Once we are aware of our emotional responses as we’re having them, we can start to regulate them, working past emotions when they’re not appropriate to the situation, soothing ourselves when we’re experiencing negative emotions, and bouncing back quickly from setbacks. People who cannot manage their emotions expend a lot of energy fighting their emotional reactions.
There are 3 main emotions that are difficult to manage: anger, anxiety, and sadness.
Here are general rules for managing any negative emotion:
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We get angry when we feel attacked. It could be someone actively threatening our physical safety, dangerously cutting us off on the road, insulting us with words, or it could be something frustrating us in our pursuit of a goal. All these are perceived forms of attack, and anger is our brain preparing us to fight.
We’re also more prone to get angry when we’re more stressed. It’s much easier to shrug things off when your day is going well; if your day is going poorly, little things that might not even get to you on a good day can easily set off your temper.
The quickest way to continue feeling angry is to dwell on what’s making you angry. The longer we think about our anger, the more our brain comes up with self-justifications and good reasons that we should feel angry. Anger builds on anger.
Say someone dangerously cuts you off while driving and you get angry. “What was that person thinking? They could have killed me. What would happen to my kids if I died? That person could have ruined my life and the lives of the people I care about! And for what? Probably for nothing. Where they’re going isn’t important enough to kill people for it. Jeez, no one pays attention to anyone but themselves anymore…”
Every subsequent angry thought after the initial one fans the flames, keeping you angry and sometimes even increasing how angry you are.
The quickest way to undermine anger is to undermine the assumptions that are making you angry in the first place, usually by reframing the situation in a more positive light.
Another way to manage anger is to physically cool off. This is particularly useful in arguments: if you find yourself getting too angry with someone, get away from them to let your brain calm itself down before you do or say something you’ll regret. Removing yourself from the source of anger lets your body and brain wait out the surge of adrenaline that hits us when we get angry without having the target of the anger there in front of you.
You could also try writing down cynical, hostile, or angry thoughts as they arise. This will help increase your self-awareness and give you an opportunity to challenge those thoughts, thus decreasing the anger. Once you’ve written them down, you’re forced to look at them and assess them, and you have a better chance of reappraising the situation -- but only if it’s in the earlier stages of anger. If you’re in a fit of rage, an exercise like this will probably fan the flames.
Someone at the peak of their rage is the most difficult person to manage. Data suggests a strategy to deal with someone in a fit of rage:
Example: On a train one night, a drunk man started yelling at everyone, threatening them, and trying to destroy parts of the train car. Nothing seemed to work to stop him until an old man distracted him by greeting him as a friend and asking what he had to drink. The man had sake, and the old man talked about how much he and his wife love sake and how they drink it every night in their garden. Then the drunk man broke down: his wife had died recently, and he’d lost his job and his home because of his grief. Goleman calls this an act of emotional brilliance on the part of the old man.
Anxiety is a form of worrying, a kind of rehearsal of what could go wrong and potential ways we might deal with it.
The goal of worrying is to come up with solutions by anticipating danger before it occurs. Too often it turns into a chronic, repetitive thought process, one that goes on and on but never actually gets to a positive solution because it keeps picking up new worries.
Chronic anxiety is an emotional hijacking beyond our control: worries seem to come from nowhere or be inspired by nothing, they’re impervious to reason, and cause the worrier to fixate on one or many anxiety-inducing topics.
There are generally two forms of anxiety:
For example, insomniacs usually suffer from cognitive anxiety and not somatic anxiety, whereas those who have panic attacks usually suffer from somatic anxiety.
There are three different types of chronic anxiety:
Worry, when allowed to continue, almost always blows itself out of proportion. In one study, participants were asked to intentionally worry for one minute out loud. Within just a few seconds, the worries had spiralled out into epic statements like “I’ll never be happy.”
Worry could easily be controlled by shifting your attention away from the worries. However, the rational brain actually gets in the way here, and makes it harder to stop worrying: we could get a payoff from worrying by coming up with potential solutions to problems, and that would be a good thing. But anxiety actually doesn’t usually come up with positive solutions.
Because worrying is negative, it doesn’t function like a creative breakthrough, viewing the problem from different angles, thinking laterally to come up with new solutions, or feeling energized at the prospect of solving the problem. Instead, it’s a form of rigid thought that deals in generalities and follows a fixed, linear path -- this is why anxiety rarely leads to a useful solution and usually turns into a rut.
Relaxation methods work to physically calm the body and take the mind off the worrisome thoughts -- but it’s best to practice relaxation methods daily, during totally normal moments, so at the time of crisis you can actually use the relaxation methods.
But relaxation isn’t usually enough -- anxiety needs to be actively challenged. Here’s a list of questions you can ask to actively challenge anxious thoughts:
We experience sadness when we feel lonely or when we’ve lost something or someone that’s important to us. For example, even if you feel sad when you see a happy couple because you’ve never been in a relationship, you’re still mourning the perceived loss or lack of something you feel is important: companionship.
People are most inventive when trying to change feelings of sadness, and it’s generally the mood people put the most energy into changing. But, of course, a lot of our coping methods don’t actually positively deal with the sadness, they negatively reinforce it.
Isolating ourselves when we feel sad actually usually doesn’t make us feel better. It adds to our feelings of loneliness and distance.
A lot of us fixate on the sadness to try to figure out what’s wrong or to understand ourselves better. But this is rumination, which, as we already know, actually increases and prolongs the feelings we’re ruminating on. It’s useful to analyze your sadness if it actually leads to concrete actions or insights that will result in positive change -- but if you find yourself passively ruminating on why you’re so sad, you’re probably just reinforcing how sad you are.
Here are 2 methods of combating sadness or rumination on sadness:
Sad thoughts are automatic and often enter our minds unbidden. So scheduling pleasant distractions actively breaks up these automatic thoughts and prevents them from intruding.
It’s important that the distractions actually be pleasant. In one study, depressed people were given a list of distractions and asked to choose one, and they ended up choosing the more depressing distractions.
Here are some good distractions, as long as they’re pleasant:
There are some commonly used distractions that have pitfalls, and might be worse for you in the long run. Exercise these with caution.
2) Engineer a small, easy success or triumph. This will boost your mood and give you something positive to focus on.
Repressors are people who repress their emotions routinely and automatically erase emotional disturbances from their minds and their awareness.
This can be positive or negative. When it’s positive, it might be more appropriate to call these people unflappables. They’re actually deft experts at handling their own emotions, capable of pushing emotional responses out of their brains without much struggle and going on about their business. They’ve gotten so good at it, in fact, that they aren’t even aware of their negative feelings. They’ve silenced them completely.
Of course, on the negative side, this can also mean the person is completely out of touch with their emotions, still experiencing primarily physiological symptoms of emotions but being totally oblivious to the emotional cause of these symptoms.
Neurologically, people who are genuine repressors are not feigning this obliviousness to emotional strife: their brains are essentially keeping this emotional information from them. People who exhibit repeated emotional repression have been found to have more brain activity in their left prefrontal lobe than their right -- the left prefrontal lobe is the center of good feelings, while the right is the center for negative feelings.