Control Your Emotions

Chapter 7. Preventative Care

What is preventative care in the context of mastering your emotions and keeping calm while the world spins on? It is recognizing the fact that our brains have an intense negativity bias, even while things are going well and we aren’t on the brink of disaster. And thus, we should seek to immunize our resilience through daily actions.
Be grateful. Savor everything. Enjoy the moment, because you’ll never get it back. Both gratitude and savoring (slowing down and being intentional with your actions) have been scientifically shown to reduce stress and increase positivity and happiness. It’s awfully tough to be both grateful and miserable at the same time. Proper perspective and expectations can be transformative for your emotional resilience.
Journaling and writing your feelings down is not an uncommon piece of advice. It is the act of expressing yourself and then being able to introspect later on. Most of us miss these two important steps, and our emotions remain pent up and unable to develop and unfurl. Of particular use is writing down all of your worries and then writing down solutions for them. Also, you can write down two distinct types of lists: “Stop Doing This” (something detrimental) or “It’s Okay To” (something beneficial).
Mindfulness is a key part of preventative care. It is the release of stress from a past that doesn’t matter anymore and a set of futures that may never come into existence. It is the act of letting go and feeling your emotions swirl around you, then observing them settle back into a normal place. It is the conscious ignorance of everything but one singular focus; this is a state of mind where no stress or anxiety can exist. You are peaceful; the more you practice, the more peace transfers into your daily life.
Finally, we come to defense of your boundaries. This book has talked about how to deal with yourself—but what about others? After all, people are probably our strongest emotional triggers and they hold enormous power over us. The best step for this is to understand boundaries. Most of your negative spirals with others are related to boundaries, so we must see the warning signs, set boundaries, and enforce them. Any set of negative feelings probably means that your boundaries are being violated in some way.

Chapter 6. Philosophical Perspective

Sometimes a shift in perspective is all that is needed for something to finally click inside you. At the very least, we can combine these new perspectives with the techniques and tools we’ve learned to make you emotionally bulletproof.
Here, we cover two of the world’s oldest philosophies in dealing with hardship and optimizing for happiness. Buddhism is all about understanding that we cause our own suffering through attachment to people, things, outcomes, and thoughts. Everything is impermanent, and good and bad come and go like waves on the ocean. When we form an attachment, we form an expectation, which puts us in a position to tumble and fall. Thus, we must detach from the notion that external things or people are necessary for our happiness. In this way, we make ourselves entirely responsible for our state of mind.
Stoicism has some philosophical overlap with Buddhism, but the emphasis is on what we can and cannot control. We cannot control anything in this world but our actions and thoughts, so we must condition our happiness to depend happiness on those things. To do otherwise would be to remove all power from us. The world is a neutral place, and we can interpret it however we want; we only have to choose a favorable interpretation. In Stoicism, we must also turn the obstacle upside down and not see negative events as tragedy, but rather interpret and reframe them as learning experiences.

Chapter 5. The Emotional Immune System

Self-esteem is the emotional immune system because it insulates you from emotional triggers, needs, and pains. The person who generally feels positively about themselves is not prone to emotional instability or reactivity because they simply aren’t affected in the same way.
Like the external world, our identities are entirely neutral, and self-esteem is a lens we view ourselves through. This means we have the power to see ourselves however we want, and for some of us, this is terrible news. A primary reason is an unreasonable set of expectations about yourself, the world, and your place in it—you will never live up to these expectations, so you can literally only fail in your mind, which makes you feel even worse than before.
Self-esteem, as with many things about emotions, is not living in a vacuum and is best understood as a cycle of causes and effects. We begin with inaccurate assumptions and arbitrary (and disempowering) rules about life that are confirmed through inevitable failure. Then our narrative begins to include this data point and creates an increasingly negative self-evaluation. The inaccurate assumptions and beliefs are then strengthened, and it becomes even more difficult to climb out of this pit of despair. Deciphering these beliefs and seeing them nullified by reality is key.

