As a mental health therapist, I have been sharing these tips and tools with clients for years. I have seen what works, what doesn’t, and what changes make a long-term impact. This post is all about learning to regulate your emotions in a new way.
Emotions are Your Friends
Emotions can sometimes feel overwhelming, unmanageable, and even scary. While emotions are part of your body’s natural response to your external world, they can often be looked at as something to manage or get rid of. Feel-good emotions, like happiness, are typically praised and sought after, where less pleasant emotions are cast as bad or unwanted. In order to regulate your emotions more efficiently, however, start to think about how every emotion could be understood and worked with in a way that is peaceful, instead of in a way that feels like an inner conflict.
Emotions can be seen as negative when they’re viewed as a problem, which often happens with anger and anxiety. However, all emotions occur in your body as a response to something and exist to serve a functional purpose. Some emotions are easier to understand, like happiness, which exists to let you know that what you are doing feels good, and you can continue to do that thing. Happiness, like all emotions, is temporary and will come and go based on your external environment. Many people will respond to happiness in the way that it is intended, by seeking more happiness and trying to increase the experiences that activate that emotion. What if we treated all the emotions like we treat happiness, understanding what it does and responding in the way that it is asking?
Anger
Anger is bad. Anger management. Control your anger. Anger gets a bad rep as the bully emotion that makes us feel bad and act in ways that we wouldn’t dream of acting otherwise. Anger tells us, “You’re being wronged!” Anger might also tell us, “Stick up for yourself!” Anger can be tied up with aggression, encouraging us to push, yell, or say and do hurtful things. If anger was your friend, how do you make sense of this behavior?
Look at anger as the overprotective friend. This friend thinks that something might hurt or is hurting you and is reacting as a way for you to get rid of the problem. Sometimes, anger is protecting you from a situation or person that makes you feel powerless, and it is giving you power to respond. Oftentimes, anger is protecting you from a different underlying emotion, like fear or hurt, that it doesn’t want you to feel.
Working with anger looks like asking it, “What are you protecting me from?” If it is something like a harmful relationship, then maybe listen to the need to protect yourself and explore different ways to do that (i.e., boundaries or possibly leaving the relationship). If it is protecting you from another emotion, ask the anger to step aside, and explore what other emotions are coming up. Once your body recognizes that you no longer need to be protected, then anger should start to subside on its own.
Anxiety
Anxiety is the number one emotion that brings people into therapy, many with the idea that having anxiety makes them mentally ill. Because of this stigma, many people have the belief that they shouldn’t feel anxiety at all and have the goal of getting it to go away completely. However, the emotion of anxiety is necessary for survival, it is just often overresponding to perceived threats. If anxiety was your friend, imagine it as the nervous friend who believes that you are in danger, even when you aren’t.
Working with anxiety looks like asking it, “What is the threat?” Sometimes, the threat is very real, like the possibility you might fail a test, the feeling that a friend is distancing themselves from you, or even the threat of bodily harm or death. When these threats are real, anxiety can give you the ability to focus on the threat, give you the energy to respond to threat, or the strength to fight or flee from the threat. If the threat is not real, like a past trauma trigger or an overactive fear of judgement (or something similar), then you can respond to the anxiety with self-soothing strategies, like self-talk or breathing techniques.
Other Emotions
Every emotion serves a functional purpose and comes and goes like waves as your external stimuli changes. Other emotions and their functions include:
Sadness– You are grieving the loss of something. It prompts you to connect with others to make meaning of and process the loss.
Jealousy– You want something that someone else has. If it is realistic to obtain, you can work toward obtaining it. If it is not, you work through the grief of accepting that you cannot obtain it.
Boredom– You are under-stimulated. Find new ways to stimulate your brain
There are many other emotions that impact us daily, many occurring at the same time. The more self-awareness you have around what your emotions are telling you, the more peacefully you can respond and regulate your emotions.
Remember all emotions are good emotions. Emotions are our friends.
Therapy can help you dig deeper into these emotions and understand better where they come from, giving you a sense of peace and control over your own body and mind.
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