How to throw out negative emotions effectively and harmlessly

The manifestation of feelings and emotions is a natural property of the psyche of any intelligent living being. Animals experience primitive emotions, but in humans the sensory sphere is unusually widely developed. Even if they say about a certain person that he is not emotional, or behaves very reservedly, do not believe it - this is a mask. Such people have learned to tightly control their emotions and not show them in public. Another type of people, on the contrary, cannot live a full life without a violent expression of their emotions. If you are wondering how to kill all feelings and emotions in yourself, you must understand that you will not be able to do this completely. However, you can help yourself significantly.

Understanding our own emotions

First of all, understand the reason for your own condition: analyzing your emotions will allow you to take the path to correcting the situation. As psychologists say, increased emotionality may be a consequence of the following:

• you yourself are an overly emotional person - this is your character trait;
• a certain situation that provoked emotions recalled negative events from the past.

It is worth carrying out the corresponding observations for at least a month or two, compiling your own statistics of the reasons and situations that drive you crazy. And then analyze and apply the data in practice.

If you are faced with a situation that can provoke an attack of an uncontrollable explosion of emotions, get ahead of it. For example, move away from her or turn your attention to other issues.

The main thing is to be proactive

Containing emotions and their consequences

CONTENT:

If you push all your experiences to the back burner and don’t express your emotions, then this will not lead to anything good. Negative emotions can accumulate . Many try to hide them for fear of being misunderstood and unaccepted. Postponing, not paying attention, enduring day after day is not the answer.

A person can get stuck with unprocessed grief inside themselves, and this leads to passive aggression and depression. Perhaps there will be a violent outburst, which is fraught with damaged relationships, emotional trauma to loved ones, problems with superiors, or later, a problem with one’s own health may appear.

10 FACTS about EMOTIONS part 1

Saving balcony

Working on control, and simply turning off your own feelings and emotions, is painstaking, but you can activate the “shutdown” by simply going out onto the balcony or street. This technique is suitable only for those who know how to quickly switch their own consciousness from a problem to another.

The “Miracle Balcony” will help both at the very beginning of a conflict and when emotions begin to overflow. Here it is important to step back from the situation and look at yourself from the outside. See the problem in black and white, without giving color to words and actions. In psychology, this practice is called self-reflection. Try on the eyes of a friend or enemy looking at you from the side at a moment of boiling emotions.

Analyze the situation, ask yourself: “What exactly am I thinking about at the moment of an emotional outburst, how do I behave in society, in public?” This visualization of your explosion of feelings will allow you to muffle them, so to speak, by clearing your head in the fresh air of your own balcony - an island of solitude and tranquility.

A way to turn off emotions is to go out to your balcony

When to turn off emotions

There are many cases when it is important to keep your turbulent experiences to yourself and weigh every word. The most important thing is to control feelings if they can harm you - both physically and in a career sense.

• In a situation where you are in emotional pain – sad, bad, difficult. For example, during the illness of a loved one, due to a sudden layoff, or after breaking up with a loved one.

Sometimes sorrowful feelings can be so strong, destructive and harmful that one can seriously worry about a person’s health.

• In moments when it is important to restrain yourself, even if anger is bubbling inside. At a meeting of directors, at a debriefing, during a difficult conversation with relatives, during a heated argument with a friend, when communicating with a stubborn child.

• If you are afraid to make a decision “on emotions”. For example, demand a divorce from your faithful husband because he offended your cat. Or quit because of an indiscreet hint from a colleague addressed to you.

• In “serious places” (school, office, bank, university) feelings must be controlled.

If everything is boiling inside, but you didn’t come here to scream, but to study or, for example, take an exam.

Train your own imagination

If, in the process of talking or experiencing a particular negative situation, you are faced with an explosion of emotions, if you want to suppress feelings, know how to fantasize. Replace your negative emotions with any picture: for example, how you are walking through the forest or the seashore, the main thing is that it should evoke a positive mood.

But don't get too caught up in your own fantasies. Your consciousness, even part of it, must remain alert, react soberly and adequately to current problems.

Treatment for the tendency to suppress emotions

People who consciously control the expression of their feelings can reduce the stress they feel in a number of ways, such as talking to a loved one, writing in a journal, and exercising.

