We don’t directly control our emotions, but we can do things influence how intense they feel, and how effectively they fade over time. Although we’re unlikely to find any one action that makes our unpleasant feelings instantly disappear, learning to consistently apply effective strategies can make our emotions an entirely manageable experience. This post will introduce you to some strategies that you can practice applying every time unpleasant emotions show up, and build a habit of responding to those feelings effectively.
It can be helpful to think of the broad categories of short-term and long-term strategies, and to split each of these up into two types – distraction and offsetting, and expression and acceptance. Although many individual strategies may overlap two or more of these classifications, it can still be useful to have a mental checklist of strategies to apply from each subdivision. This encourages you to adopt a relatively balanced approach to managing your emotions.
Short-term Strategies
When we lack the skills to manage them, intense emotions can lead to impulsive behaviour as we try to escape feeling bad. Sometimes these impulsive behaviours are harmless, and at times they lead to unwanted behaviour – if you’ve ever experienced an angry outburst, an anxious avoidance of talking about something, or a sad social withdrawal from loved ones, you likely understand this well.
When we develop healthy tools for temporarily dealing with emotions in the short term, this can give us a greater capacity to make conscious decisions about our behaviour, instead of engaging in impulsive emotional avoidance. In the short term, it helps to know how to manage your emotions as they show up. Emotions will often peak quite quickly in how intense they feel after being formed, and then settle into a lower plateau of intensity shortly thereafter. Regulating emotions during the peak of their intensity can be challenging, and so using strategies to help us get through this intense peak period of our feelings can really help.
Distraction
Simply taking your mind off of the emotions and the events that have contributed to them can be a useful tactic in the moment. Engaging in activities that require focus and attention, such as puzzles or reading, can help take your mind off intense emotions. If you find yourself overwhelmed with emotions, it can be helpful to take a break from the situation. Step away and find a quiet space where you can have some time alone. This allows you to create distance, gain perspective, and prevent impulsive reactions to your emotions.
Distraction strategies come in all shapes and sizes, and the vast majority of people are already masters of various types of distractions. Learning to recognize your go-to distraction strategies can be helpful in two way – it helps you become more aware of emotions when they show up by noticing the presence of common distraction behaviours, and it gives you more control over selecting which type of distraction to use at a given moment.
Some common examples of distraction might include scrolling through your phone, changing the topic of conversation, or procrastinating by engaging in lower priority tasks.
Offsetting
Turning down the intensity of an emotion in the moment by offsetting it with alternative emotional experience can also be a useful skill to practice at short notice. If you imagine someone watching a scary movie, it’s easy to picture them eating a box of popcorn while they watch. If we were to monitor them while they watched the movie, we’d probably find that their rate of consumption of snacks corresponds to the level of distress they are feeling from the movie. Eating popcorn makes us feel pleasure, which can offset the intensity of the fear and anxiety in the movie.
Offsetting emotions in this way can feel very effective in the moment, but it’s important to remember that it’s only a short term coping mechanism. The movie popcorn strategy might be great for the fear experienced during the movie, as the fear from the scary movie will probably subside quickly after the movie credits roll. Emotions from real life will often last long after the temporary uptick from an offsetting activity. This makes it tempting to just keep applying these same offsetting techniques again and again, which can sometimes be problematic – substance addiction, self-harm, and binge eating are common examples of habits that can form in this way.
Some examples of offsetting strategies might include:
Deep Breathing: Deep breathing exercises can help calm the nervous system and reduce the intensity of emotions. Take slow, deep breaths in through your nose, hold briefly, and then exhale slowly through your mouth. Focus on the sensation of your breath as it enters and leaves your body. If you’re feeling a very energetic emotion, like anger or anxiety, it can be helpful to increase the length of your exhalation. A common rhythm we teach is to breathe in for 3 counts, hold for 1 count, breathe out for 5 counts, and hold again for 1. The exact amounts of time aren’t as important as the general rhythm, so experiment with what works for you.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation: This technique involves tensing and then releasing different muscle groups in your body, helping to release tension and promote relaxation. Start from your toes and work your way up, progressively tensing and relaxing each muscle group.
Engage in physical activity: Physical activity, such as going for a walk, jogging, or engaging in any form of exercise, can help release tension and promote a sense of well-being. Exercise triggers the release of endorphins, which are natural mood elevators and stress reducers.
Grounding Techniques: Grounding techniques help bring your attention to the present moment and distract from overwhelming emotions. Examples include focusing on your senses (noticing five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, etc.) or describing your environment in detail.
