Emotional Control Techniques: 10 Effective Strategies
Any event, no matter how simple, awakens very different emotions. This is because a large part of our brain, the Limbic Systemtakes care of them and makes emotions so deeply rooted in the nature of the human being that we can consider them to be part of us and our way of reacting to the world.
Each of the memories that make up our life history has an associated emotional charge, and that is There is nothing that makes us feel more alive than emotions. Perhaps for this reason, one of its great representative icons is the figure of the heart, the organ that maintains our lives. Emotions make us bring out the best in us, but they can also bring out the worst in us, and by this I do not only mean negative emotions such as anger or fear, because even an excessive load of positive emotions such as joy can lead us to euphoria and with it the lack of control of our behavior.
For this reason, almost none of our emotions escape the filter of awareness. If we take into account that we continually feel, we will easily recognize that people also continually channel or repress our feelings, so we all have a certain emotional control that we execute automatically and therefore unconsciously. But despite this control that we have, partly learned and partly written in our genetic material, all people at some point in our lives have felt altered or out of control due to our emotional experiences.
Feelings and emotions create ground
We all know that feelings alter our thinking. In fact, many psychological and psychiatric disorders often arise as a result of a disproportionate emotional response that the person is unable to control. In the 1930s, psychoanalyst Franz Alexander discovered that people who repress their feelings had permanently elevated blood pressure.
The repressed emotions become overflowing seeking to be released and produce the psychosomatizationwhich consists of the expression of the psychological through physical symptoms, so that the body also gets sick. But the key to getting along with our emotions is not in not repressing them either, since not repressing them in any way can lead to other types of even more serious disorders, and get you into more than one mess that you may regret. In this sense, I want to recommend that you read Bertrand Regader’s article, called “The 10 essential rules to release emotional ballast”, where you will learn other techniques to manage your emotions.
We cannot disconnect or choose our emotions, but we can try to control them through emotional control, which should not be understood as a form of repression of emotions.but as a way to regulate them, and thus be able to modify our emotional and sentimental state, when necessary. The objective of control techniques is to prevent when a negative emotion is triggered, it drags us down and we express it in an overwhelming way that we may later regret. Below I present some techniques to help you control your emotions and feelings.
Although psychologists do not like to prescribe avoidance or escape from situations (the avoidance and flight coping style is not very effective in solving problems), in the case of controlling negative emotions, I, like many other colleagues, I will make an exception and state that the first and The simplest emotional control technique is to learn to avoid what generates negative emotions in us.whether they are people or situations, such as trying to avoid a person who overwhelms us every time we see them, not going to an event that we know our ex-partner is going to attend, or if we are on a diet, avoiding having forbidden foods in front of us, For example.
Deep breathing techniques
Another of the simplest and most useful techniques to control both emotions and physiological reactions, before, during and after facing emotionally intense situations, is deep breathing. On the one hand because it oxygenates our organs and makes the brain work better, and on the other hand because relaxes and thereby calms us down.
There are multiple techniques to perform it, a well-known one is to perform the phases of breathing by counting, this count can be varied since we all have different breathing rhythms and it is not about forcing breathing, the ideal is to find the number that best suits ours. An example of this way of doing deep breathing is the following:
In this way we will obtain a breathing slow and a little more intense than our normal breathing. You can check that you are breathing correctly by putting one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. You are doing it correctly if only the hand on your abdomen moves when you breathe (for this reason, deep breathing is also called abdominal or diaphragmatic). .
Cognitive techniques to regulate emotions
When we experience a negative emotion, our attention is focused on the thoughts that keep that emotion active and if we continually dwell on those thoughts, we strengthen the emotions. But, however, if we think less about the event that brought out the negative emotion, it decreases. We see in this fact how emotion and thought are closely linked.
For the Cognitive-Behavioral Psychology Human psychology is expressed in three levels that are in constant interaction, as the following diagram shows:
As I said before, emotions cannot be changed, but since emotion and thought go so hand in hand, if we change the thought we can regulate both our emotions and our actions. This is the fundamental principle of cognitive techniques such as those presented below.
Positive affirmations
It is already part of popular knowledge that thinking positively makes us feel better, we can even find brands on the market that have made positive statements a form of ‘branding’ and sell us a product appealing to emotion. So if positive affirmations have become so popular it must be because they must work. In order to fill our mind with positive affirmations we must empty it of negative thoughts. To do this, we must first detect which thoughts generate, maintain or increase our negative emotions and make us feel sad, angry, anxious, scared, etc.
Once identified, we have to replace them with more positive ones. To do this, although it can be done mentally, I recommend writing down each negative thought and the thought that replaces it. Once this is done, you just have to put it into practice and every time the negative thought appears, change it to a positive one automatically. This, which seems so simple, will manage to reduce both our cognitive and physical anxiety.
Thought stopping
This strategy seeks to control thought and can be used before, during or after the situation that generates the negative emotion. It’s about when you start to feel nervous or upset, pay attention to the thoughts you are having, and identify the negative connotations it has for you. Once you have completed this small analysis, give yourself orders to look for the interruption of the thought that evokes the emotion, such as: “STOP!“, “Stop!”, “Now!”, “Enough!”. After this self-instruction, replace the thoughts detected as negative with positive affirmations.
The only difficulty with this simple technique is that identifying the thoughts that evoke negative emotions and turning them into positive ones takes a little practice.
mental rehearsal
Sometimes when a person knows that they have to do something for which they do not feel confident, such as speaking in public or taking some type of test, for example an exam, we anticipate the anxiety of the moment and establish it in the moment. current, which causes anxiety about the act to become increasingly greater, since negative thoughts are negatively reinforced and an upward spiral is entered.
To prepare ourselves to face these situations and combat the anxiety they generate in us, the technique of mental rehearsal It is ideal, apart from being simple. It consists of visualizing that the feared situation develops without problems, and you feel safe and relaxed because you are satisfied with the way you act. You can also repeat slogans to yourself such as: I’m doing it well, I’m relaxed, the audience likes it… this will reinforce the technique. Plan your performance of the act and practice it mentally repetitively. With each mental rehearsal the level of anxiety will reduce and this feeling will give you more confidence to overcome the situation successfully.
People tend to make two big mistakes that can affect our emotional balance. On the one hand, we are egocentric and consider that our point of view is the only correct or valid one, and on the other, we grant others intentions that may not be correct. This can lead us to arguments or to feel bad for no reason. That’s why trying to change our perspective on people or events can be useful. There are several ways to change the perspective we have and adopt a different one, below I will explain two.
The first one I recommend is broaden the focus of the situationbecause the closer we are to something, the less we see. To do this, we can distance ourselves from the situation literally or mentally, trying to see the situation as a whole and analyze the situation again from this perspective. Another way to change perspective is put yourself in the other’s placeand think about what that person may be feeling or what circumstances may be motivating their behavior.
In this way, from the empathyit is very likely that we will acquire more tolerant attitudes towards that person and reduce our negative feelings towards him. If, for example, you are in a restaurant and you are starting to get angry because the waiter is not serving you, think about how maybe he has a lot of work or that something has gone wrong in the kitchen, how overwhelmed he must feel at that moment, and this It will surely help you feel more relaxed and have more patience.
Concluding
The techniques that I have presented in this writing, despite being simple, have demonstrated their effectiveness in clinical practice, and for this reason few psychotherapists reject them in their daily professional practice, but like most things in life to turn it into a skill ours need to be practiced.
If you manage to incorporate them into your repertoire of behaviors, it is very likely that you will achieve greater control of your emotions. and feelings that emerge in your daily life.
