Why Am I Upset That My Life is Easy

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When your psychological concatenation gets yanked, it's all besides easy to go overwhelmed by powerful feelings. But losing control of your emotions is never a good thing. It makes responding effectively to the situation just about impossible. So it's crucial to develop a skill set that enables you to loosen the tight grip your emotions may have on you.

The 20 tools and tips below, executed equally soon after your upset every bit tenable, volition minimize the likelihood that your overwrought reaction volition prompt you lot to say or practise something you'll later regret—whether it's cussing someone out, pummeling the nearest affair at hand, or keeping all your intense emotions inside and ending upwards with a bad headache.

The same is true of negative feelings directed not toward another but yourself. If you "run" with these feelings, they're likely to run over you.

Here are 20 suggestions to "triumph over" your bad feelings:

i. Exhale—and Relax. Your whole body tightens up when some perceived "assault" on your sensibilities catapults you into the fight-flying mode. In particular, your breathing speeds up and becomes constricted. As soon as you're aware that something negative is strongly resonating within you, take several slow, deep breaths—possibly while repeating to yourself the discussion "calm" or "relax."

When something throws yous off balance, it's critical that you "re-heart" yourself. Emotions are best experienced to a moderate degree, so when your upset reaches an eight, 9, or 10, it's urgent that you lower its intensity. Slowing downwards your breathing represents an platonic first footstep.

Manifestly, whatever else yous tin can do to relax volition also assistance you lot regain self-command. Try to visualize a tranquil scene—lying peacefully on a private beach, while the sun and warm breeze soothe your whole body. Additionally, all your other senses are brought into play. Imagine yourself "sifting" the fine granules of sand, smelling the sea table salt and fresh air, and hearing the pleasantly rhythmic sound of the surf. The more successfully yous can daydream yourself in such an idyllic environment, the sooner you tin more positively reconceive a situation that immediately left you lot feeling furious, helpless, or dejected.

1 class of relaxation isn't necessarily better than another. Consider some form of meditation, self-hypnosis, yoga, tai chi—or even just peering into a fish tank.

2. Identify and Challenge the Thoughts Underlying Your Upset. Typically, what causes you to emotionally overreact are beliefs that are exaggerated or distorted. Ask yourself:

• Am I reducing this person who so disturbed me to a ii-dimensional characterization? Can I force myself to find some positive traits in them that would help me regard them in a more favorable light—mitigating my animosity toward them?
• Am I listen-reading? Am I attributing the worst possible motives to their behavior—maybe considering it makes my reaction to them feel that much more than righteous and justified?
• Am I "fortunetelling"? Making a prediction that they'll always and forever disappoint me considering they're so disappointing me now? And is this deduction actually reasonable?
• Am I magnifying or catastrophizing the seriousness—or severity—of what just happened, or what was just said to me, making my and so-heated reaction "over the elevation" also?
• Are my "shoulds" or "ought to'due south" compelling me to overreact to the other person in means that deny the authenticity of their own behavioral standards—what's "right" or "fair" to them, every bit opposed to my own rules and ideals?

Inasmuch as your feelings link directly to your thoughts, when your emotions start to overwhelm your amend judgment, y'all need to accept a step back and explore the rationality of these thoughts, earnestly attempting to "adjust" them.

3. Wait for Positives. Y'all can alleviate your emotional distress if y'all de-focus from your immediate experience of injustice, fearfulness, hurt, or thwarting, and go yourself to re-focus on whatever positives might come up out of what just transpired. It's disquisitional to explore what you lot might learn from this feel that could truly help you in the hereafter.

4. Suspend Your Point of View—and Take on the Other Person's. Over again, in your hyper-aroused emotional state, this will challenge you. But if you lot make the effort to place with another's viewpoint—and specially their needs, wants, thoughts, and feelings—your upset feelings are likely to diminish. Tin can you go yourself to exist less self-righteous, less cocky-centered? If you consider the possible legitimacy of where the other person is coming from and their cocky-interest, information technology can alter your thinking in ways that will soften your sorry feelings.

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5. Become More than Mindful. Essentially, what mindfulness is most is not letting your feelings take over. What y'all need to do is become more aware of the detail feeling that'south been aroused, sit down with it, and establish plenty distance from it to process through information technology. Don't identify with it, or let yourself to become immersed in it. Rather, imagine yourself exterior yourself, curiously describing to yourself the "phenomenon" that is this emotion, and then motility past information technology, re-centering your attention on something else.