Long Term Strategies
Emotional Expression
Finding avenues for expressing our emotions allows us to make a positive impact on emotional experience in the long term. Imagine that you are carrying a large boulder of emotions with you everywhere you go, and that every time you express those emotions, you are steadily chipping away at that boulder. With consistent practice of emotional expression, what may have once felt like an overwhelming weight can transform into something far more manageable.
As a psychologist myself, I am fairly biased towards interpersonal expression – being able to express what we feel to other people can be a very effective means of addressing emotions over time. While I’m all in favour of people finding a psychologist to express their emotions to, this is also a strategy you can use with friends, family, and partners. The support and understanding we can receive in this way can really supplement our own efforts to manage our emotions more effectively.
Of course, I also recognize that interpersonal expression is not always accessible – sometimes we don’t have the right people in our lives, or they’re not available at a given moment, or we just don’t want to speak to people about certain feelings that we have. In these instances we can also use expression that doesn’t involve other people. If you want to talk to your pet rock, or talk to the trees in the forest, or speak to your dog or cat about your problems, that’s also an effective way to express your emotions. Many people also find journal writing to be an effective outlet for emotions. In all of these verbal formats, we want to learn to emphasize the emotions we experience much more than we usually do – most of us are prone to talking about the events connected to the emotions, without necessarily naming the emotions directly.
There are also all kinds of ways that we can use emotional expression in a creative way: Singing, dancing, acting, writing, painting, and many other creative mediums. The most important part with creative expression is to ensure that you’re expressing the emotion through your creativity, not just creating something for the sake of creativity. Even if you’re not good at a particular type of creativity, you can still use that to express your emotions. If you want to express your emotions through grabbing a paintbrush and drawing black circles on a piece of paper vigorously to express your frustration, that’s totally okay.
Finding accessible ways to take an emotion that was previously only happening inside of you, and finding a way to give that a representation outside of your head and body, can really have a powerful impact on our emotions over time.
Acceptance of Emotions
Many of our default strategies around emotions are focused on trying to rid ourselves of our emotions. While there is nothing wrong with not wanting to feel unpleasant emotions, one of the most powerful methods we can learn for regulating our emotions is to learn to accept them. We often experience an unconscious voice in our heads tell us we “can’t stand” feeling this way – the truth is we typically can stand feeling that way! What we generally perceive as the suffering caused by our emotions is likely more the suffering caused by fixating on the struggle against those emotions. This fixation prevents us from focusing on the rest of our lives, and results in a disconnect from so much of what is important to us in our lives.
The analogy of a tug of war captures this situation well. Imagine that you are standing on one side of a piece of rope, and your sadness / anxiety / anger is at the other end of the rope, and you’re both engaged in tug of war with each other. Some automatic ideas are likely to pop into your head – the most appealing thought is that if you just yank the rope hard enough, you will finally conquer that feeling and be rid of it at last. How great does that sound! Another part of our head sits in the background suggesting the opposite idea – what if you don’t tug the rope hard enough and your emotion beats you or overwhelms you. How awful would that be!
These two options can blind us to the fact that there is a third option – we can let go of the rope. In one way, if we let go of the rope, we are “giving up” on the possibility of beating that emotion. When we stop and reflect on that idea though, we will usually recognize that we have rarely (if ever) won that tug of war. How many times have you fought against an emotion repeatedly, only to realize that the feeling isn’t changing at all?
The other side letting go of the rope is that now there is no way the emotion will defeat us. When we learn to disengage from that struggle, we are free to shift our attention to the parts of our life that bring meaning and purpose to us. I have never seen someone in the middle of a tug of war stop to look around them and admire the lovely weather – all their focus is fixated on the struggle.
Emotional acceptance is a relatively simple concept to understand, but definitely not as easy to practice. A good starting point is to learn to accept that we are not yet very good at acceptance. The more we practice bringing an accepting approach to our emotions (and thoughts and behaviour), the better we become over time at accepting our emotions. Mindfulness exercises and meditation can also be great ways to flex our acceptance muscles more regularly.
New Skills Take Practice
Hopefully this collection of short term and long term strategies will prove useful to you in learning to manage your own emotions. Learning to balance short term and long term strategies effectively is one of the keys to good mental health, so practicing these tools in a regular and consistent way can do wonders for your well-being. All that’s left to do is to find ways to consistently practice these skills. I recommend a dual approach – creating set days and times that you purposefully review these strategies and attempt to apply them to your feelings, and looking for opportunities when emotions of any size come up to apply these skills to.
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