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Regulating your emotions

When emotions are too intense, we can feel an emotional wave that overwhelms us, to the point of not being able to keep our heads above water. Regulating your emotions is like surfing. You have to learn. Learning to surf the wave of your emotions means learning to feel your emotions without drowning. The surfer, when approaching a wave, prepares to catch it, to follow its movement. He/she observes, positions his/her body. He/she doesn't resist and lets the wave take him/her away. We tend to want to escape the strong emotions we feel fighting by the wave, when it can exhaust us and make us sink. On the contrary, accepting your emotion with the certainty that this emotional wave will go back down allows a quicker return to calm.

Sometimes we feel that our emotion lasts, and that it never subsides.

In this situation, while the emotion is at its peak, we may have negative thoughts about ourselves, others or the world that will start a new emotional wave. It is as if we have reached this plateau, we put new logs in our emotional fire, and it only grows bigger. As long as we rekindle the fire, the emotion cannot subside.

On the contrary, accepting the painful emotion allows us to experience the suffering and to avoid its continuation. It may seem contradictory, but the best way to stop feeling an emotion is to really feel it and let it disappear naturally.

All emotions have a function and deserve to be experienced, even the negative ones. To avoid our emotions is to avoid what makes us alive.

We can sometimes tend to put aside an emotion that is unpleasant to experience, for example by thinking about something else, or by smoking a cigarette, drinking alcohol etc. This is called emotional avoidance. The problem is that emotions work a bit like boomerangs: when we avoid them and do not allow them to be experienced, they always come back, one way or another.