If you find yourself overwhelmed with emotions, it can be a sign of emotional dysregulation. Often, this can be linked to issues with trauma or family history.
Managing your emotions is an important part of mental health and can help you feel more relaxed, productive and well. But sometimes, it can be difficult to do this.
Identifying your emotions is crucial to reaching emotional control. Without awareness, you may suppress or repress your feelings (emotions can be a natural response to stress).
Recognizing your emotions is also key because it can help you understand others' emotions. This can lead to empathy and increased intimacy.
Start by spending a day or two noticing how you feel in different situations. For example, you might notice how excited you feel after making plans to go out with a friend or how nervous you get before giving a presentation at work.
Once you know what you’re feeling, try naming that emotion in your head. It only takes a second, but it’s a great practice.
Once you know what you’re feeling, you can then start to think about why you’re feeling that way and how you can make it better. This can improve your relationships and help you overcome stress in a healthier, more positive way.
A trigger is something that causes a person to become upset or irritated. They can be internal (emotions, memories) or external (things, events).
Identifying your triggers is important because these triggers help you understand how your emotions work and why they happen. They also help you learn how to deal with them more effectively.
To identify your triggers, you should look for signs of emotional response like anger or sadness. You should also be aware of physical signs like heart rate, breathing, and body tension.
Once you have identified the trigger, you should be able to work through it calmly and without becoming overly angry or sad. This will help you manage it more effectively and get back to feeling calm and confident.
Often people who have a history of mental health issues, self-harm, addiction or eating disorders can find themselves triggered by something they see or read. This can lead to a relapse. It’s essential that you identify and work to prevent these triggers as this will give you more control over your emotional responses.
Often, we repress emotions that are too painful or difficult to process in the moment. This can be a habit we've developed as children.
Rather than bottling up emotions or ignoring them, give yourself permission to fully feel them and release them. This may mean letting yourself cry, shouting into a pillow, running, dancing, painting, gardening, tapping, hitting a punching bag, or any other form of bodily expression that feels cathartic in the moment.
As you get more familiar with how to do this, it will become easier and faster for you to release your emotions when they come up.
Remember that every emotion you experience is a result of your body's pre-conscious autonomic nervous system sending a signal to the brain, activating the corresponding feeling. When we interrupt this process, our unprocessed feelings become trapped in our bodies and are often experienced as physical pain.
One of the most powerful things you can do to get control over your emotions is reframe your thoughts. This can be a tricky skill to develop, and it takes practice.
Cognitive reframing is a tool used by therapists to help people change their perspectives on difficult situations. It involves examining your emotional opinions against objective facts and finding an alternative way of thinking about the situation.
It also involves practicing compassion for yourself. For instance, you might notice that you are feeling a lot of stress around taking an exam.
You could start by asking yourself what it is about the situation that is making you feel this way. Maybe it has to do with a fear that you aren’t good enough or that your family will be disappointed in you.
Next, think about positive ways to reframe your thoughts and feelings. For example, you might tell yourself that the stress isn’t as bad as it feels, and that you’ve got a great opportunity to improve your grades in class.