Practical Ways of Coping with Emotions


Outline:

  • Feelings are to be Acknowledged, Felt, Respected, but NOT Necessarily Acted Upon
  • Emotional Regulation
  • Practical Ways to Deal with Our Negative Emotions:

Feelings:

  • Feelings are not logical, rational, nor “right/good” or “wrong/bad.”
  • There are feelings we like (“positive feelings”) vs the ones we don’t like (“negative feelings”).
  • Feelings are influenced by our thoughts and our physical sensations - as feelings, physical sensations and thoughts are located adjacent to one another in the brain, and they’re in constant communication with one another.
  • Feelings are “sensations” without words, until our brain/conscious labels them. Feelings reside in our unconscious. Putting “words” to our feelings bring what’s in the unconscious to the conscious. 
  • When we experience physical pain, the pain can “communicate” with our emotions, causing us to feel worse. These emotions can communicate with our thoughts that we will never feel better/always feel bad. They can become a loop, such that we physically feel worse, and emotionally feel worse, and mentally feel worse…
  • Once we become aware (conscious) of our feelings, we can then have control of them: We can decide what we want to do with our feelings.
  • Using our thoughts, we can effect our emotions and it can effect our physical sensations.
  • “Psychosomatic” are real physical sensations felt, whose cause or exacerbation of which, come from our emotions.
  • When we don’t feel well physically, we can use our thoughts to “talk” ourselves into feeling better.
  • When we feel down emotionally, physical activities can lift our spirits and moods by producing dopamine and endorphins.
  • Dopamine is the “happy hormone:” it makes us happy and/ motivates us to do more of the same, or help us to avoid activities that might cause displeasure.
  • Endorphins help to relieve pain, reduce stress and improve mood.
  • Our perspectives/mindsets can cause us to be more susceptible to feeling better or worse.
  • “Self-fulfilling prophecy” is when we believe something will happen to us, we unconsciously “make it happen.”


Emotional Regulation:

  • Once we are able to identify our emotions by putting them into words, we can choose what we want to do with these emotions.
  • We are always making choices, even when we are being indecisive: We are choosing to delay/postpone a decision.
  • We can choose to “react” to stimuli by bypassing our logic, or to “respond” to the stimuli by stepping back, pausing, take stock and determine what might be the best decision or course of action for the situation. 
  • “If something is hysterical, it is historical:” Is this strong feeling a familiar feeling? If so, where did it come from? Choose to forgive the person(s) that caused our first strong negative emotions in order to understand why we are feeling our feelings so strongly.
  • We CHOOSE to act constructively in spite of our feelings.
  • It is important that we do make room for our negative emotions. When we suppress our emotions (we know they’re there but we “won’t go there,”) we will end up exploding unexpectedly. When we repress our emotions (we don’t even know we’re feeling these negative emotions), we end up getting physically ill. However, wallowing in our negative emotions for an extended amount of time can turn into depression and immobilize us.


Practical Ways to Deal with Our Negative Emotions:

  • Set a time allotment for how many minutes a day we allow ourselves to feel our negative emotions. Once we have met our “quota” for the day, we shut them off, telling ourselves that we will have our allotted time the next day to feel them. For example, Let’s say that we decided to give ourselves 20 minutes a day to feel our negative emotions: Set a timer for 20 minutes. When we recognize that we’re feeling our negative emotions, we start the timer. Let’s say that after 7 minutes we no longer feel these negative emotions, we PAUSE the timer. We now still have 13 minutes allotted for the rest of the day. Later on in the day we start to feel our negative feelings again, we resume the timer, and pause it again once the feelings pass. Once we reach our allotted 20 minutes, we STOP ruminating on these negative emotions, knowing that we have our fresh 20 minutes the next day. 
  • Box Breathing (using our forefinger to draw a square on our thigh, counting to four by: Breathing in, pausing, breathe out and pause as we draw each side of the square).
  • Clenching and releasing of muscles. https://youtu.be/kdLTOurs2lA?t=13
  • Laughing until our stomach hurts.
  • Crying/sobbing.
  • Exercise/do physical activities until our limbs feel wobbly.
  • Discharge our pent-up emotions through SURREAL imaginations.
  • Vent with God our negative emotions.
  • Journal our thoughts and feelings.
  • Verbally share our feelings with trustworthy friends who can empathize with us, hold our feelings in confidence and accept us. When we ask for advice, they can help point us back to God.
  • Share our negative emotions with our therapist.


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