Emotional Control Techniques: 10 effective strategies

Any event, no matter how simple, arouses very different emotions. This is because a large part of our brain, the Limbic system, takes care of them and makes emotions so ingrained in 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 of the memories that make up our life history has an associated emotional charge, and is that there is nothing that makes us feel more alive than emotions. Perhaps for this reason, one of its great representative icons is the figure of the heart, the organ that maintains our lives. Emotions make us bring out the best in us, but they can also bring out the worst in our being, and by 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 to the lack of control of our conduct.

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

Feelings and emotions create sediment

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 control. In the 1930s the psychoanalyst Franz alexander found that people who suppress their feelings had permanently high blood pressure.

The repressed emotions become overflowing seeking to be released and produce the psychosomatization, which consists of the expression of the psychological through physical symptoms, so that the body also becomes ill. But the key to getting along with our emotions is also not not to repress them, because not to repress them in a way. some can lead to other types of even more serious disorders, and to get you in more of a trouble than you can regret. In this sense, I want to recommend that you read the article by Bertrand Regader, called "The 10 essential rules to release emotional ballast”, Where you will learn other techniques to manage your emotions.

We can neither disconnect nor choose our emotions, but we can try to lead 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 mood and sentimental state, when necessary. The objective of control techniques is to avoid that when a negative emotion is triggered, it drag us down 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 fleeing situations (the avoidance coping style and flight is not very effective in solving problems), in the case of controlling negative emotions, I, like many other colleagues, will make an exception and state that the first and The simplest emotional control technique is to learn to avoid what generates negative emotions., whether they are people or situations, such as trying to avoid a person who overwhelms us every time we see them, not going to an event we know our ex-partner is going to attend, or if we are on a diet avoid having prohibited foods in front of us, for example.

Deep breathing techniques

Another of the simplest and most useful techniques to control both emotions and reactions physiological, before, during and after facing emotionally intense situations, is the 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 thereby calms us down.

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

• Inspire deeply while mentally counting to 5

• Keep breathing while mentally counting to 4

• Loose the air while you mentally count 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. It can be verified that you are breathing correctly by putting one hand on the thorax and the other on the abdomen, you are doing it correctly if breathing only moves the hand from the abdomen (for this reason deep breathing is also called abdominal or diaphragmatic).

Cognitive techniques to regulate emotions

When we experience a negative emotion, our attention is focused on the thoughts that hold that active emotion and if we continually turn those thoughts over, 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 on three levels that are in constant interaction, as the following scheme shows:

As I have said before, emotions cannot be changed, but since emotion and thought go so together 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 like the ones 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 they sell us a product appealing to emotion. So if positive affirmations have become so popular, it must be because they should work. In order to fill our mind with positive affirmations we have to empty it of negative thoughts, for this, we must first detect which are the thoughts that generate, maintain or increase our negative emotions and make us feel sad, angry, anxious, scared, etc.

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

Thought stopping

This strategy seeks to control thought and can be used before, during or after the situation that generates the negative emotion. It is about that when you start to notice yourself, nervous or upset, pay attention to the thoughts you are having, and identify the negative connotations that it has for you. With this little analysis done, give yourself orders to look for the thought interruption that evokes the emotion, such as: "STOP!"," Stop! "," Now! "," Enough! ". After this self-instruction, replace the thoughts detected as negative with positive affirmations.

The only difficulty with this simple technique is that identifying the thoughts that negative emotions evoke and turning them into positive takes a little practice.

Mental rehearsal

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

To prepare ourselves to face these situations and combat the anxiety they generate, the technique of mental rehearsal it is ideal, apart from simple. It consists of visualizing that the feared situation develops without problems, and you feel safe and relaxed because you are satisfied with the way you act. You can also repeat to yourself slogans such as: I am doing well, I am relaxed, the public likes it… this will reinforce the technique. Plan your performance of the act and mentally practice it repeatedly. With each mental rehearsal, the level of anxiety will decrease 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 other intentions that may not be correct. This can lead to arguments or to feel bad for no reason. So trying to change our perspective on people or events can be helpful. There are several ways to change the perspective we have and adopt a different one, below I will expose two.

The first one I recommend is broaden the focus of the situationBecause the closer we are to something, the less we see. For this we can get away from the situation literally or mentally trying to see the situation in its entirety and analyze the situation again from this perspective. Another way to change your perspective is put yourself in the place of the other, and think about 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 will 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 serve you, he thinks that he may have a lot of work or that something has gone wrong in the kitchen, how overwhelmed you must feel at the time, and this will surely help you feel more relaxed and have more patience.

Concluding

The techniques that I have presented in this writing, despite being simple, have proven their effectiveness in clinical practice, and therefore few psychotherapists They refuse them in their daily professional practice, but like most things in life to make it our skill they 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 emerge in your day to day.