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Emotional Control Techniques: 10 effective strategies

Emotional Control Techniques: 10 effective strategies

March 29, 2024

Any event, however simple, arouses very different emotions. This is because a large part of our brain, the Limbic system , takes care of them and makes the emotions are so ingrained to the nature of the human being that we can consider that they are part of us and our way of reacting to the world.

Emotional control techniques

Each one of the memories that make up our life story has an emotional charge associated with it, and that is there is nothing that makes us feel more alive than emotions . Perhaps for this reason, one of its great icons of representatives is the figure of the heart, the organ that maintains our lives. Emotions make us get the best out of ourselves, but they can also bring out the worst in our being, and with this I do not mean only negative emotions such as anger or fear, because even an excessive load of positive emotions such as joy can lead us to euphoria and with it the lack of control of our behavior.


For this reason almost none of our emotions eludes the filter of the awareness . If we take into account that we continually feel, we will easily recognize that we also continually channel or repress our feelings, so that we all have a certain emotional control that we execute automatically and therefore unconsciously. But despite this control we have, partly learned and partly written in our genetic material, all people at some point in our lives have felt disturbed or out of control due to our emotional experiences.

Feelings and emotions are creating poso

We all know that feelings alter our thinking. In fact, many of the psychological and psychiatric disorders often arise as the result of a disproportionate emotional response that the person is unable to master. In the 30s of the last century the psychoanalyst Franz Alexander discovered that people who repress their feelings had high blood pressure permanently.


The repressed emotions become overflowing looking for release and produce the psychosomatization , which consists in the expression of the psychological through physical symptoms, in a way that the body also becomes ill. But the key to getting along with our emotions is not to not suppress them, because not suppressing them in any way can lead to other types of even more serious disorders, and get you into more than one mess that you can regret. In this sense, I would like to recommend that you read the article by Bertrand Regader, called "The 10 essential rules for releasing the emotional burden", where you will learn other techniques to manage your emotions.

We can not disconnect or choose our emotions, but we can try to drive them through emotional control, which should not be understood as a form of repression of emotions , but as a way to regulate them, and thus be able to modify our emotional and sentimental state, when necessary. The objective of control techniques is to avoid that when a negative emotion is triggered, we drag and express it in an overflowing way that we can later regret. Here are some techniques to help you control your emotions and feelings.


Non-cognitive techniques to regulate emotions

Although psychologists do not like to prescribe avoiding or running away from situations (avoidance and flight coping style is ineffective in problem solving), in the case of controlling negative emotions, I, like many other colleagues, I will make an exception and I will state that the first and Simpler technique of emotional control is learning to avoid what generates negative emotions , whether they are people or situations, like trying to avoid a person who overwhelms us every time we see her, not going to an event that we know that our ex-partner is going to attend, or if we are on a diet avoiding having to face prohibited foods, for example.

Deep breathing techniques

Another of the simplest and most useful techniques for controlling both emotions and physiological reactions, before, during and after dealing with emotionally intense situations, is deep breathing. On the one hand because it oxygenates our organs and makes the brain work better, and on the other hand because relaxes and with it manages to calm us down .

There are multiple techniques to perform it, a well known is to perform the phases of breathing by counting, this count can be varied since we all have different breathing rhythms and it is not about forcing the breath, the ideal is to find the number that better suits ours. An example of this way of performing deep breathing is as follows:

  • Inspire deeply while mentally counting up to 5
  • Keep Breathe while mentally counting up to 4
  • Loose the air while mentally counting up to 10
  • (Repeat several times until you feel more relaxed)

In this way we will obtain a slow breathing and a little more intense than our normal breathing . You can check that you perform the breathing correctly by placing one hand on the chest and another on the abdomen, you are doing correctly if breathing only moves the hand of the abdomen (for this reason deep breathing is also called abdominal or diaphragmatic) .

Cognitive techniques to regulate emotions

When we live a negative emotion, our attention is focused on the thoughts that maintain that active emotion and if we continuously turn those thoughts around, we strengthen the emotions. But, nevertheless, if we think less about the event that brought out the negative emotion, it diminishes. We see in this fact how emotion and thought are closely linked.

