Can you control your emotions?
Can you control your emotions? The short answer is, “No!” It is important to remember thar while to can’t control your emotions, you can learn how to be with them, live peacefully with them, influence them, manage them and release them.
Think of people who go along day after day seeming to function normally, and suddenly, they explode in anger at something that seems relatively trivial and inconsequential. This is one sign of someone who is trying to control or repress their emotions, but their repressed emotions are leaking out.
The more anyone tries to control their emotions the more they resist control, and the more frightened people can become at what is seen to be a “loss of emotional control.” It is a vicious circle and reinforces the adage that “What you resist persists.”
We might be making some progress but, largely, society still encourages us to hide our emotions, to be ashamed of them or to be afraid of them. It is also popular (and necessary to a certain extent) to be politically correct when displaying our emotions. Showing emotion in public can be seen as being “out of control” and thought of as a sign of weakness. People often feel uncomfortable with those who are able to express strong emotions. Regardless of societal rules, we are born with emotions and must learn to manage them effectively. Your first critical Key Step is to gain…
The Benefits of Building an Emotional Vocabulary
An important study found that naming emotions reduces the intensity of emotion processing in the brain, possibly outlining a brain network responsible for the old saying “a problem shared is a problem halved.”
A team led by psychologist Dr Matthew Lieberman of UCLA, brain-scanned participants while they looked at pictures of faces that had different emotional expressions. This study went to great lengths to show that naming an emotion seems to reduce its impact. It turned out that when naming an emotion, activity in a frontal lobe area called the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (right VLPFC) significantly increased while activity in the amygdala decreased. In other words, rescuing us from ‘fight and flight’ and enabling us to regulate our feelings and respond more effectively.
One of the best ways to achieve a greater emotional vocabulary is to start journalling and take time to reflect on your feelings and increase your self-awareness, which is the gateway to emotional intelligence. Remember to allow yourself to feel your feelings and experience them as data not directives. By taking these Key Steps you can…
‘be the difference that makes the difference’
Namaste,
Sharon
