Deal With Your Emotions

How to Deal With Emotions Positively & Recognise Your Emotional Triggers

“Feelings can’t be ignored, no matter how unjust or ungrateful they seem.” ― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

Emotional freedom is an important factor in having a happy life and the ability to change your emotional state is a valuable skill that can actually be learned.  There are hundreds of different studies on the effects of emotions on your physical well—being.  Emotions actually have the power to heal as well as harm you.  It’s fascinating to learn what power emotions actually have.

Expressing affection and gratitude for loved ones has been proven to reduce cholesterol levels while arguments with them cause a surge in cytokines – high levels of cytokines are linked to cancer, diabetes, and heart disease.

Suppressing anger in confrontations doubles the risk of dying from heart attacks, strokes or cancer.  Letting go of that anger in an angry confrontation which may only last a short while can cause surges in heart rate and blood pressure by as much as 19%.  Bottom line, you need to find a middle ground for dealing with anger.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

One of the best ways to reduce these negative effects of anger is forgiveness.  Accepting that a negative thing has happened and forgiving yourself, the other person, the event, can actually improve your immune system and increase your life span.  The practice of forgiveness can lower blood pressure and improve cardiovascular health.

Jimmy Valvano, the greatly loved basketball coach, gave a speech shortly before he passed away which I will always remember.  He said there are three things you should do every day, laugh, think, and cry. He said if you laugh, spend time in thought, and you cry seven days a week, you are going to have something special.  In addition to the fact that the speech was very moving, he was on to something.

Laughing increases the levels of beta—endorphins which boost moods by 27%, it increases production of the human growth hormone which improves sleep and enhances cellular repair by 87%.  Even the anticipation of laughter can reduce stress hormones like cortisol and adrenalin.

Spending time in thought, appreciating your loved ones and being grateful boost immunity, lower blood pressure and speed healing.  Gratitude and expression of love trigger release of oxytocin, increase blood oxygenation, and create more harmonious electrical activity in the heart and brain.

Crying is also good for you.  Emotional tears actually contain high levels of neurotransmitters and hormones associated with stress.  Crying actually removes the stress from your body while holding tears back can result in impaired memory, poor digestion, and weakened immunity.

Whether Jimmy V knew the scientific facts or not, I don’t know, but he was definitely onto something!

Emotions can trigger a lot of stress, and stress is not necessarily bad.  Short periods of stress have been proven to boost immunity levels as well as raise levels of cancer—fighting molecules.  These effects can last for weeks after the stressful situation ends.  Long-term stress, on the other hand, can be very debilitating.  Your immune system is compromised, your thought processes are impaired and you can become depressed or even infertile.  Chronic stress significantly raises the risk of heart disease and diabetes.

Optimally, instead of having too much stress in your life, you should try falling in love.  Apparently falling in love raises levels of nerve growth factor for a year!  This helps restore the nervous system and creates new brain cells.  In the absence of another person to fall in love with, try falling in love with yourself, loving yourself will lead to peace, contentment, and more brain power.

“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” — Oscar Wilde

Negative emotions affect your health negatively, decreasing serotonin and dopamine production, repressing the immune system, and increasing risks of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.  This is just one of the many good reasons for trying to minimize the effects of negative emotions and maximize the positive ones.

Feeling good, having a positive outlook, experiencing positive emotions has proven healing effects.  Thoughts and emotions influence your body in ways that scientists continue to discover each day.  Positive thinking and optimism can have as much of an impact on your body as diet and exercise.

Expressing yourself, meditating or quiet moments of thought, positivity, communication with friends, and the wisdom to seek professional help when you can’t do it alone all contribute to mental and physical well-being. Experience your emotions, express them without judgement or attachment.  When you repress your emotions, especially negative ones, you are opening yourself up to health problems including digestive disorders and high blood pressure.

Awareness is key, understanding and knowing what our thoughts and emotions are is essential.  It is natural not to think of the positive emotions as they propel us forward.  Because negative emotions heighten our defensive mechanisms, we tend to concentrate on those.  We spend more time concentrating on the negative than the positive because the negative is hard and the positive, well, the positive, we take it for granted.  We naturally focus on the negative more than the positive because we are trying to find solutions.