People for whom hidden emotions are a deeply ingrained reflex must learn to express them in socially acceptable ways. This is usually a difficult process because it requires not only working on the shape of your own personality, but, above all, recognizing the problem, which is not obvious.

In many cases, the tendency to block emotions is diagnosed only by a psychiatrist , to whom a patient is referred suffering from somatic complaints when specialists in other fields do not find an organic cause.

Learning to express repressed emotions is most often associated with psychotherapy, the method of which depends on the specific case.

Trust your emotions to paper

Yes, that’s right: start a diary, make it a habit to write down your own feelings and emotions, everything that can provoke negativity. Analysis will make it possible in the future to find a method to suppress negative emotions, nullify and eliminate the occurrence of similar situations in the future.

In addition, according to psychologists, spelling and displaying thoughts on paper will allow you to overcome nervous tension and negative emotions, and suppress unpleasant feelings.

Turning off feelings by transferring them to paper

Tune the strings of your emotions

It is quite difficult to completely turn off emotions (and even undesirable, because you can turn into a robocop or a sociopath).

You should start your path in conquering the sensual aspect with control, calmness and muffling. Thus, folk techniques such as meditation and breathing exercises are very useful for mastering your emotional field.

Tea with mint, lemon balm, linden and chamomile, fragrant incense, aromatherapy, a bath with lush foam...

To control yourself, learn to calm down, “take a break” and relax . Once you know what your personal balance looks like, you can always return to it.

Explain to yourself the motives that drive you. Analyze the causes of negative experiences. To keep harmful feelings - fear, anger, shame, rage, guilt - under control, you must understand and accept them.

Sometimes a person is so emotionally unstable that he flares up like a match for any reason. It will be difficult for such an individual to learn to turn off feelings and control them.

If you have severe irritability, you should visit an endocrinologist, therapist, neurologist and psychologist.

Lost hormonal levels or problems with the thyroid gland can cause nervousness , instability and general “looseness”.

You may be prescribed medications, ranging from simple vitamin complexes like magnesium with B6, to hormonal medications and antidepressants.

Go for a jog

Or to the gym, or to the pool, or just to the nearest stadium. Physical activity and exercise will not only keep your body in great shape, but also increase the level of the happy hormone endorphin in the blood. And, as a result, it will help you control your own negativity, negative reactions to people, words, events. For emotional people, the grounding technique : learn to unify with the earth, walk barefoot on the grass, listen to the sound of the wind in the leaves and the surf on the seashore.

Suppression of emotions - its goals and causes

Originally, expressing emotions was a defense mechanism. It served to solve everyday problems. The fact that the human race has become civilized has had the opposite effect. The defense mechanism was the suppression of emotions . In social situations, their manifestation is actually a violation of the generally accepted principles of the community, and, above all, it is not always beneficial.

People learn to hide their true feelings because they don't want to:

• show weakness that will prevent them from achieving their goals
• immerse yourself in emotions so as not to lose control of your life
• hurt, offend or disappoint others by reacting too spontaneously

The ability to be guided by reason and caution is undoubtedly an expression of humanity and a sign of maturity. However, given the deepest causes of suppressed emotions and how much it limits a person's authenticity, health and quality of life, it is often worth taking action to release your feelings.

In many cases, suppression of emotions is the result of:

• strict upbringing, during which restraint was rewarded and expressions of affection were ridiculed or punished
• growing up in a stressful environment (family conflicts, poverty, times of political unrest), which not only limits spontaneity, but also weakens emotional life
• traumatic experiences causing various types of mental disorders associated with difficulty expressing feelings

As a result of these kinds of factors, the adaptive mechanism of suppressing emotions goes much further than necessary. This becomes an automatic response to stimuli, causing a number of negative consequences.

Meditations: ancient practices to help modernity

The ability to meditate is a great opportunity not only to disconnect from the world around you , but also to cleanse your own consciousness of accumulated negativity. The practice of meditation includes the following points on the path to controlling your own emotions and feelings:

1. Focus on the breathing process - deep inhalations and exhalations. Mentally get rid of all negativity with the exhaled air. Does not work? Count your inhalations/exhalations, holding, for example, a rosary in your hands.
2. For best results, combine meditation and yoga.

