Some basic techniques to deal with your negative emotions are given below; instant techniques are given first. Use ‘Emotion Journal’ technique for recurring irritations or mood-offs. Explore these techniques and find out what is more effective for you. Practice until you master a few of them.
Basic steps in dealing with any negative emotion
- Become aware that you are having a particular emotion. Identify and label it. (Examples: stress, worry, anger, irritation, hurt, resentment, sadness, guilt, regret, shame, envy, disappointment)
- Accept your emotions. Don’t deny it, don’t repress it.
- Release it; visualize that it is passing away as a cloud passing overhead (use any one strategy given below, if needed).
1. Breathing
Take a few deep breaths. Each time you exhale, imagine your negative emotion/energy is flowing out and when you inhale positive energy is flowing into your body and mind. Feel the relaxation you have. Imagine every cell of your body is vibrating with positive energy/emotions such as joy, peace, and love.
2. Command and switch
In this approach, you identify the emotion you want to eliminate and instruct your mind to stop the current negative thought. For example, if a have worrying thought, simply say “stop” or “cancel that thought” in your mind and then quickly imagine a successful outcome.
3. Question and switch
Asking questions can interrupt your thoughts. Ask these questions: 1) What emotion I want to release? What emotion I want to bring in, to this venue or situation?
For example, you are about to enter into a room for a meeting. Ask yourself “What emotion I want to bring in to the meeting?” Say, you want to bring in ‘energy and enthusiasm’; just take a deep breath and feel the same – you are filled with energy and enthusiasm.
You may be entering your home after a hectic day at the office. You can ask “What emotion I want to release now and what emotion I want to bring into my home”. You may want to release stress and bring in happiness/love/fun to the home. Imagine you are releasing the stress and leaving them behind the gate/door. Imagine your mind is filled with happiness and love as you enter your home.
Another useful question to ask yourself, when you feel bad is “Is feeling bad going to make the situation any better?” In that moment, find something that makes you feel good and reach for the thought that feels best. This may be followed by activities (given below) for diverting your mind.
4. Meditate
You can collect and keep a few affirmations or picture quotes that generates positive emotions in you. You may even memorize some of them. Reciting/recalling verses from scriptures can recharge you with instantaneous power.
5. Divert your mind
You can reduce negative feelings by diverting your mind. You may do activities such as below:
- Go out for a coffee or for a walk
- Eat a chocolate
- Wash your face
- Count from 10 to 1 or from 100 to 1
- Talk with a friend / call home
- Listen to a peppy song / inspirational talk
- Go thru your list of accomplishments
- Clean the clutter
- Attempt some trivial items in the ‘To-do-list’
- Find a silver lining (about the problem bothering you)
- Make yourself laugh (funny videos on YouTube, humorous websites, amusing photos)
More approaches to divert mind in the article Relieve Stress
6. Express Gratitude
Expressing gratitude is a powerful way to eliminate negative feelings. Ask yourself “What am I grateful for?” Write down what you are grateful for. Express gratitude to the people you care about. Send someone a thank you email. Do someone a favor.
7. List your emotions in an ‘Emotion Journal’
This is powerful technique to eliminate recurring negative thoughts or irritations or mood-offs.
Create a table (on a sheet of paper or in Excel) with the following columns and keep noting down your emotions, as they occur.
- Date
- Emotion (name of the emotion you felt)
- Trigger (What triggered the emotion – event, person, situation)
- Analysis
- Action to take
- Outcome
Date: Date (may also include time) when you felt the emotion
Emotion: Label the negative feeling – worry, stress, anger, sadness, ..
Trigger: What triggered the emotion – event, person, or situation
Analysis:
Pay attention to what you are feeling and try to understand why you are feeling that way. Take a few deep breaths that will help you to relax and think more clearly. Think of the events that happened during the day. What are the events, negative experiences (self-talk about your past bad experiences), situations, or persons influenced your current negative emotion. Listen to the message of the negative emotion. Negative emotion is basic to human being and has a purpose. It is a self-defence mechanism to protect you and is only a feedback. So accept and appreciate the negative thought. Ask questions such as “How can I see this in a positive frame of mind (reframe technique) so that I can respond in a useful way? What can I learn from it? What needs to be corrected?”
Action to take:
Identify a few action items that may reduce the intensity of the emotion and also recurrence of the same. Your action items could include the following strategies.
Accept: Accept the situation or person as it is. The trigger may be a random thing and there is nothing to do about it. Or the issue is not significant enough and it is not worth putting your effort to fix it.
Learn: What did you learn from the event – you may add that to your journal or diary.
Reframe: Try to see the beneficial part of such incident. See the issue from a different perspective or from a third-party perspective and get some insights. This may reduce the intensity of emotion and you may even appreciate it.
Corrective action: Identify any corrective action that you can take which will rectify the problem and prevent its recurrence.
Note: If you are really upset about something, hold off on actually executing your plan until you have given yourself a chance to calm down. Responses that seemed like a good idea in the moment may seem less ideal with a cooler head.
Outcome:
A few days after taking the corrective action, note down the outcome you observed.
If you are looking for strategies to address specific emotional pains such as stress, anger or hurt, please refer ‘Emotion on Demand‘.
Sometimes your persisting issues may have some causes which may not be obvious to you, and the approach to take may require a detailed orientation. Then you may need some support to get insights for developing a clear strategy. Also note that fixing certain issues may need a change in work/life-style or habits; it may involve reflecting on your priorities and setting goals aligned to what truly matters for you.
cmentor.in 