Like most people, you, too, must hate wastage and yet you may be wasting precious energy by entertaining negative emotions. Unfortunately, this squandering of energy can be habit forming and permeates your daily life. Signs that you are a slave of your negative emotions are when you get annoyed at the slightest discomfort, you feel bitter towards others at a drop of a pin, or your immediate response to almost any situation is anger.
Here are the some tips on how you could unshackle yourself from your negative emotions and avoid that perpetual frown etched all over your face. Besides being unsightly, it also adversely affects your relations with almost everyone around you, a very tragic situation indeed.
- Quit justifying your belligerent attitude. You are not licensed to be grouchy and blow your top whenever things do not go your way. Anger is a double-edged sword. It harms other but you are the one who suffer more because emotional stress stays within you after your adversary is gone. If you seem powerless to uproot the anger from your system, seek the help of others to teach you effective ways to manage your anger clinically.
- Quit making alibis. Stop rationalizing your irrational behaviour. There is no explanation to make your immature attitude socially acceptable. Your attempt to cover it up only makes it get ingrained deeper within your system until it becomes almost impossible to eradicate them. Making excuses for your negative emotions would be like pampering a spoiled brat inside you until it becomes obnoxious to everyone around you, including yourself.
Be responsible for your negative emotions. Once you realize and admit your negative emotions, it is time for you to take responsibility for the damage they cause to you and to others. This would gradually take away the power your negative emotions have over you. By owning your problems and stop passing the blames to others, you would start to behave as a functional and rational person.
- Refuse to be slave of others’ negative negativity. While recuperating from the effect of your negative emotions, it is best to avoid those who harbour negative emotions themselves. This is to avoid being influenced back to your old self. Do not let anyone define your own self worth by their opinions or you might end up as miserable as they are. Also, their negative comments might either trigger the old anger in you or could evoke a depressing feeling of self-pity, both resulting in the revival of the negative emotions you are trying to overcome. Remember that you could not control what others think of you but you could control your reaction to them. All of the negativity and hurt actually comes from you. Ignore the negativity of others think and end up a happier person, unshackled by negative emotions.
- Learn how to count. It may sound childish but the advice to count up to ten whenever you are faced with a top-blowing situation is very effective to keep your patience. Patience is never more important than when you are on the verge of losing it. Think before you even open your mouth to utter words you might regret forever you did. With your 1 – 10 counting, take several deep breaths and calm yourself down. Try to analyze if the situation is really so bad that it justifies the yelling and cursing with unprintable words. Think what would their repercussions be a week, or a month, or even a year from now?
- Learn to appreciate things. No matter how insignificant the good things that come your way each day, be thankful for them. Think of the good people you meet during the day, the good news you hear, even the mere fact you reach the end of your day safe and sound—there are myriads of blessing you could be grateful. Gratitude improves your health, relationships, emotions, personality, and career. Behaviourist experts find that keeping a gratitude journal can increase your long-term well-being by more than 10%.
Guard your thoughts. “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’ll be right both ways”, says a Japanese adage. Remove the phrase “I can’t” from your daily vocabulary. These self- limiting words effectively make you a slave of your negative emotions. Try to let go of your negative emotions for they could turn even the slightest inconvenience into catastrophe (at least in your mind) and make you forever miserable.
Holding on to your negative emotions shackles to a life of misery and make your chance to attain success nil. What makes it sadder is that most of these emotions are only in your mind and the power to overcome them is very much within you.