But it is better not to study on your own, relying on materials from the Internet, but to enroll in courses where a practicing meter will act as a teacher.

Meditation as a way to turn off emotions

How to stop feeling emotions?

Before you set a goal to stop feeling negative emotions, you need to recognize the situation or action that causes this emotion.

Procedure:

1. Track the situation that causes irritation and discomfort. Situations or actions of other people can be very different: a traffic jam, a long line at the bank, constant phone calls that interfere with work, and others.
2. After identifying the reason for the appearance of a negative emotion, you need to understand what emotion arose and try to name it. For example, in this situation I feel anger, resentment, annoyance or irritation. It is important to describe your mood and give a verbal description of your state at the moment.
3. Use a technique that will help you take control of your emotions and prevent you from falling into a destructive state.

There are a large number of effective techniques, with which a person can control emotions and manage his life.

Control over feelings

It is important to remember that nothing is absolute in the world. Everything is connected with the point of view of a particular person and his feelings in relation to a given situation. Life cannot be bad or good, life simply exists. Our feelings and emotions arise from our own value judgments and can be changed at will.

Focusing on yourself

Doctor of Philosophy, writer, business trainer Larry Senn in his book “Mood Lifter” offers an effective technique, which is based on asking a person to focus on himself, on his feelings in order to change a negative mood with a positive one.

You need to imagine a multi-story building with an elevator that moves between floors all day long. In this elevator there is a person who is learning to control his emotions. Each floor is his emotional state, mood. The higher the floor, the more positive, joyful mood. Accordingly, the lower floors are a manifestation of negative emotions and bad mood.

This elevator has a control console with buttons indicating a particular floor. A person doesn’t just ride an elevator all day long, he actively controls the movement of the elevator by pressing the desired button.

During the day, various difficult life situations may arise, and only the person himself can determine whether to leave the elevator on the ground floor or press the button and go up. The author calls the topmost floor “grateful mood,” and the lowest floor “depressed mood.”

To stop feeling emotions in this technique means to consciously move from a feeling of depression and discomfort to a positive attitude.

Imagination training

The ability to manage emotions is directly related to the ability to use imagination at the right time. The Mood Lift practice described above requires imagination. Some people find it difficult to imagine clear pictures and imagine the necessary situations. Training your imagination takes time and the ability to concentrate.

Acting schools recommend using exercises for combining and recombining images. The essence of the method is that a person searches for a familiar figure in various images, for example, in book illustrations, in surrounding objects or in object images.

You should train your imagination gradually and systematically. For adults, the finishing exercise is effective. During the lesson, one element is provided, which should be completed and a whole image can be created, which may differ significantly from the intended image.

Group classes develop the imagination more actively than individual ones. In a group, people can create interesting stories based on key words or drawings that are supplemented with the image of each participant. The subsequent discussion of images allows you to develop your imagination, think brightly and outside the box.

Visiting art galleries and exhibition complexes, watching quality films, listening to classical music and reading books also help develop the imagination.

Using techniques to help turn off emotions

Emotions are manifestations that are characteristic of a person, but they should be expressed in a constructive way. If emotions are inappropriate and interfere with rational and rational thinking, they can lead to devastating mistakes. Most people commit unseemly acts under the influence of strong emotions. The one who controls his emotions to a greater extent controls his life.

The appearance of emotions is a reflexive quality at the level of instinct, so that a person can make decisions as quickly as possible in a dangerous situation. This is closely related to the survival instinct.

It's another matter when emotions prevail over reason. In this case, you need to learn to take control of them.

If a difficult situation arises, the following will help:

• Pause and consider what tools you can use to return to a state of balance. To do this, you need to ask the right questions: where did this emotion come from, how relevant is it at the moment and how can you get rid of it. That is, instead of feelings, start the thought process. And, as you know, where attention goes, so does energy. The point is that an emotion without energy is not as strong and cannot cause irreparable harm.
• Simulate situations that may happen and think in advance about your emotions and feelings in connection with these situations. This way the psyche adapts to the expected life scenarios and the person will be able to control emotions. You can write down situations that give rise to certain feelings and mentally develop a strategy for your behavior. Examples are shown in the table:

• Avoid emotional overload, in which feelings completely capture attention. This condition is accompanied by changes in the body: the heartbeat quickens, trembling in the knees appears, nausea, palms become wet. In this case, you need to stop and process the information in parts, and not as a whole.
• Practice deep breathing, which fully saturates the lungs and brain with oxygen, thereby helping to relax. The technique is simple: inhale for 5 seconds, hold your breath for 2 seconds and exhale for 5 seconds. It is recommended to inhale through the nose and exhale through the mouth. You need to repeat at least 10 times.

