Regulate Emotions(Part I)
Goal
To regulate emotions and avoid being overcome by your emotional mind.
Importance of Emotion Regulation (Fulton State Hospital, p. 39)
Learning how to regulate your emotions is important for the following reasons:
To quiet the body-high emotion mind leads to high stress.- To quiet behavior-intense emotions often lead to making choices we later regret.
- So that your Wise Mind is easier to find-emotion mind blocks out intuitive, creative, flexible, and value-based thinking.
- To be more effective in meeting goals-emotion mind leads us away from our goals.
- To improve self-respect-making calm choices leads to better feelings about ourselves.
Healthy Perspectives on Emotion (Fulton State Hospital, p. 40)
Emotions are neither good or bad, right or wrong. Feelings just ARE. They exist. It is not helpful to judge your emotions. There is a difference between having an emotion and doing something or acting on the emotion. Emotions don’t last forever. No matter what you’re feeling, eventually, it will lift and another emotion will take its place.
When a strong emotion comes, you do not have to act on your feeling. All you need to do is recognize the emotion and feel it. Emotions are not facts. When emotions are very powerful they feel just like “the truth”. Be willing to radically ACCEPT your emotions as they arise.
There are 8 primary emotions (anger, sorrow, joy, fear, disgust, guilt/shame, interest, surprise). You are born with these emotions wired into your brain. That wiring causes your body to react in certain ways and for you to have certain urges when the emotion arises. All other emotions are learned by combining these basic 8 emotions.
Sometimes we have secondary emotions-an emotional reaction to an emotion-such as feeling shame or fear when you get angry and feeling angry when you have hurt feelings. These are NOT wired into our bodies and brains, but are learned from past experiences and the influence of the culture that you live in. When you have a secondary emotion, the key is to figure out what the primary emotion-the feeling at the root of your reaction-is so that you can take an action that is most helpful.
