Need help managing emotions? You’re not alone. It can be difficult to deal with your own emotions, or other people’s, and it can deeply affect your and their quality of life. Thankfully, increasing self-awareness helps you manage emotions because, when you understand yourself and others better, you’re able to more effectively deal with what you and they are feeling.
Managing emotions begins with building up your self-awareness in order to increase your emotional intelligence. Here are some tips to help you get started:
- There are four basic emotions: Happiness, Anger, Sadness, and Fear. Learn how to identify each of these when they are happening inside you. Ask yourself, “What is this feeling?” and pick one of the four. Keep practicing until you get good at recognizing what you’re feeling.
- Once you know what emotion you’re experiencing, you can begin managing or dealing with it. To do this, take five deep breaths and give yourself five minutes to just feel the emotion. It may be difficult to do this at first but, over time, you’ll become more comfortable with any emotion that arises, even the unpleasant ones that you’ve been trying to avoid.
- Realize that emotions are a normal part of life and you can use them to improve yourself. There are no bad emotions, each one is simply telling you what’s going on inside. When you stop seeing emotions as threats, you can act on them in a calm and balanced way. For example: If you’re scared about a new change in your life, take five deep breaths and five minutes to feel the emotion. Once you’ve done that calmly, take some time to plan a positive path forward. Think of one step you can take to improve your situation and, when you’re done with that one, try another.
- Keep practicing. Nobody is great at managing their emotions the first time they try. It takes a lot of conscious effort to get to the point where you are able to feel your emotions and use them in a positive way. Don’t give up, if you keep working on experiencing your emotions, you’ll eventually become an expert at it.
Managing emotions is simply the act of recognizing what’s going on inside you, making sure not to react negatively, and then finding positive steps you can take to move your life forward. Anyone can do it, but it requires work and commitment.
What will you do to develop self-awareness and manage your emotions?
Cheers,
Guy