7 Tips for Regulating Emotions
Oh the emotions that come with being an artist! Pair that with the emotions of pursuing a dream and you’ve got yourself an overly-sensitive emotional soup… Okay, perhaps I’m being dramatic. I know plenty of artists who aren’t all that emotional.. But me, yeah, I have a heart full of feelings and eyes full of water.
Currently I’m dedicating a lot of energy to learning emotional regulation. When it comes to my emotions I’ve gone through periods of suppression, then feeling because I had to but didn’t really want to, then absolute embrace of feeling everything… and now I am trying to find some balance because while I realize the importance of feeling, I also realize that it’s detrimental to my health and to those close to me to be deep in the feels all the time. For me, this means learning to notice what I feel, but not expressing or reacting right away. If I feel hurt, maybe I don’t need to show that I’m hurt immediately. If I can take a few moments to center myself I can tune into why I’m feeling hurt and choose how I want to react. Do I want to talk about it? Do I want to embody it? Can I just let it go? Am I seeing the whole picture clearly?
Expression is important, but when expression becomes more important than staying balanced in truth, issues arise. When tension is high and emotions are heightened, it’s important for me to take a pause, take a breath, and zoom out. The emotions feel all-encompassing at times, but they don't have to be. I have a choice. I always have a choice.
Below are some of my tips for working with heightened emotions:
Take Some Space
If you're in a situation where others are involved in your emotional process, be sure to take space if it starts to get overwhelming, you’re quick to react, or getting defensive. Sometimes all we need is to let our nervous systems know that we’re safe which is often easier to accomplish when we’re in our own space.
Breathe
There’s a reason people always say to take a deep breath in intense situations. Controlling our breathing can help to slow down our heart rate and take us out of the reactive fight/flight/freeze/fawn.
Get outside
Reactiveness and heightened emotions often stem from our thoughts. It’s helpful to balance the heady energy with groundedness so that we can approach our emotions fully embodied, rather than simply in our heads. Putting my bare feet on the earth almost always quiets my mind so that I can think more clearly
Get Curious
Once you know you’re safe and your mind feels more clear, start to get curious about what is really making you feel the way you’re feeling. You can talk to a tree or a trusted friend, journal, notice what the emotion feels like in different parts of your body, or simply ask yourself questions like “when did I start to feel this way?” “What triggered me?” “Are there other perspectives that I haven’t considered?” “What need is not being fulfilled right now and how can I meet that need myself?” If you choose to talk to someone, be sure to take their words with a grain of salt because they may be responding from their own past experiences and perspectives which won’t always be relevant or what’s best for your situation.
Accept It
Something that I always come back to in life is that if I want to move forward, I first have to accept where I’m at currently. Easier said than done because we often have habits and patterns that we don’t want to admit to because they don’t align with who we want to be. This is what people often refer to as the “shadow self.” These parts of ourselves are important to make peace with in order to grow and be the best version of ourselves. If you’re feeling an emotion that you don’t want to be feeling, tell yourself that it’s okay to feel this way and encourage yourself to explore it in a way that is safe and compassionate. I like to give myself 5 minutes to feel whatever is coming up. You can even set a timer. This is your time to feel it fully. I often find that when I give permission, the feeling naturally fades on its own. All it needed to dissolve was to be acknowledged and given permission to exist.
Practice Compassion
First, find compassion for yourself and then for others. I like to place my hands on my heart and imagine a glowing light filled with warmth in the center. I send myself love and understanding and listen to the signals that my body is sending. If there’s another person involved in my emotional process, I imagine them as a part of me and ask myself how would I want to be responded to?
Do Something Pleasurable
If we’re not feeling great about ourselves or others, it can be really easy to stay in the slumps because we feel like that’s what we deserve. Accepting our low moments and allowing them to exist is an important part of the process, but it’s equally important to pick ourselves up and move on. No matter what has happened, we deserve to enjoy life and can decide at any moment to start anew. Lately when I’ve felt low, I’ve been gifting myself with an activity that brings me joy: eating fresh fruit, taking a bath, dancing, giving myself a massage, laying in the sun. To allow ourselves to experience pleasure in our lowest moments is one of the most potent acts of self-love and even if it feels uncomfortable at first, if I stick with it, it can completely change the outlook of my day.
If this helps you in any way or if you have any tips you’d like to add, please share them in the comments. I would love to hear from you.