The beauty of emotions is that positive emotions can reverse the effects of negative ones.  Experiencing a mix of positive and negative emotions is natural, I doubt that many people live in an unadulterated state of positivity.  We are human, after all, and sorrow, fear and anger are going to overcome us now and again.  The key is to try to learn from those negative experiences and create more positive emotions in your life than negative ones.

Aristotle’s Rhetoric states that the primary emotions are:

• Anger and Calmness

• Friendship or Love and Enmity or Hatred

• Fear and Confidence

• Shame and Lack of Shame

• Kindness and Unkindness

• Envy or Jealousy and Content

1. What state of mind are you in when a particular emotion arises?

1. Who are the people that usually trigger this emotion in you?

1. What is the situation, what are the grounds that cause you to have that emotion?

Being aware of emotions and how they affect us is a great step in moving forward, in understanding our emotions we can control them in such a way that we experience more positive than negative.  You can’t avoid feeling negative emotions and they serve their purpose, it is right to be afraid some of the time, it is OK to feel anger, it is OK to be sad.  There are no right or wrong emotions in that sense, it is how we deal with them that makes the difference. Tune into your feelings, be aware of them and how they affect you.  Try to name your emotions as you feel them, quickly say to yourself, “I feel happy right now because…” or “I feel sad right now because…”

Being aware of your emotions and accepting them, good or bad can go a long way toward being a happier, healthier person. Both negative and positive emotions are good.  It is good to express them, to understand them.  Negative emotions, once understood, can be strong catalysts for change.  Positive emotions show us what we enjoy, where we find our happiness.  We need both to be whole as human beings. If you find yourself lethargic and feeling negative, make yourself aware of your feelings, feel them and get to the core of why you are feeling the way you are.  Bottom line is, you feel how you feel, don’t beat yourself up about it or guilt trip yourself because you are feeling negative.   Realize you have a choice – to stay where you are or to change it. There are several ways to change your emotional state:

• Be aware of your state and observe it as an outsider – as a detached outsider, what do you say about the state you are in.
• Think about how you want to feel and remember a time you felt that way, be there, see it, feel the positive feelings. Make the good memories intense by imagining a bigger picture, more intense smells and sounds. Feel the effects this has on you.
• Change your posture, smile, put a lift in your step and pretend you feel more positive. As you do this, your thinking will also change.  Exercise or go for a brisk walk, this will help release your beta endorphins and enhance your mood.
• Breathe deeply – inhale quickly, exhale slowly. This changes the levels of carbon dioxide in the blood.  Just as laughter makes you feel better, so will breathing exercises and release those beta endorphins.
• Relax your muscles, particularly face, jaw and neck. Tension builds up in these areas and relaxing your muscles can make a big difference.  Start at the top of your head and go down to your toes or vice versa, it will help reduce stress.
• See things differently, when you are in a funk or unresourceful state, you have a bit of tunnel vision, your vision is concentrated on one area, and you are unaware of what is in your peripheral vision. Expand your vision, look up, look around, breathe deeply and see things differently.
• Focus on another person, involve yourself with them and their concerns, and try to do something positive for them. This will help energize you and change your focus and perceptions.
• Use associations you have made to pleasant experiences – these are your resource anchors and can help you lift your mood.
• Food is psychoactive and has real effects on your metabolism and eating the correct foods can affect your energy levels and moods.

Regardless of what your state is at any given time, you can change it and if you are having problems changing it, keep in mind that no state lasts forever.   The key is to be aware of where you are and what you feel and call upon and build inner resources to deal with what life throws at you on a daily basis.

There are many different techniques for changing emotional states.  I particularly like structured visualization.  This is often referred to as the Swish technique used in NLP (Neuron Linguistic Programming).  You can follow a series of steps to affect a change in your behaviors or habits.

