Your Emotions - Regain Control and Live A Richer Life

Dr. Purushothaman
January 13, 2014

 

Your desire for better health, more time with your children and job satisfaction, are all dependant on you directing change through better control of your emotions, and if you have no direction, how will you experience life and grow?
It is a simple fact all achievements take effort, but the effort it takes to control your emotions may just help you achieve change for the better and lead you to the place you want to be in your life. And that is the secret; Learning to Control Your Emotions! Even negative emotions play an essential role in our lives, but they only serve a purpose when consistent with the events that cause them; Anger and aggression are an automated response to a life-threatening situation; Sadness and depression force you to slow down and contemplate your loss and remind you what was & should be important in your life. Mastering your emotions doesn't mean subduing them as if they should just be ignored. They're what makes us human after all and may be our most important quality in life. Our emotions determine the way we think and act, to such degree they determine whether we fail or succeed.
Emotions are an evolutionary masterpiece and have been felt since the most primitive people walked the earth. But times have changed. Physical emotions like aggression and anger reinforced with verbal abuse were once acceptable to lay claims to food, territory and ensure survival. But the world is now different. Society has become less tolerant of irrational people acting on negative emotions, particularly when they inflict harm on others. We are forced to accept responsibility for our actions. Rational responses to your emotions help you to move forward in life. Your career, your family life and personal relationships rely on your objective reasoning and successful interaction with the people in your life. You may risk alienating yourself if you constantly jump to conclusions and cannot put your emotions and reasoning in context with the moment. Understanding your emotions will help you understand the chain of events associated with them and this knowledge will help you succeed if you can apply them to future events. E.g. Satisfaction is a powerful emotion critical to keeping us motivated and living your life with purpose.
Action
Emotions really only provide us with the impulse to change events, it is reasoning which guides you to taking sensible actions to life's many circumstances. A reasonable person lives a life in control of their own destiny. How you act or re-act is the skill of taking command of the event that confronts you. Example, your partner comes home angry and snaps at you. How you perceive his/her anger and how you re-act can send you into a spiral of NEGATIVE emotions; anger, resentment, sadness, annoyance. A moment in which you take a deep breath and take control of your own negative emotions, helps you to re-act reasonably and putting you in control.
Perceptions
When you finally feel you have your emotions under control the next step is to understand what drives them in the first place, and that is the interrelationship between your temperament and perception. Are you generally aggressive, balanced or subdued? Either extreme may present a problem in the wrong circumstance. If faced with confrontation you don't always want to back down, but you don't want to become angry each time either. To change your temperament for the better is no easy feat, it's something you've learned and lived with for possibly many years, but it is possible to improve it! Time and practice on your relaxation or self-assertiveness techniques will put you on the right foot.
Assumption is the dark horse when it comes to perception. The choice is yours on how you wish to perceive any circumstance. Stop before you take a negative reaction. Establishing the facts or truth of a matter will better help you interpret situations with clarity and therefore correctly.
The key to a positive outlook is to recognize your emotions as they are building, NOT once you have broken-down with anger, sadness or anxiety. This moment of recognition is the moment for contemplative reasoning and control. An impulsive action on your emotions only sends you down the lonely road of self-destruction.

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