How to Master Your Emotions

This week I want to go into more depth about emotions. If you can master them, you will more fully own your own life. The quality of personality that this grows is conscientiousness, and it happens to be one of the most important qualities for your overall health and longevity.

Sometimes our emotions make life worth living: love, joy, ecstasy, delight, curiosity… Our emotions bring us these experiences and fill us with the meaning and motivation of life.

Sometimes our emotions can throw us into the worst that humanity can endure: pain, sadness, horror, grief, anger, fear, terror, depression… When this is what we feel, life can become overwhelming and, conversely, when life feels overwhelming, sometimes these are the feelings that come to dominate.

There are tools that can help us master our emotions, even when times are very, very hard. There’s no magic formula that will bring only the positive. And I wouldn’t recommend it if there were, because our negative emotions are no less essential to living well as the positive.

Being resilient is not a function of eliminating the negative, or keeping a phony cheeriness in the face of dire threats. It’s in part a function of being able to channel and redirect our emotions, so that we feel them deeply, but we are not at the mercy of them.

It can help to know what our negative emotions are good for.

• Anger is largely a response to trespass. When we feel somebody has crossed the line, or we feel wronged or mistreated in some way, our feelings of anger let us know it.

• Fear is a response to perceived threat. The feeling of fear can tell us that we may be in danger, and that we should be wary, or should get away to safer territory.

• Grief is a response to loss, and it reminds us of people and circumstances that matter to us.

• Depression is often a symptom of helplessness, and it lets us know that there may be some action that we need to take.

We need these emotions. They provide us with important information. But emotions are not wise or omniscient purveyors of Truth. They are reactions. They are colored by our history, our expectations, our temperament, and our beliefs.

It’s important to be aware of our emotions, but they are not infallible guides. They are more like signposts. We need to feel them, pay attention to them… but it’s up to us to decide what a given emotion means, and where we’d like to go with it.

You might be a person who is quick to anger, or who gets frightened easily. You may have a tendency toward depression, or a sense of sadness and loss that comes all too easily for you. We all have our emotional tendencies; the following skills can help us to master them.

• Don’t indulge your negative feelings… particularly anger. Contrary to pop psychology theories of the ’60s, venting our anger does not actually “get the anger out;” rather, venting serves to dig that pathway in deeper, making our anger more intense and coloring our experience more broadly. We get good at what we practice. When we practice getting angry, we get good at getting angry.

• Redirect your feelings. If you are facing a challenge that seems too big for you, and you feel like collapsing in fear or sadness or helplessness, find one thing that you can do; one action that you can take that will improve your situation. Direct your feelings toward accomplishing that task. Then find the next action, and do that…

• If you’re feeling despair, or feeling overwhelmed by your circumstances, look for at least one thing that you can feel grateful for. I’m not suggesting that you pretend that everything’s fine when it’s not. You know darned well what the stakes are in your situation. But given what’s true, by finding something that you can feel grateful for, you are, in effect, identifying where you are strong. That strength can give you a solid place to stand to deal more effectively with your situation.

• Use music to moderate your emotions. If you’re feeling sadness or grief, don’t listen to sad music. If you are feeling depressed, don’t listen to music that has a hopeless feel or message. Find music that can help you to redirect your feelings toward hopefulness, rather than driving you further into despair.

• Reach out to friends and family. Seek their help and comfort when you need it, but don’t abuse the privilege; don’t use them to vent your anger or sadness, beyond a reasonable point. It’s true that misery loves company, but it’s also true that company does not love misery.

• Once you’ve identified the meaning of your emotions and an action you need to take, focus more on your goal, and less on the emotions themselves. Once you know what your emotions are and the action you need to take, those emotions have effectively done their job.

• Grief is a little different, because you’ll feel a deep loss for a while – weeks and months certainly. Just roll with these feelings, and know that they are an expression of the love you felt for somebody, or the meaning of what you lost. You will always miss a loved one who is gone, but the intensity should subside over time.

This is not an exhaustive list, of course. Life is much more complicated than that, and sometimes it’s important to get more personal help. But if you can use these suggestions to move through hard times, to ride your feelings rather than having them ride you, you’ll earn more conscientiousness, a greater sense of strength and resilience, and a deeper sense of ownership of your life.