For the Cognitive-Behavioral Psychology Human psychology is expressed in three levels that are in constant interaction, as the following scheme shows:

As I said earlier, emotions can not be changed, but since emotion and thought go hand in hand if we change our thinking we can regulate both our emotions and our actions. This is the fundamental principle of cognitive techniques such as those presented below.

Positive affirmations

It is already part of popular knowledge that thinking positively makes us feel better, we can even find brands in the market that have made positive affirmations a form of 'branding' and sell us a product appealing to emotion. So if positive affirmations have become so popular it must be because they must work. In order to fill our mind with positive affirmations we have to empty it of negative thoughts, for it, first we must detect which are the thoughts that generate, maintain or increase our negative emotions and make us feel sad, angry, anxious, frightened, etc.

Once identified, we have to replace them with more positive ones, for this, although it can be done mentally, I recommend the annotation of each negative thought and the thought that replaces it. Once this is done, you just have to put it into practice and each time the negative thought appears, change it to a positive one automatically. This seems so simple will reduce both our cognitive and physical anxiety.

Stopping the thought

This strategy seeks the control of thought and can be used before, during or after the situation that generates negative emotion. It's about when you start to notice yourself, nervous or upset, pay attention to the thoughts you're having, and identify the negative connotations it has for you. Once this little analysis is done, give orders to yourself that you seek the interruption of the thought that evokes the emotion, like: "STOP! "," Stop! "," Ya! "," Enough! ". After this self-instruction replaces the thoughts detected as negative by positive affirmations .

The only difficulty of this simple technique is that to identify the thoughts evoked by negative emotions and turn them into positives, a little practice is needed.

Mental rehearsal

Sometimes when a person knows that he has to do something for which he does not feel sure of himself, like speaking in public or performing some type of test, for example an exam, we anticipate the anxiety of the moment and we establish it at the moment current, which generates that the anxiety before the act is increasing, since with the negative thoughts they are reinforced negatively and one enters an ascending spiral.

To prepare ourselves to face these situations and combat the anxiety that they generate, the technique of mental essay It is ideal, apart from simple. It consists of visualizing that the dreaded situation develops without problems, and you feel safe and relaxed because you are satisfied with your way of acting. You can also repeat to yourself slogans like: I'm doing well, I'm relaxed, the public likes it ... this will reinforce the technique. Plan your action of the act and practice it mentally in a repetitive way. With each mental test the level of anxiety will be reduced and this feeling will give you more confidence to overcome the situation successfully.

Change of perspective

People tend to make two big mistakes that can affect our emotional balance. On the one hand we are egocentric and we consider that our point of view is the only correct or valid one, and on the other, we grant the other intentions that may not be correct. This can lead to arguments or to feeling bad for no reason. That is why trying to change our perspective on people or facts can be useful. There are several ways to change the perspective we have and adopt a different one, then I will expose two.

The first one I recommend is expand the focus of the situation , because the closer we are to something, the less we see.For this we can move away from the situation literally or mentally trying to see the situation as a whole and analyze the situation again from this perspective. Another way to change perspective is put yourself in the place of the other , and think what that person may be feeling or what circumstances may be motivating their behavior.

In this way, from the empathy, It is very likely that we acquire more tolerant attitudes towards that person and reduce our negative feelings towards him. If for example you are in a restaurant and you are starting to get angry because the waiter does not take care of you, think about maybe you have a lot of work or something has gone wrong in the kitchen, how overwhelmed you must feel at that moment, and this It will surely help you to feel more relaxed and have more patience.

Concluding

The techniques I have presented in this paper, despite being simple, have proven effective in clinical practice, and therefore few psychotherapists refuse to use them in their daily professional practice, but like most things in life to turn it into a skill ours need to be practiced. If you manage to incorporate them into your repertoire of behaviors, it is very likely that you will achieve greater control of emotions and feelings that come out in your day to day.


3 Ways to Control Your Emotion - Motivational Video (March 2024).


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