Chapter 4. Cutting the Cycle

Our lowest emotional points don’t exist in isolation; they almost all exist due to various cycles of triggers, emotional needs, behaviors, and then consequences—all of which strengthen the cycle for the future. So it’s necessary to cut the cycle short and interrupt it in any way that we can. The most valuable way we can do this is through simply analyzing how it takes place in our lives.
The first tool for this is the ABC Loop, which stands for antecedent, behavior, and consequence. They generally describe the main elements of an emotional outburst that we can break down and analyze: what happens before, what you did to cope, and what happens afterward that makes the cycle even harder to escape.
The second tool is similar but more in-depth: emotional dashboarding. It describes the same cycle but through a different lens, with elements of situations, thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and impulses/actions. This gives you an even deeper view into certain situations and why you felt the need to lash out or become dragged down by negativity. The important thing to keep in mind with both of these tools is that the willingness for deep honesty is required.
Finally, we come to a tool that underlies everything: self-talk. Most of the time, our self-talk is negative and disempowering. We may not even realize that our lens on the world and ourselves is negative because we’ve held this type of narrative about our lives for so long. But negative self-talk just makes you less resilient. The world is neutral, and our self-talk is what determines our emotions much of the time. Self-awareness is the key here; would you speak to a close friend like you speak to yourself?

Chapter 3. Recognize, Respond, and Regulate

Now that we’ve got an understanding of emotional triggers, needs, pain, and how they all interact with each other, we must talk about how to deal with them. How can we inject self-awareness into our lives, recognize what’s happening, and keep the volcano (us) from erupting? The first model to think about is responding versus reacting. When we touch a hot stove, we are reacting without thought, instinctually, and to protect ourselves. This is rarely necessary from an emotional standpoint, and yet we find ourselves similarly volatile to a volcano instead of pausing a beat to think and then respond.
Next, we should think about a framework for regulation that plays with the emotional triggers and needs we have discussed. This consists of selecting the situation (avoiding triggers), modifying the situation (decreasing triggers), shifting focus (ignoring triggers), changing thoughts (changing the trigger), and changing response (reacting less to a trigger).
This leads directly to the next point of distress tolerance. Sometimes we are indeed too prone to flying off the handle; we are overly sensitive in a way that makes us unpredictable and fragile. Thus, we need to work on increasing our tolerance to distress and anxiety. This has common elements with the framework for regulation, but it focuses more on foregoing the comforting escape mechanisms you use and staying in the situation and emotion. The purpose is to accept anxiety and distress, withstand the major emotional spike surrounding it, and stay with it until it subsides and you realize that you are still doing fine.

Chapter 2. Emotional Triggers

When we talk about emotional resilience and calm, we are really talking about the emotional triggers that push us over the edge. The vast majority of the time, these triggers will be subtle and external and not at all proportionate (or even related) to the response they will create within you. This is the classic case of overreacting to a simple statement based on how it made you feel, not the actual substance.
Of course, this is because our emotional needs are being exposed, poked, or prodded in an uncomfortable way. To escape this discomfort, we react by lashing out, avoiding, or coping in a variety of other ways. Very few of these habits are healthy, and this sequence of events is what will lead to your unraveling and emotional instability.
It’s not enough to simply know your emotional needs; we need to gain emotional granularity into what is actually happening. A doctor can only treat a sickness if they know the actual cause, and Plutchik’s wheel of emotions is a useful tool in labeling yourself and escaping the uncertainty of a general feeling of dread and discomfort. In fact, diversity of emotion helps us remain balanced and even-keeled

Chapter 1. Our Volatile Emotions

Our emotions have enormous power over us. Sometimes this is good, and other times, it makes us feel completely out of control. This is bad. But there is good reason for this type of power—you can view emotions as a type of warning signal that has evolved alongside humans to keep us alive and healthy. In the absence of higher critical thinking, emotions taught us about the world and how to regard it. This is also the reason that negative emotions can make us spiral out of control so quickly.
These types of dangers aren’t present anymore in our modern lives, and our task now is less survival and more controlling and harnessing our emotions. The extent to which we do this can wholly determine how our lives go. In no way is this suggesting that emotional suppression is the key to happiness. In fact, emotional suppression is linked to poor health outcomes, so we must simply find the fine line of healthy emotional expression and reaction

They could include the following:

Stay in the Present

IT’S OKAY TO:

Putting yourself last

Ask people for help

Trying to be all things to all people

Be constantly changing

Being afraid to say no or yes

Admit vulnerability and weakness

Talking down to yourself

Not be impenetrable

Talking and not listening

Be knocked down and feel hopeless

Depending on others to make you happy

Cry

Letting outside events define you

Speak up for what you value

Settling for less

Take time to determine your feelings about a situation

Limiting beliefs

Always be in “learning” mode

Keeping score in games you don’t need to—or can’t—win

Question the rules of the games you do play