Do You Know How to Manage Your Emotions?

Source: Pilar Arango, psychologist

The world of mixology can be agitated. Every cocktail is a work of art. You need to master ingredients, techniques, and also emotions. The pressure to deliver “perfection in every drink,” for instance, can lead to emotional turmoil, and it can become a lot when you add anything else that is going on at work or home.

But here is the key: recognizing and managing your emotions is as essential as using the perfect amounts of each ingredient. Taking time to pause, reflect, and learn to channel emotions like rage, fear, sadness, joy, and disgust can lead to a healthier life and help you share unique and memorable experiences with those around you.

Emotions: Impulses Leading Us to Act

The word emotion relates to movement. It is the impulse that leads to an action. Emotions are psychological, physiological, and spiritual responses to different stimuli.

Emotions are meant to protect you and help you adapt to the environment and the particular things you are experiencing every moment. In a way, they are the natural response to what happens around you. This is why emotions have an adaptive and survival function. They prepare you to act and respond agilely at any given moment. They also allow you to express your feelings and share whatever is going on in your mind.

The Primary Emotions

The five primary emotions are rage, fear, sadness, joy, and disgust. Let’s learn about each one.

Rage

Rage is a response that helps you establish boundaries or defend yourself from situations or people that might harm you or invade your space.

It generally comes up in the face of injustice or situations that negatively impact you or your well-being.

Fear

Fear is a response to being exposed to a threat. It is a survival mechanism in the face of danger. It helps you protect yourself and react quickly to dangerous stimuli. For instance, it can help you run away or defend yourself when threatened.

Sadness

Sadness is a response related to loss and, therefore, the process of adapting to said loss. It helps you process complex situations and seek support. It leads to decreased activity so that you can reflect, analyze, and connect with your inner self.

Joy

Joy is a response to positive situations and accomplishments. It pushes you forward to achieve your goals and to celebrate and enjoy them. It also helps you strengthen social bonds.

Disgust 

Last but not least, disgust is a response to unpleasant stimuli, food, or environments. Disgust is meant to protect you from potentially damaging situations and can encourage you to follow healthy habits in your daily life.

4 Things You Need to Understand about Emotions

1. For emotions to have an effect, there needs to be a stimulus: the way something is said, a gesture… pretty much anything your senses can perceive.
2. Emotions can come from positive or negative stimuli. Your brain processes them in the limbic system, specifically the amygdala.
3. Every emotion leads to a feeling or a sensation. For example, if you’ve faced a painful situation or trauma that left a negative sensation inside you, and you never processed the sensation and “let it pass” instead, the emotion will become a negative feeling stored in your brain like an unhealed wound. Then, whenever something “triggers” the memory of that feeling, the emotion will come up again (and again) through a “response” that leads to negative physical reactions accompanied by anger, rage, desire for revenge, etc.
4. Emotions left unprocessed can have a “snowball” effect, leading to cyclical emotional patterns. This can result in unnoticed reactions, keeping you in a permanent state of rage or hatred. Consequently, your family, work, social, and cultural life can be affected.

Why Are Emotions Hard to Manage?

Now that you know about each emotion, it is essential to understand the challenges of managing them in your work and personal life.

Managing emotions is challenging because we are often not taught to identify, process, express, and handle the emotions that arise in a wide variety of situations.

If You Don’t Learn to Manage Your Emotions, This Will Happen

Learning to manage the rage, fear, sadness, joy, and disgust you may feel throughout the day is vital. Otherwise, you may end up living in “the world of wounds and the lies they tell you.” What does this mean?

It means you may struggle with:

• Giving and receiving love healthily
• Making proper use of your freedom
• Easily adapting to your surroundings
• Fostering healthy relationships with others
  
  

In other words, you could interpret situations and reality from a subjective truth instead of an objective one. Consequently, you may struggle to trust the people around you and remain in a “fight-or-flight” mode instead of a healthier “safety and connection” mode.

This is why it’s important to learn to manage your emotions. The great news is that it’s never too late to learn!

When we fail to exercise our emotional intelligence to manage these responses, they control us instead of the other way around. In other words, our self-control becomes chaotic and without a guiding force.

When Emotions Control You, They Form “Mind Movies”

When emotions take over your life, you may inadvertently create “mind movies” that act as absolute truths and distort everything around you as the ultimate truth.

When rage, fear, sadness, joy, or disgust are let loose and not properly managed, they control you, which has potential adverse effects on the personal, family, work, and social levels. If mind movies convince you that they are real, it can lead to resentment, hatred, injustice, etc.

Managing Emotions: The Spaces for Self-Reflection and Self-Control

Emotional management is individual work that can positively affect the people around you. It’s an exercise that starts with self-reflection. For instance, when faced with an emotional reaction, you can become curious and ask yourself the following questions:

Why did I react this way to the situation?

Why did my words cause such a negative reaction in others?

Why, when I talk, do others feel attacked? 

These kinds of questions can help you move from the space of blaming to the space of self-reflection. 

And that’s just the beginning. Soon, you’ll start asking more complex questions like: Is my tone of voice the problem or the actual words? Am I really being attacked, or is it just a sensation?

The good news is that that’s when you’ll start understanding yourself, face hard truths, get a better sense of what’s real and what isn’t, and enter the space for self-control.

If you wish to learn more about controlling your emotions, we recommend the book Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life by renowned psychologist Susan David.

Emotional agility is a revolutionary, science-based approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind after studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than twenty years. David found that no matter how intelligent or creative people are or what type of personality they have, it is how they navigate their inner world—their thoughts, feelings, and self-talk—that ultimately determines how successful they will become.


 
The way you respond to your internal experiences will drive your actions, career, relationship, happiness, health, and everything that matters in your life! Because emotionally agile people know how to adapt, aligning their actions with their values and making small but powerful changes that lead to a lifetime of growth. Emotional agility is not about ignoring difficult emotions and thoughts; it’s about holding them loosely, facing them courageously and compassionately, and then moving past them to bring the best of yourself forward! So, if you are looking for a real behavioral change, you should read it ASAP!