How To Control Your Emotions

Do you want to know how to control your emotions?

Are you willing to be in charge of your emotional reactions?

You might have been living your life without recognizing or understanding your own emotions.

Or perhaps, you can’t explain why most times you can’t control your emotions?

Not being able to control your emotions can result in dire consequences than you could imagine.

This is why you must strive to control your emotions.

Hence, making you a better person overall.

Read on to find out all you need to know how to control your emotions.

How To Control Your Emotions

The ability to recognize and manage emotions is a skill that most people lack.

This is why most times you see people behave irrationally, and afterward, you find that such people are unable to explain the reason for their irrational behaviors.

Being unable to control your emotions is a serious sign of immaturity and irresponsibility.

More so, if you intend to go far in life generally, this is a must-have skill for you.

However, you need not feel bad or like a failure, if you fall into this category of people who cannot control their emotions.

There’s always room for improvement as long as you’re willing to change and become a better person, either as a business owner, working professional, or a regular individual.

Hence, the reason we have put up this blog post for you.

Before discovering some helpful tips on managing and controlling your emotions, let’s discuss why it’s difficult for some people to control their emotions.

Reasons Some People Can’t Control Their Emotional Reactions

Several factors are responsible for why most people cannot regulate their emotions, and they vary from individual to individual.

However, here a few of them;

Anxiety disorders
Lack of discipline
Stress
Traumatic events
Negative thought patterns
Lack of adequate sleep
Mental health disorder etc.

Having discovered some of the causes of lack of control of emotions, let’s discover how to better manage our emotional reactions.

Helpful Tips On How To Better Manage Your Emotions

Seeing that you’re searching for how to control your emotions, this means that your emotions are getting the better part of you, and you don’t want that.

As such, here are some helpful tips to put you on the right track to gain more control of your emotions.

Examine The Impact Of Your Emotions On You

Another thing you should know when thinking of controlling your emotions is that having strong emotions is not bad.

Rather it is when your emotions become too difficult for you to handle that it becomes bad.

For instance, there are so many kinds of emotions: happiness, love, envy, bitterness, sorrow, joy, etc.

Some are good, while some are bad.

All these emotions are what makes you a human being.

As such, they would always be a part of your personality.

Hence, this places a responsibility on you to keep these different emotions in check.

To do this, you need to constantly examine how your emotions generally impact your life and interpersonal relationships.

You need to ask yourself; is it making you a better person, or is it making life more difficult for you?

Are you ruining your interpersonal relationships because you find it difficult to control your anger?

Or are you becoming a jealous and obsessive lover/partner in your personal relationships because you can’t control the strong emotions of love you feel?

By realizing how your emotions are affecting/impacting you negatively, it becomes easy to begin to take caution in how you express your emotions.

Consequently, helping you control your emotions.

Practice Emotional Regulation Not Suppression

This is another important helpful tip on how to control your emotions.

Controlling your emotions doesn’t mean that you do not feel any emotions, which would be very bad.

Rather the main aim is to be in charge of your emotions and not the other way round.

Hence, what you should do when thinking of controlling your emotions is to create a balance between your emotions.

This means that you should train yourself to know when your emotions are getting out of hand and have the discipline to stop yourself from expressing such emotions.

This might not be an easy thing to do.

However, you’ll find yourself becoming more in charge of your emotions and not the other way around with consistent practice.

It’s all about making conscious efforts to pay more attention to your emotions, identifying when they’re becoming excessive, and making efforts to regulate them so that you do not act irrationally.

Thereby helping you to control your emotions better.

Identify What Triggers Your Emotions

Understanding what triggers your emotion can also help you to control your emotions.

When you know the source of your emotions, you will be able to control them.

There are a few things that trigger our emotions.

These include your thoughts, feelings, events, or personal relationships.

More so, people’s words, opinions, situations, and environmental situations can provoke a negative emotional reaction.

As such, when this trigger is pushed, it can lead to you getting angry, hostile, or fearful.

This is why to prevent yourself from behaving irrationally when such triggers are pushed; you need to know what triggers your negative emotional responses.

To do this, you need to pay more attention to your feelings.

When you find yourself feeling angry, you need to ask yourself why you feel that way.

For instance, say someone speaks to you rudely or turns down your request, and you feel bad each time you think about it.

Ask yourself what it is that you’re angry about?

Do you feel disappointed or rejected?

By doing this, you’ll find out why you’re experiencing the negative emotions that you feel.

Another way you could easily identify your emotional triggers is by journaling.

This involves writing down your thoughts and feelings in your journal.

This will help you recognize negative recurring patterns that trigger your negative emotional reactions.

Consequently, helping you identify your emotional triggers and better control your emotions.

Build Emotional Intelligence

Still on how to control your emotions.

Another thing you could do to help you manage your emotions better is to build emotional intelligence skills.

Just as the name implies, emotional intelligence is a skill that helps you understand and control emotions.

It is a psychological theory developed by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer and popularized by Daniel Goleman.

With emotional intelligence skills, you can understand your emotions and the emotions of other people around you.

Thereby guiding your behavior and emotional reactions in your interpersonal relationships.