The sad consequence of getting entangled in your emotions is that your best judgment, or college neocortical functioning, is no longer available. Information technology'southward offline, so your power to respond wisely to whatsoever set you off is seriously compromised. It'southward also important to remind yourself that, regardless of the force of your feeling you don't need to human activity on information technology.

six. Don't Judge Yourself on the Basis of Your Feelings. You may well be plagued by too many negative self-thoughts as it is. Repeated so many times that it'south become a truism, feelings themselves are neither right nor wrong, they simply are. If they're truly reflexive, they can overtake you in an instant. Furthermore, they tin exist precipitated by all sorts of past experience—and the "programming" instilled in you lot from various messages you received from others, especially your family of origin. In fact, the combination of your temperament and everything that's always happened to you lot determines what emotion an consequence will trigger in yous.

At some bespeak, it's essential to go more aware of what sets you off. Regardless of what emotions you're susceptible to, they don't have to be viewed as saying anything especially negative about you lot. Finally, you want to teach yourself to acknowledge all your feelings as genuine, and and then justified.

7. Apply Self-compassion as Needed. If you lot're in the habit of chirapsia yourself upwardly, your cocky-accusations are no better for you than losing your temper with someone else. You lot need to tell yourself, for instance, that making a mistake doesn't make you a bad person—or incompetent, unworthy, or stupid. A great way of calming yourself down is but to recognize that old tapes of self-denigration accept gotten triggered, and that information technology's time to be as considerate, kind, and forgiving of yourself as you've shown the power to exist with others.

8. "Accept Pains" to Heal What You Experience. If y'all're feeling unwanted or unworthy, tin can you lot offer yourself some reality-based reassurance? Until y'all've worked out your deeper questions, you may still be vulnerable to nagging feelings almost not being good enough.

Even so, if for example, you're not an bookish genius, can y'all ask yourself whether defective superior intelligence actually means you're not smart enough? You hardly accept to be "super-smart" to handle about of the things that come up in life. When a "not good enough" plan surfaces, you lot demand to find effective means to counter it—to tell yourself that at that place's much physical evidence that the truth about you is far more favorable than whatever trying state of affairs caused y'all to dubiety yourself.

9. Take Advisable Action. If you're feeling lonely, is there someone you tin can phone call? If you're feeling lethargic or apathetic, might y'all exist able to walk briskly out of it? If you're feeling anxious, can yous explore, and alter, the underlying thoughts or beliefs tied to your nervous land? And if you take unresolved frustration or anger with someone, tin you call or write to that person, or arrange a meeting? Can you assertively—non aggressively—get the matter resolved? Many times relatively simple things tin be done to alter a feeling that's gotten you down.

x. Reach Out to a Friend or Relative. Complementing the above, your negative emotion or mood might dissipate if y'all overcome any firsthand resistance you have to reach out to someone? Maybe an individual who would exist set up to offer you the agreement and emotional support that at nowadays may be missing. Typically, when yous're beset with aversive feelings, at that place'due south nothing better than a friend to assist you lot change a pessimistic, or otherwise self-defeating, perspective.

11. Don't Get Carried Away by the Feeling. The moment yous're conscious of how strong, or upsetting, your emotional reaction is, do a reality bank check. Perhaps you are overreacting because—unconsciously—what just happened reminded you of something earlier that's still negatively charged for you. Bring yourself back to the here-and-now and reassess the situation as existence less fearful, inflammatory, or hopeless than it initially seemed. You'll cope much better in the present if you lot can forbid by sensitivities from undermining your more mature, rational judgment.

12. Don't Get "Locked Into" the Feeling. If y'all can tell yourself that this feeling will laissez passer, in fourth dimension it will die down. Of course, it volition do then sooner if y'all make a conscious effort to alter the negative thinking that's feeding the feeling. In that location's a paradoxical expression: "Yous always become what yous resist." Mindfully let the feeling exist while increasingly detaching yourself from it. Eventually, it will leave on its own—hopefully, replaced by something much less negative.

