Tag Archives: #identify

Emo­tions

Can you recall the last time you were really angry at some­one? So much so that you were phys­i­cally shaken just at the thought of them? Rarely does this feel­ing of anger help us in get­ting what we want. Often, it will work against us, result­ing in more pain, unnecessarily.

Even the most gen­tle of per­son­al­i­ties can tem­porar­ily turn into a vin­dic­tive ras­cal, if pushed far enough.

A friend of mine is going through a divorce with a spouse who is unrea­son­ably pro­long­ing the process. He’s sad, hurt, upset, frus­trated and very, very angry. Words of anger and hatred spout out of his — oth­er­wise polite and thought­ful — mouth. He was no longer his authen­tic and peace­ful self. And he didn’t like who he was becoming.

Through help­ing him come to a place of under­stand­ing and for­give­ness of his ex-spouse with love, com­pas­sion and humil­ity (we had to dig deep), I real­ized that the same tools can be used in deal­ing with other neg­a­tive emotions.

For sake of sim­plic­ity, we will use anger as the tar­get emo­tion to over­come. Keep in mind that it can be applied to over­come other non-conducive and intense emo­tions such as jeal­ousy, guilt, hatred, regret and fear.

Why Do We Feel Like Crap?

“It’s amaz­ing how much emo­tion
a lit­tle men­tal con­cept like ‘my’ can gen­er­ate.“
– Eck­hart Tolle

Anger doesn’t feel very good. It’s pretty gross, actu­ally. Our stom­ach tightens-up, we become sweaty, we react — instead of act — in sur­vival mode. And anger clouds our judg­ment caus­ing us to respond wildly out of emo­tion. We’ve all been there. Some­times, it can get so intense that we trem­ble pas­sion­ately while feel­ing strong hate towards other peo­ple. And when we cool down, we would won­der how we allowed our­selves to get in such a messed up state in the first place.

The answer is: Very eas­ily. Allow me to explain.

Emo­tion is our body’s response to a thought, which could be trig­gered by an exter­nal sit­u­a­tion. But this sit­u­a­tion is seen through the lens of our own inter­pre­ta­tion. Our lens is col­ored by the men­tal con­cepts unique to each of us; con­cepts like good and bad, mine and yours, like and dis­like, right and wrong. Keep in mind we all have dif­fer­ent lenses, thus inter­pre­ta­tion con­flicts are inevitable.

For exam­ple, we feel very lit­tle emo­tion when some­one else loses their wal­let. But when it is our own money, we sud­denly feel pain and the desire to hoard it back to us.

The moment we’ve labeled some­thing as “mine”, we will expe­ri­ence men­tal dis­tress when we’ve inter­preted that we have ‘lost’ it or are at the risk of los­ing it. Whether it is my wal­let, my pride, my money, my house, my car, my job, my child, my stocks, my feel­ings or my dog, as long as we feel that it is lost or threat­ened, we will expe­ri­ence pain in the form of anger or other strong neg­a­tive emotions.

We expe­ri­ence pain, because we have been trained since chil­dren to believe that the things which we have labeled as ‘mine’, are some­thing that define who we are. We’ve iden­ti­fied with it and falsely believed that if we lost it, or face los­ing it, we lose our­selves. Sud­denly, our ego has noth­ing to iden­tify itself by. Who are we? This hurts our ego tremendously.

In our minds, we feel enti­tled to more, whether it is more money, or more respect, or a bet­ter job, or a larger house. Amongst it all, we fail to see that our mind will always want more. Greed is a highly addic­tive state of mind, always grow­ing, blind­ing us of real­ity, while con­vinc­ing us that we’re doing a rea­son­able thing.

Com­mon Ingre­di­ents of Anger:

* Unfair­ness — We believe that we have been treated unfairly. We tell our­selves that we deserve more, and we buy into this story that some­one has wronged us.

* Lost — We feel that we have lost some­thing that we have iden­ti­fied our­selves with. Feel­ings, pride, money, car, job.

* Blame — We blame other peo­ple or exter­nal sit­u­a­tions for hav­ing caused our loss, for tak­ing advan­tage of us unfairly. The blame often only resides in our heads and is a prod­uct of our imag­i­na­tion. We fail to see things from other people’s per­spec­tives. We become deeply selfish.

