Regulate Emotions (Part II)

Goal

To regulate emotions and avoid being overcome by your emotional mind.

Benefits of Emotions (Fulton State Hospital, p. 42)

Emotions have three “jobs”: communication, motivation, and validation.

Communication

• Emotions are communicated most powerfully by our faces, our voice tone and volume, our posture, and our gestures.
• Non-verbal communication of this type is very rapid. If we need to communicate alarm, for example, we can do it with our faces as opposed to a lengthy explanation.

Motivation

• Emotions tell us to “ACT NOW!” and “STAY FOCUSED.” They give us motivation to change a situation.
• Emotions save us time in important situations. We don’t have to think everything through.
• Strong emotions help us overcome obstacles-in our mind and environment.

Validation

• Emotions can be information about a situation, signals, or alarms.
• When this is carried to extreme, emotions are treated as facts (e.g., “I have hurt feelings, so the other person must not care about me.”).

Know the Difference Exercise (Fulton State Hospital, p. 44)

Instructions: For each of the following items, decide if it is a thought, emotion, behavior, or event.