2. Misunderstanding or misperception:

When you feel a certain feeling, it is unlikely that you want to change your emotional state. For example, when you feel angry, although this feeling is annoying, you cling to it, and try to prevent the transition to a different emotional state that makes you feel calm and peaceful. Also, the violent emotions feed themselves; therefore, it is often difficult to break this chain of self-feeding. 

Sometimes we can be contradictory. For example, sometimes we do not want to feel contentment, but rather we enjoy feelings of misery because we feel that we have justification for these negative emotions.

For example, you may feel that you are sad, and the truth is that your tongue says: “I need to feel miserable because of what happened to me,” or “I want to feel angry because someone did this to me,” or “I need to feel stressed because my boss sets unreasonable deadlines.”

These justifications are one of the major obstacles to changing our emotional state in a way that brings us calm and happiness. To get rid of them, you must understand that you are responsible for your emotions in all circumstances and times. So, anger, pain, and stress are often useful emotions in directing your actions.

However, remember that you are the only one responsible for your emotions, not other people, or what is happening with you now or what happened in the past, and without this sense of responsibility you will never be able to control your emotions.

3. Having a good reason for emotions that serves the human race:

Emotions serve a specific purpose in life. Take for example thinking how fear helps us to keep us safe. Fear, anger, hate, love, pain, etc. are all necessary to prompt us to take appropriate action, so the emotions that you experience are not absurd, but rather purposeful.

However, the problem is that we still think the same way our ancestors did thousands of years ago despite the enormous development that has occurred in our environments. That is, our genes are still the same as the genes of our ancestors who lived in the age of mammoths and giant snakes, and although we now live in the age of the Internet, many of our emotions are still objective and we cannot isolate them. For example, when you feel angry because you have been wronged, you rush to express the error that happened in order to correct it. 

Feeling stressed also motivates you to regain your energy and move forward, and fear is still a very important feeling for our safety, so the skill of controlling emotions is as easy as making some small adjustments to the emotional system that stopped developing thousands of years ago. The world has changed a lot in the past 40,000 years, so your emotional system needs an update too.