All the emotions are adaptive and are there to help us, but there are many occasions when we get to see how they control us and end up being a problem. That is why we have to learn to control emotions effectively so that they serve us well and help us in our day-to-day lives and in personal relationships.
One of the pillars of what today is called emotional intelligence it consists precisely in controlling emotions and learning from them. It is not about repressing or suppressing certain emotions, but about understanding them and making them ours to help us move forward.
Understand emotions
Understanding your own emotions and those of others is the first step to be able to control and use them to your benefit. It may be difficult for us to realize the emotions of others and even more of our own. Sometimes we don't know why someone is making us angry, why we suddenly feel upset, sad, or happy. That is why it is important to know yourself and get to the point where we clearly know what happens to us when we feel a certain way. You can look for a book that tells you about basic emotions, their adaptive function and how they make us feel. It is a good start to learning about emotions. You should also practice with yourself and with others, trying to know how you feel and how others feel at all times. It is not easy but like everything you can learn and train. Knowing our emotions makes it easier for us to know how to behave and how to channel and use them.
Practice positive self-criticism
Sometimes we must be critical of ourselves to know what we can be doing wrong or what are the emotions that always dominate us. Knowing yourself goes through knowing your strengths and weaknesses. With the positive term we mean that you criticize everything that you may be doing wrong and that you have to improve but from a positive point of view, in order to change it. Being critical of yourself without reaching a conclusion may not be beneficial as it creates bad feelings. But if we do it in order to improve it is always positive.
All emotions are positive
We may have been taught over the years to avoid emotions that are supposed to be negative like sadness or anger. But the truth is that emotions exist because they are adaptive in nature and in our social relationships. If they are mishandled they stop being adaptive to become a problem but we have to think that from the beginning all emotions have something positive. That is why it is good to identify how we feel and why.
Your lifestyle matters
We always hear about mens sana in corpore sana, and that is that there is no healthy mind without a lifestyle that makes us have a healthy body. So it is highly recommended that in order to better manage and understand your emotions, you lead a healthy lifestyle that helps you to be more positive and to channel negative energy better. Eating healthy is essential, but we also highly recommend daily physical exercise. Playing sports is always beneficialIt makes us feel better, clears our minds, and is even proven to help us solve problems more effectively. There are so many benefits of doing sports that we should not put it aside, because it is also closely related to our emotions.