Sadness, fear, anger, disappointment, exhaustion, loneliness. Sometimes we experience emotions that are not easy to deal with. What can one do when feeling bad? How do you go about controlling your emotions?
When illness or disability strikes the issues you’re faced with can be overwhelming, and more than likely you will have a variety of reactions, which will include:
Feeling physically and mentally drained
Having difficulty making decisions or staying focused on topics
Becoming easily frustrated on a more frequent basis
Arguing more with family and friends
Feeling tired, sad, numb, lonely or worried
Losing your temper at the slightest of provocation
Experiencing changes in appetite or sleep patterns
Worried about your future
Most of these reactions are temporary and will go away over time, but getting ourselves and our lives back on a positive footing isn’t easy, but it’s essential for you to do things so to begin controlling your emotions.
When a disability strikes it is a major life event and therefore will take a lot of adjustment. The period in your life immediately after it first occurs might seem maddening at times, but you will be able to make the necessary adjustments. But that doesn’t make the emotional trauma we go through any easier. At the time it all happens we feel like our life will never get any better.
We are driven day by day by our emotions they dictate our thoughts and our actions. So many things that we took for granted, including many simple daily tasks, have become incredibly challenging, which frustrates you terribly. Your emotions tend to spiral out of control. In time, these emotions can grow like weeds, slowly conditioning the mind to this is how life will be from now on. You can’t afford for your negative emotions to spiral out of control, you need to be controlling your emotions and I want to provide you with some simple methods to start controlling your emotions effectively.
Do you control your emotions, or do they really control and direct you? Once you are controlling your emotions, life changes for you in more ways than you ever dreamed possible. Not only will you feel way more empowered and in control in life, but you will be happier and much healthier as you won’t be stressed or weighed down so often.
1. Don’t react right away. Reacting immediately to emotional triggers can only lead to unhappiness and negative feelings. Things happen in milliseconds. You have to make a conscious choice not to be angry, scared, or sad. Emotions come and go on their own, without you asking for it. When something ‘bad’ happens, stop, take a deep breath, count slowly from 10 to 1, and then ask yourself ‘how much does this matter?’ By doing this I found that many of the silly things that I used to do that immediately made me get so angry then just became insignificant. You know for me since losing much of my sight pouring water from a kettle to a mug often results in water pouring all over the counter, and this used to make me get so angry. But now by stopping, breathing and counting down, I see it for what it is, a funny pain in the butt which makes no real difference to life. I know this may be a stupid example in your mind, but think about it, aren’t most the situations that really stress you out just really silly things that you blow out of importance.
2. You get to choose how you react. Haven’t you realised so many of the things that stress you out are about nothing, literally blowing up at nothing. Part of the reason is that you’re letting whatever the situation take control of you. My suggestion is don’t allow this any longer. It’s time for you to become aware of when you are excessively emotional or overreacting, I’m talking about actually noticing how you feel and what causes you to feel like you do. If you start to monitor your emotions, you will start to realise how silly many of your emotional reactions are. Equally important it will show you that you can’t afford to react in this way, and that you don’t want to react in this way. You come to realise it is far better to have your cup half full rather than half empty.
3. Your solution is to find solutions. Let me give you an example of something that will make most of you get totally frustrated. Again it’s a silly example. Losing your car and house keys. I bet you’ve gone through that emotional downer. This happened to me yesterday. For over an hour I hunted everywhere. I got so angry. Then so sad. The frustration was immense. Matters were made far worse by the fact of my disability, being visually impaired. By the end, my eyesight was to blame, this was how life would always be, never being able to see or find anything. I then carried out step 1, I stopped, took a few deep breaths. Then step 2, getting angry isn’t going to achieve anything and I need to think about when I last had them. Well I did find them, and we all know the solution to this problem. Decide one place that you will always put your keys. I bought a hook and it will be up tomorrow and be the new home for my keys. Every problem, even the hard ones, have solutions.
4. Always hold on to your big picture. Being able to control your emotions depends in part on how positive a bigger picture of your life you hold on to in your mind. A lot of my focus in life is based upon the legacy I want to create. What drives you? What gets you up in the morning excited? Thinking about your big picture, can counter any negative emotion. Not having a big picture, a clear image of the life you want to live, the things you want to be, do and have, is a recipe for disaster and living a life full of negative emotions.
Are you visually impaired? Feel free to join my Facebook group, Coping with Visual Impairment (link is external),” to discuss today’s blog, or to ask further questions about this posting.
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