Emotions

There's a time in everyone's life where they probably admit, perhaps they don't have the healthiest coping mechanisms or the most helpful inner-monologue or thought processes. What we tell ourselves on a regular basis in our head is crucial to how we believe we will act and cope with certain situations and events within our lives.

Thoughts such as "Shit isn't going right despite my best efforts", "Why am I always the victim to my circumstances?" or even, "What did I do to deserve this?", put us into a victim mindset. The person may feel like, they have exhausted all of their own power and efforts to change their situation but nothing ever goes their way. These kind of thoughts put the person into a victim mindset. One where we feel helpless to our environment and that we can't change what is happening around us, and that's true.

We can't change what's happening around us but, we can change the way we look at those problems and is one of the most crucial developments in any persons life.

It unlocks a whole new perspective and mindset and most of all, it gives you back the power.

To be able to identify you're not coping or your struggling with a problem whether it be; depression, self-harm, any form of addiction, anxiety, anger, manipulation, bullying etc, is the first step to changing your life, improving yourself and beginning to take the positive steps to work towards where you want to be.

In life, we have two options:

We can either resist and fight as we struggle to breathe in the chaos of life and drown whilst exhausting all of our energy. Or, we can collect ourselves and our emotions and soon discover, we're able to stand up in the water anyway.

If you believe or tell yourself, life has dealt you an unfair hand and that things are constantly not going your way, you'll never feel able to deal with any of the problems life brings.

However, if you tell yourself "life will happen" but choose that you're going to decide how you let life affect you, then you will feel more empowered and able to deal with anything life throws at you.

Life is by no means easy to navigate, and emotions are incredibly complex.

When we release that our life is 10% the problems we have and 90% the way we react to them, we will start to understand we have far more control over our lives that we may have initially thought.

For example; if someone cut's you off in traffic, yeah it sucks.In reality, depending on how worked up you get over the situation, sets the standard for how the rest of your day will unfold.

Let me explain;

If someone cuts you off in traffic, whilst on the way to work and you get angry and try to race besides them to give them a piece of your mind, you are injecting all of your energy and emotions into that one person. Whilst you're racing to give them a piece of your mind, you are not focusing on driving, which means you miss the speed camera on the side of the road and bag yourself a £150 fine. Was it really worthy it?

All of these little things add up and will put you into a bad mood when you arrive at work. You might snap at a work colleague for an unknown reason to them, but for you, you were still emotionally invested in the jerk who cut you up this morning. Then, that may have an impact on your colleagues day, who then goes on to feel like crap because of something sharp you said unintentionally, meaning you might need to go and apologise.

Alternatively, If you just accept what the other person did as something you can't change. You'll be less emotionally involved. Turn the radio on or take a few deep breathes to distract yourself. Maybe even curse under your breath, but let it go. You will realise how much smoother your day will go. Yeah, you could have given that driver a piece of your mind, but is there really anything you can do to change the fact they pulled infant of you? No. It's happened and the only thing you can do is move on. Then, you'll notice the speed camera at the side of the road and you won't snap at your co-worker.

As a matter of fact, you might have taken the other driver's actions personally, but you don't know what's going on in their life that made them make that choice. Perhaps, they got an emergency phone call and they are making their way to the situation as fast as they can. Perhaps, a family member has suddenly fallen ill. In that case, how would you feel if someone was giving you a hard time for trying to get to a sick family member whilst you still had the chance? Ultimately you'd feel pretty crap because you already have enough on your plate to deal with.

The less we take other people's actions personally, the more understanding and in control we may become.

If we accept how we feel and simply sit with a feeling, it can help it to pass. Other times, we have to decide what external factions we are going to let affect us.

If you're feeling sad for whatever reason, you don't have to force yourself to get up and do things if you have the time to be able to rest for a while.

For example; if you feel sad, but know you have laundry to do, post to collect and shopping to be done, just put the brakes on for a moment. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Start with the small things and take life one day at a time, or even one hour at a time if you have too. Perhaps, you could get ready and go and collect your post and shopping at the same time. That's two of the big things out of the way and then from there, maybe later in the day you can do your laundry.

Not everything has to be done immediately and there's no rules to what order things should be done. So, relax and go easy on yourself.

It's totally fine too, if you decide to put it all off until another day. Just try to do one thing which you wan't to achieve today that will help you feel productive.Iit could be something as simple as getting dressed or brushing your teeth. From there, you may find it easier to start doing the other tasks.

Sometimes, if we sit with emotions and other emotions arise, it may be because we have suppressed them for a long time. If for example; we have distracted ourselves with work or keeping busy rather than allowing time for our true reaction to a situation to unfold, we may realise our emotional reaction catches up with us sooner rather than later. This may be common if you struggle with depression, but it also has roots in other emotions too, such as anger.

Depression doesn't just arise out of nowhere. Everything has a cause. You might not remember the cause, or even realise something upset you as deeply as it did, but that's no reason to feel weak and ignore it.

Everyone is affected differently and deals with situations and events in their own way. In order to be happy and to move forward, you have to find all these emotions you perhaps overlooked and sit with them. Give them time and respect and soon you'll be feeling better.

Admittedly, some events and situations are harder to work with than others so, it might be best to work alongside a therapist or counsellor to help you explore all your emotions in a safe space.

On top of this, professional help can also be useful when you're unsure of what's causing you to feel the way you do and also, if you're feeling like no matter what you do things always go wrong.

If you feel like you know the situation or event which triggered your emotional reaction, there are also support groups where you can share and talk through emotions with people who are feeling or have felt, the exact same way. These groups could be; self harm support or bereavement groups as well as plenty of others for a range of events and feelings.

The more you talk about your feelings, the more you'll find your subconcious mind reveals things to you that you never realised you thought or felt.

It's kind of like The Princess and The Pea; you've perhaps tried to rush emotional reactions by pushing them down or ignoring them and trying to forget, by layering mattress upon mattress (distraction upon distraction). However, you actually didn't notice that there was a little, niggling, something stopping you from fully moving on and being comfortable. That little niggling something is possibly the remainder of your emotional reaction or simply the a whole emotional reaction you tried to ignore and not feel.

Once you've identified exactly what it is that's holding you back from being "happy" or triggering you to react to situations in a certain way (basically, finding what's your pea in this situation). Then, you can start working on how you're going to stop letting it control you.

I will write another post on the topic of how to stop letting your thoughts and beliefs control you. For now, I would like to end this article here.

To finish, I would just like to remind you that everything you need lies within yourself. You have the control and power over your mind of what you're going to invest your energy into. Although, this does not mean you can choose to ignore emotions that arise just because you "don't want to feel them". We are all affected by different things differently. If you feel a certain way about something, and you strongly don't want to feel that way, ask yourself why? Why don't you want to feel sad over this situation, because clearly you are? Is it because you don't want to seem bothered? Or you don't want to look stupid? Forget that. If it's important to you then it's important you feel that emotion. It's your life and story at the end of the day. Nobody else's.

Until next time,

Peace and Love x