* Pain — We expe­ri­ence pain, men­tal dis­tress, and anx­i­ety. The pain causes phys­i­cal responses in our body, which dis­turbs our nat­ural energy flow and state of wellbeing.

* Focus — We focus on the thing we don’t want, and ener­gize it by com­plain­ing about it pas­sion­ately, and repeat­ing it to as many peo­ple who will lis­ten. This cre­ates a down­ward spi­ral of anger. “What we focus on expands”, this is true regard­less of the emotion.

The inter­est­ing thing is that if there are two angry peo­ple unhappy with each other, both peo­ple feel a sense of loss, unfair­ness, pain and the need to blame the other per­son. Who is right? The answer is: both are right and both are wrong.

Why Should We Bother with Over­com­ing Anger?

Neg­a­tive emo­tions like anger kick us into sur­vival mode, as if say­ing to our body, “we are in dan­ger”. There is a phys­i­o­log­i­cal change that takes place in our body to pre­pare us for fight or flight. These phys­i­cal responses dis­rupt the nat­ural flow of energy in our body — affect­ing our heart, immune sys­tem, diges­tion and hor­mone pro­duc­tion. A neg­a­tive emo­tion is there­fore toxic to the body and inter­feres with its har­mo­nious func­tion­ing and balance.

Pro­longed anger, stress and hold­ing grudges will hurt our adrenal gland and immune sys­tem. For women, stress on the adrenal gland can affect the repro­duc­tive organs (uterus, ovaries) caus­ing them to exhibit abnor­mal behav­iors, poten­tially result­ing in sterility.

Aren’t your phys­i­cal and men­tal health worth more than the men­tal pres­sure you are vol­un­tar­ily pil­ing onto your­self? Is it worth it to react out of spite­ful emo­tions and hurt feel­ings, so that we might tem­porar­ily sat­isfy our pride?

Anger also clouds our judg­ment and we become con­sumed with prob­lems and pain. Instead of cut­ting our­selves loose, free from the self-inflicted pain; we make irra­tional, unrea­son­able, regret­ful and hurt­ful deci­sions. In the case of divorces, the legal fees alone can drain one’s sav­ings, unnec­es­sar­ily leav­ing both par­ties unhappy and poor. Nobody wins!

The Fun­da­men­tals of Change

Notice how quickly we can fall into a neg­a­tive state of being? A split sec­ond, maybe. By the same rea­son­ing it should take us the same amount of time to shift into a resource­ful state of being. The chal­lenge here is that we have been con­di­tioned from a very young age to remain in an un-resourceful state. Nobody gave us the tools to shift our state into a pos­i­tive one. Often, our par­ents didn’t know how, and still do not know how.

When neg­a­tive feel­ings arise, we have two choices,

1. To fol­low the habit­ual pat­tern we’ve learned since we were young, to react and allow the neg­a­tiv­ity to con­sume us.

2. Or, to inter­rupt the pat­tern we have been con­di­tioned to fol­low, and in doing so build new neural path­ways that allows for alter­na­tive possibilities.

There are essen­tially three ways to inter­rupt a behav­ioral pattern:

* Visual — Change your thoughts.
* Ver­bal — Change your lan­guage.
* Kines­thetic — Change your phys­i­cal position.

Okay, let’s dive into the prac­ti­cal stuff…

15 Ways to Over­come Anger

Some of these tools might be more effec­tive for some of us than oth­ers. For me, “Look Up!!” has been the most effec­tive (thus, I’m list­ing it first). I’ve also seen good results where sev­eral of these are used in combination.

1. Look Up!!!

The fastest way to change neg­a­tive feel­ings is by chang­ing our phys­i­cal posi­tion right away. The eas­i­est way to phys­i­cally change is by mov­ing our eye posi­tion. When we are in a neg­a­tive state, we are likely look­ing down. Sud­denly look­ing up (into our visual plane) will inter­rupt the neg­a­tive pat­terns of sink­ing into the quick sand of bad feelings.

Any sud­den phys­i­cal change will do the trick:

* Stand up and stretch while let­ting out an audi­ble sigh.
* Exag­ger­ate and change your facial expres­sions.
* Walk over to a win­dow where there is sun­light.
* Do 10 jump­ing jacks.
* Do a ridicu­lous dance that pokes fun at you.
* Mas­sage the back of your neck with one hand while singing happy birthday.

Try this next time you feel a neg­a­tive or unpleas­ant thought come up.

