Control Your Emotions: A Straightforward and Applicable Guide to Controlling All of Your Emotions

Introduction

Are there times when you might have reacted in an emotional way that made you feel you had no control over yourself? It could be some action done in a fit of rage or breaking down in front of someone (that made you cringe later), or it could even be an act of kindness that made you take a particular step. Do you see something common in each of these situations? In every situation, you acted based on the desire of your heart over the logic of your mind. Although it is not our heart that is making these decisions (literally), we can say that it is the emotional part of our brain at work.

Now take a different situation where your child has just learned to walk. After holding their hands for a few steps, you know it is time to let them learn by themselves. You see them take those tiny steps and slowly progress. With every step they take, you have a strong urge to hold them and to protect them from falling. But you stop yourself because you know that this is the only way they can learn. Here, although you are full of emotions, you let logic prevail because you know this is the right thing to do.

Our minds are always in conflict between the emotional approach and the logical approach. These are like two parallel lines that can never meet. There could be situations where you have reacted in an unpleasant manner, after which you say you did not mean it, but it just came out. This happened because your emotions ruled over your thoughts. This does not mean the emotional side is bad and logical thinking is good. Neither are emotional decisions better than logical ones.

As humans, we are engineered with both of these. It is just that some people’s inclination is towards the logical side, whereas others are more inclined towards the emotional side. While emotions can help us find and realize our purpose, our thoughts help to prevent us from making irrational decisions. At the same time, acting while ignoring certain one's emotions might cause regret in the future because their actions aren’t aligned with their values. Similarly, we may also come to regret actions performed out of an emotional impulse, especially if the action was irrational.

What we need to realize is, there is no specific standard to measure when it comes to our emotions and behavior. In school, if we didn’t get an A on an assignment, we’d most likely know we could have done better because A is the highest possible grade. However, when it comes to us humans, we cannot score a perfect 10 for each of our reactions and actions.

Just like how a school teacher teaches while keeping the preferences and abilities of their various students in mind, we also need to keep in mind that everyone is different. No two people are alike. Although some may share common traits, they are different from each other. Each individual is bestowed with many traits. It is the combination of these traits that make each one unique.

Chapter 1: Dealing With Emotions

Being humans, we tend to be swayed by our emotions. There is no need to disregard the cause of your actions. It is instead essential to acknowledge your actions, take responsibility, and rise over them. Critiquing yourself for being too emotional or judging yourself for acting on an emotional impulse can only take you farther from managing your feelings. Only if you know yourself in and out, and accept that unique ‘you’, will you make progress in dealing with your emotions.

When dealing with your emotions, and as you take a step forward in controlling them, it is necessary to practice self-love. Self-love is not loving the perfect you. Neither is it disliking the flawed parts that we consider ourselves to have. It is also not the feeling that I am above all. Self-love is acceptance. It is about accepting our quirks and mistakes and letting them slide. It is also about being proud of our accomplishments and being grateful. The same approach applies to our emotions as well.

Have you ever wondered where a particular emotion originated from? It could be some moment that caught you off guard and you experienced an emotion that you normally don’t experience, such as astonishment. It turns out that we are born with eight primary emotions that are wired inside our brains. This explains the reason why we act a specific way when a certain situation happens. They are anger, sadness, fear, disgust, shame, surprise, interest, and joy. Not all emotions are wired in us, some other emotions are learned through our exposure to the environment like family and friends. (About Emotions, n.d.).

Chapter 2: Dealing With Anger

Although anger is often thought of as a negative emotion, it was ingrained in us with a purpose. According to the American Psychological Association, anger helps us let out our pent-up emotions (APA, n.d). However, anger does us more harm than the benefits we get out of it. Those who have anger management issues tend to find it difficult to control their emotions.

Suppose you were confronted with a situation where you just lost it. You snapped at someone when you weren’t supposed to. When you realized your mistake, you might have felt pangs of guilt. Although the other person would have forgiven you, you find it difficult to forgive yourself. Normally in a situation like this, you may use one of two coping mechanisms. One way of dealing with such a circumstance would be to take a figurative leap, and a huge one too. In other words, running away from the problem or trying to escape the situation. Or, the other method could be to acknowledge, accept, and change your behavior.

If you choose the former mode of coping with the situation, you might soon find other things to keep you busy and occupied. You will divert your thoughts and engage in various other activities, all so that you can avoid confronting yourself. Also, time teaches us that what might be relevant today need not be relevant tomorrow. Hence this incident is just stacked somewhere back in your brain as a distant memory, and you think that you are over it. However, in the near future, you could be faced with a similar situation, and you will most likely react the same way you did before. You resort to the same coping mechanism over and over again each time a similar incident occurs.

Since you find yourself falling into the same pit again and again, you begin to question yourself. As humans, we are adept at noticing repeating patterns, including patterns within ourselves. However, as we begin to notice our pattern of reacting in an unhealthy way, we might become overly focused on the problem. We might end up defining ourselves in a few words, which would be the ideal way to name the problem but limits our perception of ourselves.

In that process, you will disregard all the beautiful things that are a part of you. This is where the good you exits and the not so likable you (from your perspective) enters. The problem with limiting your self-definition to a few negative traits is that you tend to believe you cannot change. If an alcoholic believes that their other name is alcoholism, then they can never change. They won’t even try because they feel that this is their nature of being and changing the essence of who they are is impossible.

This is why it is important to not tie yourself completely to any negative incident or emotion. If you are someone who has a short temper, you need to remind yourself that in addition to your unpleasant traits, you have many beautiful traits like love, kindness, positivity, and many more.

If you go to pick some apples and you see that some of the apples are beautiful and perfect, but some are not, does that mean the tree is bad? No, it doesn’t. Right? Similarly, just because a few aspects of our behavior are bad, that doesn’t mean we are a bad person.

Now let us discuss the second approach. When faced with the above situation, you could also choose to react by confronting the problem. Instead of running away from the problem and acting as if it never happened, you can try facing it. The reason most of us do not like to do so is that we’ll have to face some things we don’t like such as challenging emotions. The hesitation to face those unpleasant moments is what keeps us from confronting the problem.

On the other hand, if we acknowledge what has happened and decide to fix it, it ends then and there. Our mind gets closure. The event doesn’t lurk around as unfinished business waiting to strike. Hence, moving on becomes easy. We learn to separate ourselves from the problems we caused. In other words, we become smart enough to not let our negatives define us. This shows us the road towards improvement and fulfillment.

What we need to understand is that the feeling of anger is not the problem. It is the reaction to anger that causes an unpleasant outcome. The point of anger is to let you know that you are not pleased with the outcome