1. Identify the problem.
2. Create a picture (the cue picture) that identifies the problem. What always precedes the problem?  Find a visual trigger for the problem (this can be in your thoughts or an actual picture or scene).  See the problem as an achievement, I know this is counter-intuitive but try it.
3. Identify two features in the cue picture that give it power. Pretend you have your remote control for your TV in hand and increase the size and brightness of the image.
4. Take a short pause and breathe deeply.
5. Create a picture of your desired self. See yourself if you did not have this problem.  Imagine the sort of person that could easily solve the problem or not have it at all.  Imagine yourself having more choices and being more capable.  Make the image realistic, motivating and attractive.  Dissociate yourself from it and view it.
6. Take a short pause and breathe deeply.
7. Close your eyes. Put both pictures in a frame.  Make the problem picture big and bright – identify with it, be in it.  Put the desired self-picture in a small dark corner of the frame and dissociate from it.
8. Now make the self-image picture big and bright and let it fill the frame. Do it very fast and imagine a sound that goes with it (swiiishh or whoosh – whatever works for you).
9. Open your eyes and make the frame go blank, look at something else.
10. Repeat steps 7-9 three times fast – always take a short pause and breathe deeply in between swishes.
11. Try to access the problem state again. You may not get the picture back in the same way or you may start considering the problem in the past tense.

This technique may take some time to master as it does entail several steps, but after practicing it a while, it will come quite naturally.

Regardless of what your state is at any given time, you can change it and if you are having problems changing it, keep in mind that no state lasts forever.   The key is to be aware of where you are and what you feel and call upon and build inner resources to deal with what life throws at you on a daily basis. You can use both negative and positive thoughts as agents for change.

Empower yourself by facing negative thoughts head-on and dealing with them as they come up.  Start looking at the glass as half-full instead of half-empty.  Being aware of your thought patterns and in touch with your emotions, both positive and negative, will assist you in vanquishing the demons of negativity.

Thoughts and emotions are part and parcel of every second of every day, whether you are awake or sleeping, engaged or disengaged, your mind never stops.  Just as the heart continues to beat, your mind continues to process everything that comes your way.

Your heart beats approximately 104,000 times a day and your subconscious mind processes states that the subconscious mind processes 20,000,000 environmental stimuli per second versus 40 environmental stimuli interpreted by the conscious mind in that same second.  Experts estimate that we have anywhere from 12,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day, with something of a consensus at 50,000 thoughts.  For every two or three beats of your heart, you have a new thought.  Not easy to grasp is it? I don’t know about you but I don’t even know how the brain can process 40 stimuli per second. Nor do I know how we can have anywhere from 12,000 to 70,000 thoughts per day, depending on what study you want to believe.

Your thoughts shape who you are. What are you thinking each day?  What are your prevalent thoughts and emotions?  Getting in touch with yourself and understanding your thoughts and emotions can be a wonderful adventure.  Be aware, don’t be afraid to feel, don’t beat yourself up for whatever emotions you have.  Experience and understand and enjoy the ride on the emotional roller coaster we call life.

EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS

Emotional triggers play a significant role in our lives, in how we feel, how we respond, and ultimately in our successes or failures in life.  Once you know what your triggers are, you can determine how you respond to them and understand your ingrained patterns and habits.   Triggers result in the creation of habits and patterns; we learn to become subconsciously competent.  Triggers stimulate actions and may change emotional states.

Weather can be a trigger, as weather affects our moods and elicits emotional responses, happiness, for example, on a sunny day and conversely, a sour mood when it is cloudy and cold.  Words and sounds can be triggers, as you respond to your name, music, sounds, and vocal tones.

Touch and physical comfort or discomfort, a favourite chair, a warm bath, a gesture, have their own triggers and smell and taste, have their own associated states, eliciting emotional responses and reactions.  Smells are particularly powerful triggers as your olfactory senses elicit immediate and visceral responses.  Intense experiences and traumas can result in phobias and less intense experiences combine to create our emotional and habitual responses.

Do you get butterflies in your stomach when you think of certain things?  Does a certain song make you happy or sad?  Does a smell evoke memories or emotions?  Are you overly sensitive or do you find yourself reacting out of proportion to certain things?

