Emotions are strong feelings derived from your circumstances, mood or relationship with others. They are also known as sentiments, sensations and feelings. They can be interpreted as an intense psychological reaction to an event, and include feelings such as love, hate, anger, joy and so on. Emotions mostly act by releasing a hormone, epinephrine (adrenaline), which in turn acts on the nervous system, leading to negative effects on the body and mind. These manifest through increased heart rate, increased respiratory rate, tightening of the muscles, sweating etc. In short, it is usually the fight and flight response (sympathetic nervous system) that gets activated and can wreck havoc if not taken care of.
How to control your emotions
The most important thing is to take care of your emotions. There are a few important ways to take charge of your emotions rather than letting them take charge of your life. The most important ones are:
- Take charge of your breath
- Try progressive muscle relaxation
- Visualization
- Replace the emotions with positive thoughts
- Remove yourself from the situation
Amongst all these methods, breath awareness and taking control of your breath is the most important and effective way of taking care of emotions. For every type of mood change or emotional turbulence, there is a corresponding breathing pattern. If we focus on our breathing pattern we can produce a particular type of thought or emotion.
Deep diaphragmatic breathing is extremely effective for taking charge of emotions.
When combined with breath awareness, progressive muscle relaxation intensifies the effect of breathing on regulation of emotions.
The visualization technique of taking in positive energy with every inhalation, and breathing out negative emotions as toxins is another powerful way taking control of your emotions.