Managing Emotions: How To Get Them Under Control

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you cope with your emotions?

It can be important to develop healthy coping mechanisms so that your emotional health doesn’t suffer. 

Some of the harmful ways people might deal with negative emotions include denial, withdrawal, bullying, and substance abuse. While these outlets might seem to make the uncomfortable emotions go away, when you choose to avoid your emotions rather than understand your emotions, it can lead to detrimental consequences down the road. 

The good news is that when you’re feeling negative emotions, you can practice coping in a healthy way, which can help you understand your emotions over time and make it easier for you to overcome future negative emotions.

One way to deal with unpleasant emotions could be the PATH method. PATH stands for pause, acknowledge, think, and help. A good way to actively pause is to count to 100 or say the alphabet backward.

Acknowledging your feelings can help you deal with negative emotions. For example, if you feel sad because a friend moves away, you can acknowledge that it’s ok to feel that way because that friend is an important person in your life. By accepting how you’re feeling, you are working on your emotional health and preventing having to feel overwhelmed by your negative emotions.

Now that you have taken a few moments to acknowledge how you’re feeling, you can begin to further manage emotions by thinking about how you can make yourself feel better. 

You can then help yourself based on what you came up with. For example, you might take the action step of telling your friend that you’re sad they’re moving away and that you hope to set up monthly video calls so you can keep in touch with one another. Other ways that you can help yourself include reading a book, playing with an animal, eating a healthy snack, taking a nap, making a gratitude list, exercising, and many more. The goal is to find something that helps you manage emotions that arise for you in a way that is productive, healthy, and able to move your emotional health forward and help you healthily cope with uncomfortable emotions.

What are the 5 emotional signs of stress?

There can be physical and emotional signs of stress. Some of the physical signs of stress include heaviness in your chest, headaches, shoulder, neck, or back pain, shortness of breath, feeling tired, anxious, or depresses, sleeping more than usual, grinding your teeth, among others.

The five emotional signs of stress include: 

• Being more emotional than usual
• Feeling overwhelmed or on edge
• Having trouble keeping track of things or remembering
• Having trouble making decisions, solving problems, concentrating, or getting your work done
• Using alcohol or drugs to relieve your physical and emotional feelings of stress.

Some of the ways you can practice coping with emotional stress include taking time to relax, practicing mindfulness, distracting your mind by focusing on something else, journaling, meditating, or anything else that allows you to calm down and help you manage emotions around stress.

How can I fix myself emotionally?

Everyone struggles with the emotional processing of difficult life events and challenging emotions. 

While talk therapy can be a great option for emotional processing, don’t feel like that’s the only option. There are plenty of ways to work on yourself to manage your emotions better. 

ne way that you can begin to work on yourself is to get to know yourself. Begin asking yourself what you would do or who you would be if nobody else cared or gave you their input. By asking yourself questions such as these, you may begin to develop a better sense for what it is you want out of life, which will then allow you to ask more difficult questions such as, what is getting in your way and why have you allowed it to get in your way for all this time? 

By diving into your fears and concerns, as well as what your ultimate life goals are, you may begin to be able to understand why you feel the way you do and what steps you need to take to achieve those goals.

How do you handle difficult emotions?

Difficult emotions are a normal part of life, and learning how to deal with them as they arise is an important life skill. 

Many people may try to run from their emotions, and while at the moment, it might seem like the emotions have gone by the wayside and are no longer an issue, if you never deal with the initial problem, it is likely to fester and cause bigger issues in the future. 

One of the best ways to handle difficult emotions when they arise is to pause and acknowledge how you’re feeling. Sometimes, simply acknowledging that you’re feeling a certain negative emotion allows the intensity of that emotion to dissipate. Other times, the intensity might still be there, but by acknowledging the emotion, you might feel able to think of a plan for how to overcome the emotion. 

For example, if you’re feeling angry because a person upset you, you can pause and acknowledge that you are feeling angry and that it’s okay to feel angry. You can then begin to think about ways to calm your anger, such as going for a run or playing with your pet. Once you quell the initial intensity of the anger, you can then think of a path forward, such as talking to the individual who upset you about why they made you angry.

How can I control my emotions and anxiety?

When it comes to controlling emotions and anxiety, you can overcome several negative thoughts. It is common to ruminate about negative things when negative feelings or experiences occur. Oftentimes, we can get into a cycle of playing out what happened or what could have happened over and over and over again. These cyclical thoughts are typically not productive and can lead to more negative feelings. The best way to overcome this thinking may be to take control of these emotions. One way to do that could be by naming different objects that you see around the room – this can help you redirect your thoughts to more mundane things and bring your focus back to reality.

Another way to control your emotions and anxiety could be by practicing acceptance. By accepting the things you cannot change, you can put yourself in the driver's seat of the situation.

Taking deep breaths is also beneficial because the simple act of taking a deep breath activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which can help calm high-arousal negative emotions, like anxiety or anger.

Another great way to try to control your emotions and anxiety could be by exercising. Exercise can be an effective way to boost your mood. The physiological changes that happen to your body during exercise can make it a great solution for intense emotions that you’re having a difficult time overcoming.

What happens if you hold in your emotions?

Holding in your emotions can be detrimental not just to your emotional health but also to your physical health. 

When you suppress your emotions, the chronic stress from the unresolved emotions can trigger your sympathetic nervous system’s fight or flight response, which can slow digestion and result in gas, bloating, constipation, vomiting, and occasionally ulcers. 

You may also experience headaches and migraines due to the tightening of muscles in your forehead and brow, which can lead to reduced blood flow to the brain, which may result in a headache.

Holding in emotions can explode in the form of anger, which may put you at an elevated risk for heart disease. In one study, the heart attack risk was 8.5 times higher up to two hours after an extreme anger episode and 9.5 times higher two hours after extreme anxiety.