You need to know what is triggering your emotions, what makes you feel what you feel.  Not to get all “inner child” or Freudian on you, but knowing what triggers you respond to, what sparks your emotions, and why, is important.  Most of us have very little control over our emotional triggers. We may not even be entirely clear what is making us so irritable, or why we take an instant dislike to someone.  They are there and they spring up unexpectedly, our reactions to triggers are almost instinctual, they are deeply rooted somewhere in our mind, body, or soul.

Emotional triggers can be as simple as hating a name because someone of that same name picked on you as a child.  They can be extremely complex and multileveled – all caught up in family relationships and self-esteem, a tangle of different triggers that can set off a machine gun effect.

In drug and alcohol treatment, triggers are discussed over and over again.  What are your triggers, what makes you want to drink?  How do you avoid them or deal with them?  Triggers can be positive or negative, make you happy or sad, but no matter what the trigger is, chances are you will not be able to avoid it.  You cannot close yourself off from the world and you cannot close yourself off from yourself, so you need to at least know what the root of your emotions is, and be aware of the signals that you may be wandering into emotional quicksand.

The subconscious uses behaviour patterns that have been learned over the course of life to respond and react to events.  This harkens back to the very essence of survival instincts but problems arise when our learned responses due to emotional triggers are negative.  Emotional triggers can seriously skew your perspective and reactions to emotional triggers are often fully out of proportion to the actually event that is happening currently.

To get a handle on your triggers, you need to first ask yourself a few questions:

• Is there something that, every time I see, causes an unpleasant emotional reaction in me?
• Is there something that, every time I hear, causes an unpleasant emotional reaction in me?
• Is there something that, every time I smell, causes an unpleasant emotional reaction in me?
• What topics of conversation create a strong reaction in me?
• Are there words, phrases, or names that stir a particularly strong emotion in me?
• Who are the people who set me off?
• What places trigger me the most?
• Who would I like to avoid?
• What situations would I like to avoid?
• Given a chance to do it over, what people and experiences would I avoid?

This exercise is best accomplished with pen and paper at hand, and when you have time and a quiet place to think a bit.  Ask yourself the questions, write down the answers, do this until you cannot think of anything else.  If you don’t have many triggers on your list, go a bit deeper in yourself.   Triggers can be emotional bombs and even thinking about them can be painful.

You need to accept your emotional triggers for what they are.  It is not an easy task.  Delving into your emotional triggers can be a dark place, where the hell did you get all this emotional baggage from?  Why do you keep carrying it around?

Once you determine what your triggers are, you will feel a sense of relief and peace; you know all the things that trigger your emotions, so knowing that, you can deal with them.  Right?  Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy, your triggers are part and parcel of who you are and they cannot be erased with mere knowledge of them.  Here is the rub, they will come back again, and probably just when you think you have the knack of positive thinking down and have a good grip on starting to realize your dream.  Just because you know what they are, doesn’t mean they still won’t affect you.  This is an on-going process, part of the daily maintenance of your emotional engine.

“Let’s not forget that the little emotions are the great captains of our lives and we obey them without realizing it.” — Vincent Van Gogh

You may, for example, determine today that you will deal with a person that triggers negative emotions in you by not speaking to him.  But what happens when he calls you, or it’s his birthday?  It’s an on-going, never-ending evolution, and this is one of the reasons for journaling and ensuring that you are aware of your emotional triggers.  When you are aware of the triggers, you can better deal with situations now and in the future.

One of the real problems with emotional triggers is that you often react disproportionately to events if there is an emotional trigger involved.  Knowing what your triggers are and why they affect you is a key step in understanding your reactions and controlling your thoughts so you can remain in a positive rather than a negative state.

SEEBEDO Your Emotions

SEE how your emotions affect you and your life.  Know what your emotional triggers are.

BE aware of your emotions and be sure to respond to things accordingly instead of based on emotional triggers.

DO things proactively, act on your thoughts and act positive.