Navigating Strong Emotions: The Why and 7 Tips To Try
Navigating emotions is a key part of Emotional Intelligence. Emotions can be confusing at times, for adults and children. Especially strong or unpleasant feelings. When life gets stressful, hurried, or unpredictable, it is important to be able to navigate our emotions.
In our previous article, Making Friends With Feelings, we addressed ways you can recognize feelings and how to “name them to tame them”. This may lead us to think we should control our emotions. But, what if we reframe it from controlling our emotions to “navigating” our emotions.
We’ve all heard the saying “Keep your emotions out of it”. Sometimes we try to suppress our feelings because they are strong or unpleasant. We exert a lot of energy trying to control our feelings and keep them down. Take this beachball analogy, for example.
Have you ever tried to hold a beach ball under water? If you have, you know that it takes a lot energy to keep it suppressed under the water. Then, at some point we lose control of the ball and it shoots up out of the water in a unpredictable direction.
Now, pretend the water is what is happening around you, and the beachball represents your emotions. You may not want to play with the beach ball, or you might dislike the beach ball, so you push it down.
When we push our emotions down because we don’t understand them, or because they are unpleasant, we must work really hard to keep them under the surface. And, just like the beach ball shooting out of the water, at some point those emotions will show up in an unpredictable way.
Imagine just letting the beach ball (your emotions) float next to you. You acknowledge it is there. You don’t fight to push it away. It might still float next to you and it might eventually float away. Either way, you can coexist with it, and channel your energy towards enjoying the water.
So, how do we let the beachball float, so we can choose what we want to do in the water?
7 Tips to Navigate Your Emotions
When having strong emotions, calming our nervous system allows us to choose moving forward in a healthy way. This is a great skill to use for ourselves and teach to our children. Here are some ideas to bring ourselves to a more calm space.
In our article, “Don’t Like Guided Meditation? Try These Mindfulness Ideas”, we discussed 6 ideas to practice mindfulness. See which ones might work for you.
Meaningful Breaks - When having strong feelings, try some of these meaningful break ideas:
Stretching exercises.
A walk and talk with a friend, or your family.
Getting water or a healthy snack.
Doing a moderate-to-high intensity physical activity.
Box Breathing - Variations can be making the counts longer, looking at the sides a square or rectangular object as you breath and count, and incorporating touch by running your fingers around a square or rectangular object (your phone, a book, a picture) as you breath in and out and count.
Take 5 Breathing - It is quick and easy, using your breath and your hands. Using the senses of sight and touch, you can practice slow breathing in and out, while tracing up and down the outer edges of your fingers.
Humming Bee Breath or Singing Loudly (even if you can’t sing) - Both these practices can help calm strong feelings.
Create a playlist - Creating a “go-to” playlist of music for different strong emotions you might have (anger, excitement, grief, sadness, etc.) can be helpful. Music can have a positive affect on our mood. Some ideas might be upbeat, happy music or soothing and soft music.
Practice Gratitude - Gratitude is a strong emotion in itself, and practicing it can actually have lasting positive effects on the brain. Cultivating it through keeping a gratitude journal, writing a thank you note, meditating on something you are grateful for, or verbally expressing appreciation to someone, are some ways you can practice gratitude. This article also has great resources around gratitude practices.
Once you have calmed your nervous system, you can make choices about how to move forward.
It may be time to ask, “What are these emotions trying to tell me?” and “How can I use this information to make decisions?”
We address ways to understand what emotions are telling us, and how to examine our thoughts, feelings, and actions, in our next article.
Stay tuned!