2. “What Do You Want?”

Sit down and write down exactly what it is that you want out of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. Your job is to describe the end result you would like to see. Be clear, real­is­tic and fair. Be spe­cific with your descrip­tion. Includ­ing dates of when you would like to see the results.

Once you have this clearly mapped out, and when you find your­self drift­ing into neg­a­tive thoughts of what you don’t want, you can shift your focus on this list instead.

Also, when we do this exer­cise con­sciously, we’ll come to find that the arbi­trary and mate­ri­al­is­tic things that we thought we wanted, aren’t want we want, after all. Clar­ity is a beau­ti­ful thing.

3. Elim­i­nate: Don’t, Not, No

Words such as Don’t, Not, No, Can’t gets us focused on the things that we don’t want. Lan­guage is a pow­er­ful thing and can influ­ence our sub­con­scious mind, and ulti­mately our feel­ings. When you catch your­self using a negated word, see if you can replace it with another word of oppos­ing mean­ing. Exam­ple: instead of say­ing “I don’t want war”, say “I want peace”.

4. Find­ing the Light

Dark­ness can only be elim­i­nated when there is light (like a lamp, or sun­light). In the same way, neg­a­tive things can only be replaced by pos­i­tive things. Remem­ber that regard­less of what is hap­pen­ing to us exter­nally, or how bad things appear in our mind, we always have the choice to speak and see things positively.

I know this is harder to do when you’re in midst of heated emo­tions, but I’m a big believer that there is some­thing to be learned from every sit­u­a­tion we encounter. Look for the les­son. Find some­thing about the sit­u­a­tion that you’ve gained, whether it’s a mate­r­ial pos­ses­sion or an under­stand­ing or a per­sonal growth. Find the light so you can uncover the dark­ness of your mind.

5. Surrender

Sur­ren­der to our ego’s need to be right, to blame, to be spite­ful, and to be revenge­ful. Sur­ren­der to the moment. Sur­ren­der to the pull to become worked-up by the situation.

Become mind­ful. Watch your thoughts and learn to sep­a­rate your thoughts from your own iden­tity. Your thoughts are not you.

Things will play out regard­less of whether we become emo­tional or not. Trust that the uni­verse will work its course and do its job. By not sur­ren­der­ing, we get worked up for noth­ing, and our body will suf­fer as a result of it.

6. Cir­cle of Influence

When we are feel­ing down, it’s easy to be sucked into the down­ward spi­ral of bad feel­ings. It really doesn’t help to be around oth­ers com­plain­ing about the same issues. It’s counter-productive to get­ting well.

Instead, find a group of peo­ple with a pos­i­tive out­look. When we are around such a group of peo­ple, they will remind us of things we already know deep within us, we can start to rec­og­nize the good, and the pos­i­tives. When we are down, we can draw energy from them in order to rise above the prob­lem and neg­a­tive state.

In the same way that being around neg­a­tive peo­ple can affect you in a neg­a­tive way, being around happy and opti­mistic peo­ple can raise our aware­ness, and help us move out of the un-resourceful state.

7. Grat­i­tude Exercise

Find an unin­ter­rupted space, and bring a notepad and pen with you. List out (in as much detail) every­thing you are grate­ful for in your life, either in the past, or present; either expe­ri­ences, rela­tion­ships, friend­ships, oppor­tu­ni­ties or mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions. Fill up the page, and use as many pages as you have things to be thank­ful for. Be sure to thank your heart and your body.

This is a sim­ple, yet under­es­ti­mated tool to help us focus our atten­tion on what mat­ters. This exer­cise can also shift our state of mind from one of a lower fre­quency to that of a higher fre­quency. It also helps us to gain clar­ity and to remind our­selves that we have much to be thank­ful for.

No mat­ter how bad things get, we always, always have things to be grate­ful for. If any­thing, we have the oppor­tu­nity of life, in which we have the free­dom to grow, to learn, to help oth­ers, to cre­ate, to expe­ri­ence, to love.

I’ve also found it par­tic­u­larly effec­tive to add silent med­i­ta­tion for 5–10 min­utes prior, and visu­al­iz­ing every­thing on your grat­i­tude list after the grat­i­tude exer­cise. Try it for yourself!

8. Med­i­ta­tion

Med­i­ta­tion is train­ing for the mind; to calm the noise in our men­tal space, to lower our thought count, to draw out inner wis­dom, and mostly it helps us to rec­og­nize and remain anchored in our divine state.

