Managing emotions

The management of emotions should in no case be confused with their suppression. Suppress emotions is harmful to mental and physical health: if you constantly keep everything in yourself, you cantime to discover a whole set of psychosomatic diseases. Managing emotions allows them to be channeled into a constructive channel, to find emotional balance and to reach mutual understanding with the interlocutor.

Managing emotions consists of several steps. The first step is awareness. How can you manage what you do not notice? In the fuse, we can not always correctly identify this or that emotion. Therefore, first of all you need to learn to be aware of your emotions at a given moment in time.

The second step is determination of the appropriateness of emotion. There are several cases in whichneed management of emotions. Sometimes the emotion experienced is completely out of place in a particular situation. It also happens that the emotion is quite appropriate, but it is expressed too intensely.

Once you have decided on the relevance of emotion, you can proceed proper management. At this stage, you need to either reduce the intensity of the emotion, or transform the tested emotion into a more appropriate one for the given situation. But how to do that?

There are several ways to control emotions. The first is change in the concentration object. Our reality is what we focus on. Just turn your attention to another object, and the emotions you experience will change.

Say you came to a cafe with friends and metthere is his ex-boyfriend with a new girlfriend. You are disappointed, jealous. Try to switch to friends, focus on the fact that you have a pleasant evening with people who love and appreciate you. If you do not switch to anything, try cause some good memory: recalling a pleasant event, we involuntarily begin to experience the emotions that were experienced at that moment.

The second way is change of belief. Any information we pass through the filterour beliefs; we see the world not as it is, but as we want it to be. Therefore, if you can not change the situation in which you are, you need to change your attitude to it, then your emotions will change.

The third way to manage emotions can be called "Physiological". Each emotion is a reaction to a certainan event to which our body must adapt. Therefore, emotions are accompanied by physiological changes: pulse and breathing quicken, blood pressure rises, pupils expand, etc.

In this case management of emotions is carried out "from the opposite". If the emotion has changed the state of the body,why the management of the body can not change emotions? It is not for nothing that a worried person is advised to breathe deeply and measuredly: such breathing is characteristic of a calm state.

This pattern is called mimic feedback. Emotions often cause involuntary facial expressions. However, at the same time, arbitrary facial expressions can evoke emotions: when trying to depict an emotion, a person can begin to experience it. This technique can be used to control emotions.

The ability of a person to control emotions andmanage them is related to its level of emotional intelligence (emotion management is one of its four components). Until now, scientists have not agreed on whether it is possible to raise the level of emotional intelligence. However, they all agree that emotional competence, which includes the ability to control yourself and your emotions, can and should be developed.