They say life is 10% what happens to you, and 90% how you react to it.
So, why do so many of us fly off the handle or turn to self-destructive coping mechanisms when it comes to dealing with our problems?
Ultimately, because we’re not educated on emotional regulation at school or by our elders, and these behaviours must be taught as they are not always innate.
You may be more familiar with the terms ‘self-care’ or ‘self-love’, all of which strive to achieve the same goal – regulating your emotions so that you can calm any inner chaos.
The knock-on effect to this is boosting your self-esteem, helping you feel your best, protecting your relationships, and improving your mental health.
Just like your body regulates internal temperature by making you sweat when you’re too hot or shiver when it’s too cold, emotional regulation requires that you adjust your thoughts and behaviours to balance what’s going on around you that is causing that emotion.
Our friends over at Fingerprint for Success, a professional and personal development platform to make amazing things happen at work and in life, have collated the top tips so you can master this.
Check them out below!
1) Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
You may’ve heard of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), which helps people change their thoughts so they can feel differently, but what about DBT (Dialectical Behaviour Therapy)?
DBT is often used to help people who are struggling to manage emotion by teaching them tools to regulate these intense feelings so they can improve interpersonal relationships.
By delving into mindfulness and distress tolerance, these key skills can help regulate emotions and send emotional literacy skyrocketing.
2) Learn to master self-compassion
Someone who is reacting with compassion recognises the suffering in someone else and is moved to ease their pain. Self-compassion is doing that for yourself.
If your friend was upset because someone else at work got the promotion they wanted, would you shame them for feeling anger? Would you tell them they were being ridiculous? No, you would sit with them and say it’s understandable they feel this way. You’d ask if they’d like to talk about it.
Extend the same compassion to yourself the next time you experience unpleasant emotions.
3) Address the need/desire behind the emotion
When we experience an intense emotion, we often jump to conclusions about the situation or the person toward whom we feel this emotion. But, what if we withheld judgment and looked at what that emotion is trying to tell us about our needs and desires?
Jackie Schuld, a therapist who works with women experiencing overwhelming emotions and helps them express them through art, says emotions are helpful messengers from our body.
Schuld explained: “When an unsettling emotion begins to arise, I teach clients to acknowledge the emotion without judgment. We make an initial emotion even larger when we add judgmental thoughts such as, ‘I can’t believe I’m upset again’ or ‘I’m broken’.”
She then encourages them to get curious about the need behind the emotion to understand why it is present so they can move through it instead of spiralling into emotional dysregulation.
For the full article, click here: Emotional Regulation.
Inspo Daily 