Regard­less of what is hap­pen­ing exter­nal to us, we have the capac­ity to remain cen­tered, in a state of accep­tance, of flow, of peace, and of love. When we are in this state, we are ratio­nal and have the clar­ity we need to han­dle any sit­u­a­tion with grace, and with min­i­mal stress on our body.

9. Breath­ing Relax­ation Techniques

Most of us are shal­low breathers, and air only stays in the top of our lungs. Deep breath­ing exer­cises will get more oxy­gen into our brains, and into the rest of our body. Try this:

* Sit up straight in your chair, or stand up.
* Loosen up cloth­ing, espe­cially if your stom­ach feels tight.
* Inhale through your nose. Exhale through your mouth.
* Put one hand on your abdom­i­nal area (over your belly).
* When you inhale, feel your hand expand­ing as air is filled up in your diaphragm.
* When you exhale, feel your hand retract­ing to the ini­tial place­ment.
* Count in your mind the num­ber of inhales and exhales, and grad­u­ally level them off such that both take equal counts.
* Slowly, add a count to your exhale.
* Keep adding a count to your exhale until the count for exhales dou­bles that of the count for inhales.
* Repeat this breath­ing rhythm for 5 to 10 times.
* Keep your eyes closed in silence for a few min­utes afterwards.

10. Laugh­ter!

We can­not laugh and be upset at the same time. When we make the phys­i­cal move­ment required to laugh or smile, we instantly feel light-hearted and joyful.

Try it now: give me that beau­ti­ful smile of yours. I want a gen­uine and large smile now! J How do you feel? Do you feel an instant jolt of joy? Did you tem­porar­ily for­get about your problems?

List out a series of movies that make you laugh and stock them up at home. Or meet up with a humor­ous friend who can really get you laugh­ing. For my friend going through the divorce, I pre­scribed Episode 10 of “Sur­vivor Gabon”, he laughed until his stom­ach hurt and told me the next day that he slept very well, with­out once think­ing about the neg­a­tiv­ity that would oth­er­wise trig­ger anger.

11. Forgiveness

For my lit­tle vin­dic­tive ras­cals out there, I know the idea to for­give your ‘enemy’ sounds counter-intuitive. The longer you hold on to the grudge, the more painful emo­tions you will expe­ri­ence, the more tur­bu­lence you are putting on your body, the more dam­age you are inflict­ing on your long-term health and wellness.

Unable to for­give some­one is like drink­ing poi­son and expect­ing the other per­son to die. And there’s no way around it.

12. Snap a Rub­ber Band

Wear an elastic/rubber band around your wrist, at all times. Every time you find your­self hav­ing a thought that would lead to a down­ward neg­a­tive cycle, snap the rub­ber band. It might sting a lit­tle. But this actu­ally trains our mind to avoid trig­ger­ing those thoughts. Pain is an amaz­ing motivator.

13. Iden­tify and Elim­i­nate Your Triggers

Sit down and brain­storm a list of reminders and activ­i­ties that will trig­ger this neg­a­tive emo­tion in us. It might be hear­ing the word ‘divorce’, or someone’s name, or going to a par­tic­u­lar restaurant.

Com­mit to your­self to elim­i­nate the men­tion­ing of these trig­gers from your life. If we know some­thing will upset us, why would we bother trig­ger­ing it?

14. Iden­tify What Anger Brings

List all the things that you’ve gained as a result of being angry. When you’re done, go down this list and count the num­ber of pos­i­tive things that are actu­ally con­ducive to your well­be­ing. By the way, “mak­ing the other per­son suf­fer and feel pain” does not count as “con­ducive to your wellbeing”.

This exer­cise helps us bring more aware­ness, ratio­nal­ity and clar­ity into the situation.

15. Seek Clo­sure. Solve the Problem

To the best of your abil­ity, do not drag any­thing on for the sake of “win­ning” or “being right”; it’s not healthy for any­one involved.

Just because we sur­ren­der to the exter­nal events and choose not to give them any more atten­tion, does not mean that we sit back pas­sively to let oth­ers step all over us.

Take action that will help you move onto the next step, and closer to res­o­lu­tion. Be proac­tive and thought­ful. The faster you can get the prob­lem resolved, the quicker you can set your­self free, mentally.