Quarterback Your Emotions

Hey Gen X Lady,
Emotions are the beacon of light that guides our lives. When our lives are filled with love, admiration, contentment, joy, then our emotions will guide us to a happy place. However, too often, other emotions like fear, jealousy, and anger are swimming in our heads like sharks waiting to feed. And we feed these sark-like emotions with either stronger negative emotions or with overall negative self-talk.

If emotions have that much power, is it even possible to take control?

In this episode, we take a look at how to gain back control of the emotions, especially when they drive all of our decisions.

Emotions from a brain-science perspective.

All emotions start with a thought first. This is actually very liberating because we’ve assumed that emotions happen to us, however, we actually have more control over them than we think.
Our thoughts are patterns embedded in our brains, that’s why we typically have the same reactions to a stimulus. Since 95% of our thinking is actually our sub-conscious auto-pilot, which makes these old embedded thoughts take the wheel and turn into emotions.

Once the thought pattern kicks off, the brain releases chemicals that start to flow through the body and heighten our emotions. When you have good emotions you release good chemicals, you literally feel high.

On the flip side, negative emotions release negative chemicals this is why your hands may shake when you are nervous or you get flushed when you’re angry.

Emotions from an energy perspective

Our emotions give clue us into how we what kind of energy we are putting out.
Here’s an example, ever notice when you’re in love everything around you feels better. I once heard someone say, “the snow even looks brighter!”. That is because we’re operating from a higher-level, anabolic energy.
But then you have an argument with your partner. Your subconscious mind takes over and you become fearful that you will be abandoned or angry that you are not being acknowledged.
Now you feel the emotion of frustration, maybe you’re sad or even feeling a bit depressed. Everything feels like a slog. You’re cranky, irritable and one frustrating thing happens after another. This is because you’re in a lower level catabolic destructive energy.
Like you learned in high school physics like energy attracts like energy, so whatever your emotion, you are actually attracting more of it.

Emotions are actually neutral

We may say being angry or sad are bad emotions, but they are actually just giving us information. Something is triggering these feelings and if we are curious about them and why we are let’s say angry, we can get down to the root cause and then make needed adjustments.
The other thing is humans are NOT supposed to be happy 100% of the time. Life gives us ups and downs. But the self-aware person knows how to be ok with their emotions. The difficulty comes when we want to run away from something that feels crappy and we do things to self-soothe like shop, drink, eat, etc.
Resources:
Download our Guide, 5 Steps to Stress Less

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