Feeling emotions is a normal physiological process for humans. According to psychologists, in order to stop plunging into a negative state, you should think about ways out of an unpleasant situation and solutions, and not the problem itself.

Meditation classes

Meditation helps you stop depending on negative emotions, fears, excessive worries and other destructive emotions. Meditation allows people to experience happiness and complete satisfaction regardless of external circumstances.

Meditation techniques can be used to reset your emotions throughout the day. For example, if before an interview with an employer or during an exam a person falls into a state of fear and despair, you can devote 3-5 minutes to simple meditative practice, again feel the ground under your feet and return to a state of calm and balance.

The initial practice of meditation is as follows:

1. Take a comfortable position while sitting or lying down and relax your muscles. The main condition is to keep your back straight, as this position helps a person concentrate.
2. Start tracking your breathing. When you inhale deeply through your nose, imagine how air fills the lungs, enters the bloodstream, and every cell of the body is saturated with oxygen. Then exhale calmly through your nose. You should breathe like this for 2-3 minutes. At the same time, breathing calms down and the person is ready to control his thoughts.
3. At the next stage, as you inhale, you need to say to yourself: “I feel inner joy.” As you exhale, repeat this phrase. Before this stage, it is recommended to remember some joyful event when a person was happy, calm and serene. It will be a big plus if you can return to this emotion and feel it again.

During meditation, the practitioner feels the effect of the law of positive thinking, which is based on the idea that what a person thinks about, he becomes. Changes within the mind gradually lead to a change in the quality of life, personality transformation and a revision of one’s attitude towards negative situations.

Finding an outlet

People who live “automatically”, doing a lot of the same type of work every day, often do not notice that they are performing unpleasant actions out of habit. For example, a person can communicate with people whom he does not like and irritate, or buy whatever food products come to hand. Ultimately, negative emotions accumulate, mood and vitality worsen.

In this case, you need to take responsibility and make a decision to eliminate all unpleasant things from life. Then life will sparkle with new rich colors, and negativity will gradually begin to be replaced by positive emotions.

The first thing you need to do is make a list of things that you enjoy doing, the process of which creates a feeling of satisfaction and contentment.

Pleasure and enjoyment are feelings that need to be recognized and deliberately created situations that evoke pleasant emotions. If you remain inactive and wait for circumstances to turn out favorably, you can waste a lot of time in vain.

There is no need to put off things that you enjoy doing. For example, if a person likes to draw, make things with his own hands, or cross-stitch, he should do this without excuses or justification to himself.

Developing self-confidence

Psychologists say that a person with high self-esteem and confidence in his abilities is less prone to depression and experiences associated with negative situations.

People often become confused, frustrated, or angry when they find themselves in unexpected situations because they are unsure that they have the resources, including internal resources, to overcome difficulties. At such a moment, we should remember that every person has the ability and internal strength to find the right answer.

Practice aimed at developing self-confidence will help you stop feeling negative emotions. Joseph Murphy proposed a technique for extracting positive opportunities from negative situations. To do this, you need to remember situations from the past or present that were assessed as undesirable, unfavorable or problematic.

For example, an unsuccessful purchase, a missed vacation abroad, a broken refrigerator, and so on. Then you need to jot down these problems and look at them from a different perspective. To do this, you need to turn to the wisdom of your subconscious and mentally ask for help to see the positive sides of this situation.

The author of the technique suggests using the word “but” to make it easier to see the positive aspects. For example, a vacation abroad was cancelled, but we spent the summer at the dacha with our family and the relationship became stronger and reached a new level. The refrigerator is broken, but you can buy a new, more modern model.

How to suppress emotions?

Breathing exercises.

Some argue that feelings are only in the head. This is a mistake because they cause strong physical reactions. Anger increases your heart rate and blood pressure, anxiety causes many physical changes, and depression can weaken the immune system.

