Do you know how to control your emotions?

Autora. Yaymelis Garcia Leyva. Master's Student in Clinical Social Work AGMU Tampa, Florida.

Do you get carried away by anger if something does not go as expected? Do you feel unable to handle feelings like fear or sadness? Find out below if you know how to manage and control your emotions.

To control emotions, you must start by first identifying what is happening to you and why, that is, you need to learn to manage your emotions in order to know how to handle them properly at all times. This is also the best attitude you can adopt if you want to feel good about yourself and maintain satisfying relationships with the people around you. The correct management of emotions helps us avoid unnecessary conflicts or confrontations, makes it easier for us to express our emotions and generates empathy with others, and helps us orient ourselves toward the goals we set for ourselves. Also, it allows us to learn from our own mistakes and those of others.

Therefore, if you are one of those who easily get carried away by anger when something does not go as expected, if everything that happens to you affects you excessively, if you do not feel capable of handling feelings such as fear or sadness, or if when you get angry you react disproportionately and 'lose your temper', it's time for you to rethink your behavior and try to make allies of those emotions that now 'escape' you.

Knowing how to control our emotions makes us feel more capable of facing different challenges, keeps us healthy, keeps us from disorders such as depression, helps us to have better relationships with others, and can prevent negative consequences such as drastic mood swings. , since these affect our interpersonal relationships. A person with developed emotional intelligence knows well how they feel and knows how to communicate well with others, and, furthermore, is capable of identifying how others feel satisfactorily.

Throughout the day, various situations trigger multiple responses in us: emotions. In general, we cannot control all the situations that we experience in our daily lives: a traffic jam that delays us, a reckless driver that challenges our patience, a loud noise in the street that wakes up the baby that we care about so much. hard to sleep...

We also cannot control feeling the anxiety, anger, annoyance, sadness, fear, or joy that we experience from these situations. Being on the verge of taking an important exam can make us feel anxious, an inconsiderate response from someone we appreciate can make us angry, and the loss of a loved one can make us deeply saddened... However, there is something about which we can have some level of confidence. control: what we do with what we feel.

It is important to clarify that emotions, in themselves, are neither positive nor negative. Remember that our emotions "give us clues" about what is happening around us. What acquires great value are the actions we execute based on those emotions. We call the awareness and control of what our emotions generate; emotion management; and, as it enters into carving every moment of our life and determines our correct relationship with others and our well-being, it is important to educate it and constantly review how it is affecting our lives.

In managing emotions, pause and reflection will be our best friends because they will allow us to recognize and understand our emotions and the stimuli that cause them. To control our impulsive attitudes it is necessary to have emotional self-control. The key is in the way we interpret our emotions. Depending on the way we react to an emotion, will condition us on how it will act on us. And that's not all, since poor regulation of emotional responses leads to anxiety or depression. Therefore, we must prevent and learn to act before emotions invade us. Knowing how to identify the symptoms, understand our state of mind, and then proceed.

In addition, the control we apply over our emotions has benefits. Here I summarize the most important ones:

• Improves emotional well-being

• Increase self-esteem

• Increases concentration

• Help in decision making

• Allows you to control stress in situations under pressure

• Helps you stay calm and think more clearly

• Allows you to deal with difficult situations efficiently

As we have mentioned before, to control emotions we need to know ourselves. As Daniel Goleman, author of the book Emotional Intelligence, said: "The ability to pause and not act on the first impulse has become a crucial life learning."

References

Por Gimeno, Anna. (mayo 31, 2015). Las emociones influyen en el pensamiento y la conducta, por eso el control emocional es importante.

Por Escudero, Manuel. (mayo 14, 2020). Controlar y manejar emociones