How to deal adequately with painful or unpleasant emotions?

Tips on how to adequately channel emotions when they make us have a bad time.

There are those who assume that the perfect human being is the one who is guided mainly through rationality and logic. In fact, there are many philosophers who over the centuries have seen emotions as an obstacle that prevents us from living in a totally virtuous way; as if the fact of getting excited and experiencing intense feelings were only a distortion of our ability to understand what surrounds us.

Nowadays, however, psychology and behavioral sciences in general have developed enough to make us understand that emotions are part of what allows us to adapt to the challenges and difficulties of everyday life, and that they usually play in our favor. However, that doesn't mean that we can't learn how to take advantage of their beneficial aspects and mitigate their effects when they work against us. That is why, in this article you will find some tips on how to properly deal with painful emotions when they become too entrenched when these become too entrenched in your way of thinking or detract from your ability to find solutions to your problems.

What are negative emotions really?

Normally, the term "negative emotions" makes reference to those emotions that produce discomfort in us in the immediate moment in which they emerge in us, independently if in the short, medium or long term.This is true regardless of whether in the short, medium or long term they help us to adopt an attitude or behavioral patterns that work in our favor. That is, a negative emotion is one that makes us have a bad time simply because we feel it, such as sadness or disgust.

Although the subjective component of negative emotions is associated with everything we do not like, the possibility of feeling them is often advantageous, since it allows us to learn which situations we should not expose ourselves to or which actions we should not repeat in a given context. In other words, they are part of innate psychological and Biological mechanisms that allow us to correct our behavioral patterns..

However, in the same way that some elements of our body that are natural and normal in human beings can give rise to diseases or unpleasant experiences in some situations, this predisposition to feel unpleasant emotions can also give rise to problems or unnecessarily uncomfortable or painful experiences. That is why it is worth learning to detect these situations to better channel our emotions and feelings.

4 keys to cope well with painful emotions

As we have seen, although in most cases emotions help us, sometimes they can lead us to problematic situations that we could have avoided, because there is no mechanism of adaptation to the environment that allows us to always "get it right". What to do to deal with emotions when they make us feel bad in a way that does not help us to learn? Let's see a summary.

1. Get used to associating the emotions you feel with words.

It is not about trying to reduce all your emotions to what can be understood verbally, but, assuming that your emotional side will always overflow the world of words, try to understand them better through words. In this way you will not fall so many times in confusing some emotions with others, you will be better able to identify them, and you will be able to manage them in a more specialized way..

To achieve this there are several effective strategies; one of the most used in psychotherapy consists of filling in a diary of emotions, in which you will frequently write down how you feel and in what situations those emotions and feelings have arisen.

2. Learn to combat rumination with activities that stimulate you.

The rumination is that tendency to give him turns over and over again to the same type of thoughts, so that in the end it is the own anticipation of those thoughts the one that attracts them towards our conscience. This is something that usually happens with emotionally painful memories, such as when we remember a time when we made a fool of ourselves in front of someone important, or when we lost a pet.

To combat this vicious circle dynamic, the best thing to do is not to try to block these thoughts, but to direct our attention towards activities that stimulate us psychologically.. In this way, our consciousness will be "on track" on a totally different route that will capture our attention for the time necessary to weaken rumination.

3. Structure your activities with a schedule

If in your day to day life you expose yourself a lot to those situations in which you do not know what to do, it is more likely that you end up attracting again and again to your consciousness those painful emotions that have been affecting you. That is why, it is advisable to plan beforehand how your day will be structured, what the sequence of activities will be.What will be the sequence of activities that you will carry out.

4. Apply relaxation techniques

Those unpleasant emotions that are linked to stress and anxiety can be managed through relaxation techniques (such as controlled breathing or Jacobson's progressive muscle relaxation). These will allow you to return to a state of normal brain activity and prevent those situations and prevent those situations in which you start to get stressed by the possibility of stress.

Looking for professional psychological assistance?

If you are looking for psychotherapy services to improve your emotional management, contact our team of professionals.

@professionals(2050508)

At Avance Psychologists we have more than two decades of experience attending patients, and nowadays we work helping people of all ages from psychological therapy directed towards the individual as well as family and couple therapy. We also offer in the areas of neuropsychology, psychiatry, coaching and speech therapy. We can assist you both in our psychology center located in Madrid (in the neighborhood of Goya) and through the modality of online therapy by video call.