You may not immediately realize how much your emotions can affect every aspect of you life. Stress itself is an emotion, and to fight it, you must learn useful skills in generally managing your emotional life. This is what I mean by Emotional Management.
Here are some tips for controlling your negative emotions:
- Try to be aware of the exact moment you start to feel bad, so you can do something about it as soon as possible.
- To begin with, if something is too overwhelming, try temporarily distracting yourself by doing something different or something you enjoy. Singing is a good activity to try because the parts of your brain that it activates are different than the ones you need to ruminate about your negative thoughts and feelings.
- Remember to breathe deeply and slowly if you start to become too anxious.
- Try a meditation session
- Write down your triggers so you can work through the ones you can't avoid.
- Call a friend for a chat. This must be a friend who feels comfortable helping you by letting you vent about whatever is stressing you.
Lastly, please don't beat yourself up if you are having a negative emotion. The worst thing you can do to manage your emotions is to suppress or judge them. This will only make them harder to control or they will rear up their ugly head in other ways that will only make your life more difficult. You must deal with you feelings head-on if you are to learn to effectively manage them.