3 tips to help deal with difficult emotions.

When I was young emotional intelligence was not a thing and I was never taught how to understand or deal with the emotions I was experiencing. Us humans have to deal with SO many emotions, in fact there are 36,000 emotions that we feel. How many emotions can you list? 15 maybe? You are not alone. 

For a long time I didn’t even understand what emotional intelligence was or meant. Let’s deconstruct it….. 

Emotional intelligence is our ability to perceive, use, understand manage and handle emotions. People with high emotional intelligence are able to label their emotions and create a little bit of space between them and their emotions before reacting to something. They also have the ability to read other peoples emotions and to adapt to them.

Emotions are very real as we feel them churning in the body, which is why it’s so hard to navigate them. Strong emotions can sweep us from under our feet and will strengthen the untrue or dramatic stories happening in the mind. 

What to do when we’re experiencing a difficult emotion? 

STOP 

Stop in your tracks and create some space around the emotion. When emotions are intense we need to stop the thing that is causing the emotion to increase. Stop reading the email, step away from a conversation, put down the phone and find a mindful moment connecting to yourself. 

Psychologist Joan Rosenberg explains in her book ’90 seconds to a life you love’ that our emotions replay every 90 seconds. When we experience an intense emotion set a timer for 90 seconds, focus on the body and breath rather than the story in the mind, and ride out the wave. After 90 seconds check in with yourself, your body, your gut feelings, your breath and your heart. 

Whether you do the 90 second timer or simply pause to check in, the important thing is that we’re coming to the moment at hand and finding a little bit of space around the emotion. 

Labelling the emotion 

UCLA researchers using an MRI machine to study the brain have shown interesting results on labelling and describing emotions. When we are experiencing an intense emotion the amygdala gland is on overdrive, this is the alarm bell of our brain also known as our monkey mind. Simply labelling and describing the emotion we are feeling helps us to interrupt the amygdala gland and shift us into our thinking mind; our prefrontal cortex, otherwise known as the CEO of our brain. 

If the science is new to you or a little confusing all you need to remember is that when you’re feeling an intense emotion label the emotion e.g. I am feeling frustration, anger, sadness, and describe the emotion either out load or write it down. 

Describe how it looks, acts and feels in the body in that moment. This helps us to become more emotionally literate. 

Get curious 

Get really curious about the emotion you are experiencing and how it feels in the body. How is it affecting your breath, how does it feel in your gut and in your heart. 

Begin to ask yourself the below questions. 

What is the story behind this emotion? 

Is this story actually true? 

If I were to look at this moment through a different lens what would I see? 

How do I want to respond to this moment? 

Can I show more compassion to myself and the stimulus?

When we start to ask ourselves questions and get curious about the story we can gain greater control over the emotion. It’s the story in our head that perpetuates the emotion. We wouldn’t have the emotion without the story. So it’s super important to understand the story and to see it as just a story. 

A note on compassion.

If someone has judged or wronged you, a way to show compassion and manage your emotional response, is to acknowledge that they only have the level of awareness that is available to them, and that they are doing the best they can. I know this is hard at times but really people only have what they have available to them at that time. 

When we can become more emotionally intelligent our nervous system will feel more balanced as we’re not being pushed around by our emotions. When we do the steps above we are actually strengthening our ability to be more fluid with our emotions and we become less stuck in habitual reactions. 

Our habitual reactions are strong programmings we’ve developed over a long period of time so we need to repeat this process over and over to understand our emotions. 

Cultivating greater self-awareness is the root to this practice. Check out my meditations on my members channel. If you’d like to explore it the first 7 days are for free.