There are five components to emotional intelligence as stated by Daniel Goleman, and they include;

Self-awareness- This is all about understanding yourself, your moods, thoughts, emotions, and general behavior.
Self-regulation- This is all about controlling your behavior and emotional reaction to situations and people around you.
Motivation- Furthermore, this has to do with being internally motivated to develop yourself, become a better person, and work on your goals.
Empathy- With this skill, you can understand others’ emotions and treat them according to their emotional reactions.
Social skills- This has to do with the ability to guide your behavior and manage social relationships.

Overall, these skills will help you to control your emotions.

Build Self-Discipline

This is an important part of controlling your emotions.

This has to do with possessing the willpower to suppress your emotional reactions whenever you find your emotions getting out of hand.

More so, when you’re disciplined with your emotions, you’ll be able to restrain yourself from reacting negatively in overwhelming situations.

Furthermore, to build and exercise self-discipline regarding your emotions, you must first understand that you’re in control of your emotions and not the other way around.

When you understand this, controlling your emotions would become easier.

Also, you need to understand that building discipline takes time and careful practice.

Hence, you shouldn’t feel frustrated if you find yourself unable to control your emotions.

Just be committed to the process of becoming a better person by becoming more disciplined with your emotions.

Thereby helping you control your emotions.

Practice Meditation

Another helpful tip on how to control your emotions is through meditation.

Practicing meditation is a great way to relieve tense muscles and also lighten your mood.

So when you find yourself experiencing tense emotions due to overwhelming situations around you, consider meditating.

You can look for a quiet space, sit calmly, take deep breaths, and divert your attention from your emotional stressors by concentrating on more positive thoughts.

You can do this for 10-15 minutes.

Afterward, you’ll find that you feel calmer and happier.

So, practice meditation as a technique for controlling your emotions.

Consequently, helping you control your emotions.

Reduce Your Stress Levels

Stress can also be one of the reasons you’re struggling to control your emotions.

Stress could lead to cloudy thinking, high tension, and lead to you making irrational decisions.

This is why reducing your stress levels can help you control your emotions better.

There are numerous ways in which you can control your emotions.

For instance, as a business owner with so many duties or responsibilities, you could consider delegating our outsourcing certain tasks.

More so, you could employ some stress management techniques to reduce your stress levels.

Some effective stress management techniques include;

Meditation
Exercises
Engaging in recreational activities like playing games, watching movies, etc
Going on a vacation etc.

Overall, if you’re able to reduce your stress levels, you’ll improve your mental clarity and better control your emotions.

Find Positive Ways To Release Emotional Tension

This is another helpful tip on how to control your emotions and become a better person overall.

When you struggle with controlling your emotions, one thing you should do is to discover ways in which you can release the tense emotions that you feel.

This is a healthy way of coping with emotionally overwhelming situations.

More so, there are so many ways that you could release emotional tension.

You could either decide to go for a walk, focus your intense energy on work/a task, or express your anger on an inanimate object.

The main aim is to look for positive ways to channel your negative feelings.

This is so that you do not engage in destructive or irrational behavior.

Hence, to better control your emotions, try to identify positive ways to release your emotional tension.

Discover what works for you and engage in it each time you feel emotionally tensed.

Thereby helping you control your emotions better.

Change Your Negative Thought Pattern

This is another important helpful tip on how to control your emotions.

Sometimes the reason most people behave irrationally and are unable to control their emotions is due to their negative thinking pattern.

They have a negative perception and perspective of things.

For instance, if someone criticizes something about them, either their skills or behavior, rather than see it as constructive criticisms, they see it as an attack on their personality.

Having this kind of mindset about situations can lead to you feeling more negative emotions than you should.

It could also make you lose control of your emotions most times and react negatively to situations that do not warrant it.

Hence, you need to change your negative thought patterns if you want to control your emotions better.

When situations occur, rather than think negatively about the situation, try to look for positive reasons why things happened that way.

This will help you think about the situation calmly and respond to the situation rationally.

Consequently, helping you control your emotions.

Withhold Reaction

Another thing you need to know about controlling your emotions is to withhold reaction.

This is all about giving yourself time to cool off before reacting to a situation that demands an emotional response.

Furthermore, when we react in the heat of the moment, we often make rash decisions that would result in dire consequences.

This is because, when you’re emotionally tensed, it’s difficult to think clearly and rationally.

Hence, it would be best if you formed the habit of withholding reaction each time you’re confronted with a situation that triggers a negative emotional reaction.

One way you could do this is to quietly count to 10 in your mind before responding or reacting to the situation.

You could also take deep breaths in and out.

This will give you some time to calm your nerve, release tense muscles, and think more rationally.

Consequently, helping you control your emotions.

Seek Professional Help

The final tip on how to control your emotions that we have for you is to see a professional.

Having done everything you can to control your emotions, but there seems to be no improvement, that’s an indication that you need professional help.

A psychological therapist could help you identify the reasons for your lack of control of emotions and certain measures that you could take to improve your mental health.

Hence, consider seeing a therapist if you struggle with controlling your emotions as an individual.

Thereby helping you improve your mental health and control your emotions better.

Benefits Of Learning To Control Your Emotions

Why the fuss about knowing how to manage your emotional reactions?

Well, here are some of the reasons why.

Firstly, being able to control your emotions makes you a better person overall.
Furthermore, controlling your emotions makes you capable of building more friendly and lasting relationships.
It would improve your mental and emotional well being.
Lastly, it would also make you an emotionally intelligent individual.