13. Have Full "Ownership" of the Feeling. As long every bit you blame others for what, emotionally, is going on inside you, you lot'll render yourself helpless to outcome any change in your feeling. Altering this stance isn't really most giving up your viewpoint toward another's possible wrong-doing. It's merely about accepting that whatever they said or did relates to themselves quite as much equally information technology relates to you lot. There's no need to "hold onto" the words or deeds of another when they've made you lot feel bad. Since your feelings belong exclusively to you, you can change them just by reevaluating the meaning you gave to what originally provoked yous.

fourteen. Journal Away the Feeling. One powerful fashion of overcoming a distressing feeling is, through journaling, to freely ventilate, or "discharge" it. If y'all notice yourself stewing over something, it can be extremely useful to write it out—partly as a way of clarifying and "integrating" the feeling, and partly to console or comfort yourself. Such an act tin can enable you lot to become at least temporary closure on the matter, and perchance even expand your perspective so that you find information technology less disturbing. You can even write a letter specifically to the person who antagonized you or made y'all experience hurt or abandoned.

Sending the letter, yet, is something else. Once you've managed to regain some semblance of calm, yous have to ask yourself whether, realistically, such direct advice will actually help improve the situation. If you retrieve information technology might, you'll no doubt desire to edit it—to moderate a tone that may be overbearing, too accusative, or vindictive. Still, the simple act of honoring your feelings by giving "voice" to them tin can assistance you brand peace with them. Seeing your thoughts and feelings "laid out" on the page may do wonders in helping you come to emotional terms with any upset you lot. What may not be resolvable with someone else may yet exist resolved inside yourself.

15. Avoid What Routinely Provokes You lot. If there are individuals or things that typically button your buttons, then, if viable, become alee and eliminate them—or at least "take a vacation" from them. Nosotros all accept enough stresses to deal with without taking on people and things that aren't germane to our welfare. So it may be time to reassess what you might let go of that's gratuitously contributing to your emotional vulnerability.

16. Yeah, Bear witness Cocky-compassion—but Be Conscientious About Feeling Distressing for Yourself. This one's a chip catchy. Acting with self-compassion tin can help y'all transcend such feelings as sorrow, regret, guilt, or shame. But if yous "luxuriate" or "slosh around" in diffuse feelings of self-pity, information technology tin can get nigh self-indulgent, preventing you lot from processing and moving beyond your distress to a healthier emotional state. Continuing to ruminate about your situation, whether information technology'southward i of failure or rejection, interferes with your arriving at a more than counterbalanced understanding of information technology—and so, for your own good, letting it get.

17. Become Out of Yourself. Refocusing your attention on someone else's bug stops your self-absorption in its tracks and tin be very useful in taking leave of an emotion gnawing away at you. Assisting some other in a project, or but redirecting your attention to listen sympathetically to their problems, almost always helps you feel meliorate. This is precisely why the mood of many depressed individuals lifts once they "lose" themselves in volunteer piece of work.

xviii. Bring Humor to the Rescue. If you can prompt yourself to behold the state of affairs that so provoked y'all in a less serious, more than comic, vein, then whatever you might accept taken too much to eye could lessen in severity. Get yourself to recognize its more ludicrous aspects. Information technology's been said that "life is a one-act for those who think, but a tragedy for those who feel." Can you brand an attempt to cultivate some sort of "humorous detachment" from whatever compromised your composure?

nineteen. Lower Your Tension—and Raise Your Feel-good Chemicals—Through Exercise. At its best, exercise does at least iii things for you. I, it distracts y'all from the thoughts keeping you stuck in your feelings; two, it alters your brain chemical science—gets your opiate-like endorphins flowing; and iii, it allows you to physically vent the toxic, stress-induced free energy coursing through you. It'south nigh always a good thought, through vigorous motility, to "loosen yourself up" when uptight feelings have left your whole trunk tense. If you practise with a trusted friend, the chances of your discouraged mood abating increase all the more.

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20. Nurture Yourself. Sometimes the best way to deal with painful feelings is to exist kind to yourself, to do something that affirms you're worth beingness treated better than perhaps the rocky drama of your life has at present prompted you to believe. Even if someone has fabricated you feel abandoned, you certainly don't have to abandon yourself. This may be a perfect time to take a walk in the wood, get a massage, or anything else that helps convince yous that you deserve as much tender, loving intendance as anyone else.

That's information technology. When some person or state of affairs in your life leaves you feeling anxious, depressed, or enraged, you're now armed with multiple techniques for combating these distressing feelings (and, no uncertainty, there are others). If you tin't trust your memory to access these tips when needed, become a magnet and attach a copy of this to the side of your refrigerator.

Who knows when it might come in handy?

© 2016 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.

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Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201610/emotionally-upset-20-ways-defeat-negative-feelings

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