The ability to experience and express emotions is more important than you might realize. let’s know How to Become the Boss of Your Emotions.
As the felt response to a given situation, emotions play a key part in your reactions. When you’re in tune with them, you have access to important knowledge that helps with:
decision-making
relationship success
day-to-day interactions
self-care
While emotions can have a helpful role in your daily life, they can take a toll on your emotional health and interpersonal relationships when they start to feel out of control.
Vicki Botnick, a therapist in Tarzana, California, explains that any emotion — even elation, joy, or others you’d typically view as positive — can intensify to a point where it becomes difficult to control.
With a little practice, though, you can take back the reigns. Two studies from 2010Trusted Source suggest that having good emotional regulation skills is linked to well-being. Plus, the second one found a potential link between these skills and financial success, so putting in some work on that front may literally pay off.
Here are some pointers to get you started. How to Become the Boss of Your Emotions
1. Take a look at the impact of your emotions
Intense emotions aren’t all bad.
“Emotions make our lives exciting, unique, and vibrant,” Botnick says. “Strong feelings can signify that we embrace life fully, that we’re not repressing our natural reactions.”
It’s perfectly normal to experience some emotional overwhelm on occasion— when something wonderful happens when something terrible happens when you feel like you’ve missed out.
So, how do you know when there’s a problem?
Emotions that regularly get out of hand might lead to:
relationship or friendship conflict
difficulty relating to others
trouble at work or school
an urge to use substances to help manage your emotions
physical or emotional outbursts
Find some time to take stock of just how your uncontrolled emotions are affecting your day-to-day life. This will make it easier to identify problem areas (and track your success).
2. Aim for regulation, not repression
You can’t control your emotions with a dial (if only it were that easy!). But imagine, for a moment, that you could manage emotions this way.
You wouldn’t want to leave them running at maximum all the time. You also wouldn’t want to switch them off entirely, either.
When you suppress or repress emotions, you’re preventing yourself from experiencing and expressing feelings. This can happen consciously (suppression) or unconsciously (repression).
Either can contribute to mental and physical health symptoms, including:
anxiety
depression
sleep issues
muscle tension and pain
difficulty managing stress
substance misuse
When learning to exercise control over emotions, make sure you aren’t just sweeping them under the rug. Healthy emotional expression involves finding some balance between overwhelming emotions and no emotions at all.
