Learning the Mentalmap to Emotional Mastery
There will be days when you will not have a moment or an entire day, sometimes a few days of emotional distress. Let's face it, we all have been and will likely be there again. On such a day, you will have a combination of any subsequent symptoms: a decrease in energy, feeling down, trapped, angry, and a strong urge to entertain a few self-destructive old habits. Here is what you can do instead of spiraling deeper into depression or engaging in self-destruction. Before I go into the details of the strategy and the habits, it's essential to understand some fundamentals of how the brain functions because timing is crucial.
We Reason with our Emotions
The brain does a great job forming perspectives of the world and ourselves without much of our input. The problem arises when that perspectives are not accurate. Yes, we are all emotional; emotions can help us reason better if we learn to control them. The content of our thoughts is highly influenced by our emotional state. In the next few sections, we will examine the mentalmap to gain mastery over our emotional state.
Fight or Flight Response/ Feeling Down
When you experience a flood of intense emotions, it is highly likely you have triggered the fight or flight response or fallen into a depressive state. At this stage, your ability to reason is no better than that of a chimpanzee. You lose access to the part of your brain responsible for analytical thinking and reasoning. So don't try to reason with yourself; you will likely fail.
Understand How to Transition from Bottom-up to Top Down Interventions
When experiencing an intense emotional state, you want to use your body and the senses to shift your emotions (bottom-up). Once you have transitioned from the intense emotional state, it's time to use the (top-down) or your logical brain to further your transformation back to your normal state.
Cool off or Elevate Your Energy
You are encouraged to use the body and engage your senses when experiencing intense emotions. If you are feeling down, you need to increase your energy using movement and the senses. Physical motion can help release built-up energy and shift your emotional state. Talk to a friend, get outside, go for a walk, or even better go to the Gym. Deep breathing and mindfulness meditation can also help. Your reasoning ability will come later. Now it's the time to alter your emotions using the senses and movement.
go for a walk
go to the gym
call a friend and talk
listening to soothing music if you are angry
listen to jovial music if feeling down and depressed
do deep breathing exercise
meditate
Don't Fool Yourself
We make quite a few mental mistakes each day without even realizing it. Our automatic brain often makes frequent errors, spinning the data received from our senses into a cognitive distortion or false perspective of reality. One example is confirmation bias, which focuses on things that support our beliefs and discredit those not aligned with what we believe is true. Until you learn to identify cognitive distortions, the process is out of your awareness, and you might not know what a limiting belief in the first place is. Limiting beliefs limits your perceptions of yourself and the world around you and influences your emotions. The distortions give us the perception we are trapped and often drive self-destructive tendencies when they trigger a fight or flight response or a deep state of depression that eventually leads to self-destruction.
How do I gain awareness of my thoughts?
While it sounds complicated, learning to sit still by doing 2-3 minute deep breathing exercises is simple and effective. This training can be done individually or with assistance. It takes about 10-15 minutes to learn this skill. While sitting still, you will notice that all of your thoughts under the surface try to distract you. You finish the exercise, and upon finishing, take an inventory of your thoughts and write them down.
Learn to do deep breathing meditation (click on the link I'll send you a free simple guide)
After the meditation, write down your thoughts (click here for a free thought journal guide)
Introducing Cognitive Restructuring Tool
Now you have the thought record; you can entertain a different view. This step will be counter-intuitive since we subconsciously try to prove our view of the world is correct. Initially, I encourage you to practice with a friend, mentor, or therapist. Once you get good at it, when practiced repeatedly, you will get much better at avoiding believing the distorted sense of ourselves and the world around us. You can judge whether having an accurate sense of yourself and the world matters to you. I will encourage you to learn this skill, without which you will experience more pain and worry than necessary.
Learn the power of reframing and restructuring
Build a habit of testing your assumptions about yourself and others
Embrace a Growth Mindset
The Five Golden Habits to Emotional Mastery
Lastly, Embrace and Act on these seven habits, building them into a routine. Once you build these activities into a habit, you can leverage them in the future. I assure you will feel much better.
Use the Power of Gratitude
Build a habit of making your bed
Keeping your workspace clean
Go to the Gym
Leverage Music to Shift your Emotions
Eat Whole Food
Meditate
Use the Power of Gratitude
Practicing gratitude has been demonstrated in research and practice that learning to enjoy what you have today saves you from the constant chase of a false sense of reality. If you cannot be happy with what you have today by being grateful, you follow the dangerous spiral of training your mind never to be satisfied. In other words, you are setting yourself up for a perpetual state of misery no matter what you acquire.
Making Your Bed and Keeping your Work Space Clean
The brain keeps a score of successes and failures. If you have failed at everything for that day, and such a day is inevitable, you can rely on making the bed and keeping your workspace clean to give you a sense of order and accomplishment. If you can stack this habit onto the next one, you increase your odds of shifting your sense of accomplishment twofold.
Go to the Gym (click the link, and we'll give you a simple mentalmap to getting your Gym Routine started)
Making a habit of working out is essential for many reasons. Some of those reasons include having more energy, a better functioning immune system, improved sleep, decreased time getting sick, reduced chances of developing chronic illness, and finally, feeling accomplished at the end of the day. If nothing goes well, you can stack your workout with the making the bed/ keeping your clean workspace routine, and you have improved the odds of feeling low.
Listen to Jovial, Spirited Music (click on a link, and I can email you a playlist)
Music has tremendous power to influence our emotions. You are encouraged to choose what you listen to wisely. Remember the earlier point, we think with our emotions. If you are sad, you naturally want to listen to dark and depressive music. Subconsciously such an impulse satisfies the desire to feel connected to others experiencing the same emotions. The problem is that such a behavior furthers and deepens the depressive state and supports the underlining story you tell yourself. This story, or narrative, must change if you want to change your emotion, starting with using music to help this transition. So if you are feeling down, listen to jovial or happy music. If you are angry, listen to calming music.
Eat Real Food
Food has tremendous power. Use it wisely. Food can transform a healthy child into a middle-aged adult who is starting to experience various manifestations of chronic illness. At the same time, food can cure chronic illness and cancer simultaneously. There are some general principles to keep in mind. When possible, eat organic, consume lots of vegetables, avoid processed food and fast food, consume healthy fats (Omega 3), and limit your sugar intake. Check out the Foods that Fight the Funk blog for more details.
Meditate (click on the link to receive a roadmap to learning to sit still)
Learning to sit still has been proven scientifically to lower stress and decrease anxiety and is the gateway to improved decisions. Whether you want to know the basics or choose to be a master, we can help guide you along this journey. There are simple and highly effective exercises we can provide to get you started, which take 10-15 minutes to learn. Click --> learn to meditate to get started by dropping us your contact information.
Now you have a complete mentalmap to emotional mastery. Take a breath and reflect. Give yourself credit for what you are doing well, and focus on improving areas needing a mental and behavioral update. Remember updating your mentalmap takes effort, while it's possible. You are not alone. Share this blog with someone who could find it helpful. We encourage you to sign up for free weekly tips, tools, and strategies. Schedule a free consultation by clicking the link below if you need additional support.
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