Changes in emotional state are also directly related to breathing rhythm. Anger and anxiety can take over a person if he breathes quickly and shallowly, so in emotional moments it is advised to do the following:

1. Hold your breath for five seconds.
2. Exhale slowly, focusing on the diaphragm and inhale until the lungs are full.
3. Then exhale even more slowly, imagining how the body relaxes.
4. Repeat until calm comes.

Liberation of desires.

After enough practice in releasing emotions, moving in each session from specific feelings to one of the nine basic emotions, you may find that it is even more useful to turn to the deeper levels of your Self - the claims of your EGO - desires. According to Levinson, the source of all our emotions, which we divided into 9 basic categories, are two even deeper levels - desires. I - desire for approval, self-affirmation; II - desire to control. Every act of desire is an indicator that you do not have what you want. In Levinson's words: "What we don't have is hidden in our desires." It may be confusing at first: what’s wrong with wanting approval and control? In fact, as already noted, to want means not to have. It turns out that often the desire to have something actually prevents us from having it.

Why can't you drown out negative emotions?

I'm not against happiness and thinking about good things. But our life, unfortunately, does not consist only of events that evoke joyful emotions. Quite the opposite. It would be good if we stopped idealizing the world we find ourselves in. And we realized that our life should consist not only of joy and serenity, but also of sadness, pain, disappointment... It should not because we owe something to someone. But because it's normal.

Yes, being angry and sad is as normal as being happy and having fun. Dividing emotions into good and bad, emphasizing some and denying others is a dead end. Dead end and destructive. It’s not without reason that there are more and more cases in the world when a seemingly calm person suddenly loses control of himself, picks up a gun and shoots at a crowd of passers-by. Once the effect of pills and training ends, an avalanche of suppressed feelings descends on a person’s consciousness, and he ceases to control himself. At all.

Under the loud optimistic cries of personal growth coaches, the world is gradually drowning in depression. According to statistics, depression is the most common disease of the 21st century. If you treat depression with antidepressants or distract yourself from it with “optimism,” a breakdown may occur at some point, since all this does not eliminate the cause, but only masks it and pushes it deeper. “Negative” emotions don’t go away. They only fall silent, so that one day they can result in something. From uncontrollable outbursts of anger to psychosomatic illnesses.

How to deal with excessive emotionality and temper?

Many people are naturally short-tempered. They have a high energy level that comes from their innate temperament. Hot temper can also be the result of psychological trauma received in childhood or defects in upbringing. Such people get emotionally wound up very quickly and fade away just as quickly. Excessive emotionality can be dangerous for several reasons.

• Firstly, it negatively affects relationships with people. Few people will like it if their voice is raised, they are rude, or they react sharply. It is difficult for such people to work in a team and build long-term relationships.
• Secondly, it affects the person himself. He may fall into regular feelings of guilt after outbursts, or justify himself, thereby distancing himself even more from the people around him and accumulating resentment towards himself.

Modern research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that excessive emotionality is something that can be changed. We can learn to reduce the intensity of our feelings and manage them. You can learn to regulate the intensity of emotions in specially designed emotional intelligence school programs, or master this skill on your own. Below are 5 rules that will help you do this.

How can we do this?

• Rule #1: Decide to get your temper under control. By making this decision, you are signaling your unconscious mind to learn how to deal with this emotion. On a conscious level, you acknowledge the fact that you are not managing your anger and need help.
• Rule #2: Strengthen your self-esteem. Take any attack in your direction with interest as information useful for reflection. Playing sports serves as an excellent preventive measure, thanks to which you learn to endure pain and withstand blows.
• Rule #3: Recognize the warning signs of anger. These are beacons that signal that you are entering a dangerous zone. Using "meta-attention" observe yourself when you are irritated. This could be tension in the stomach, increased heart rate, clenched jaws, etc.
• Rule No. 4. Learn to interpret the events that happen to you in a new way. If you interpret a situation as a threat, disrespect or injustice, anger will automatically turn on. It's not what happens to you that matters, but how you interpret it.
• Rule #5: Lower your expectations of the people around you. Try to tell yourself more often that other people are not there to meet your expectations. A large number of problems come from our belief that everything should be the way we want and immediately. There are another 7 billion people living on this planet with you, and you need to take this fact into account.