It is necessary to move on to the next step in the transformation of internal qualities, to control your Feelings.
Many people are now trying to engage in personal and spiritual growth, they begin to go to trainings, attend yoga classes, get acquainted with many spiritual schools, strive to cleanse the aura, karma, chakras, but they miss the main thing with which human development begins - the transformation of qualities.
To change personal qualities, you need to become the master of your Mind and feelings, learn to manage feelings and control them. After all, it is no longer a secret that negative emotions suck out a person’s energy, leading to depression, disbelief, to the manifestation of even more bad qualities and hinder its development.
Great sages give such an analogy that the material body is a chariot on which the soul sits. And this chariot is driven by the charioteer-reason. In the hands of the driver, like the reins, is the mind. And feelings are horses. And a living being under the influence of the senses and the mind can sometimes rejoice, sometimes suffer.
The sages of antiquity say that it is very important to control one's emotions, otherwise a person loses his Mind. It is like a cracked vessel from which water slowly flows out. The sages understood where many negative feelings come from and advised to start first of all with the control of one's mind, speech and anger, which arises from excessive attachment and disappointment. And then you need to learn to control the urges of the tongue, stomach and sexual instincts.
Managing emotions does not mean suppressing them. It has been proven that a strict ban on the expression of one's feelings can affect the physical and mental well-being of a person, expressed in psychosomatic diseases. Emotions must be managed wisely. You can acquire the skill of redirecting energy. If you often experience unpleasant and uncontrollable feelings: anger, guilt, resentment, irritation, anxiety and want to get rid of this, then I advise you to learn simple skills to restore inner balance. This is useful in personal and business relationships to achieve mutual understanding. But the most interesting thing is the entrance to the world of understanding yourself, your feelings and actions. As a result, this is an internal transformation of qualities and personal growth.
Steps to managing feelings:
1. Be aware of emotions. What you notice is easier to manage. It is important to be aware of your condition, your feeling.
2. Consciously reject low impulses to which Feelings and Mind aspire.
3. Transform the emotion to a more suitable and constructive one in this situation. Or at least change the intensity of the feeling that has arisen.
four. . In moments of dejected mood, try to think about those who would not be hindered by your help and support now. Shifting the focus of your attention from your feelings to the needs of another person will change your way of thinking and eliminate mental instability.
5. Physical activity from light walking to sports contribute to the production of endarphins - hormones of satisfaction.
6. Breathing exercises are a simple and effective way to relieve emotional stress. This will help you take control of your feelings and begin to control them.
7. The study of the Holy Scriptures, spiritual practice, meditation and prayer are the most profound methods that will allow you to control your Feelings and Mind.
And it is also noticed that common feature of all centenarians is the ability to think positively and enjoy every day and not perceive the world around us as hostile.
Monitor and control your feelings. Let only positive qualities and emotions prevail in your life. This will make your life rich, joyful and interesting.
It is not easy to overcome the barriers of mutual understanding that arise in various situations of communication. To do this, you need to be well versed in the nuances of human psychology, including your own. It is much easier to do something else - not to create these barriers yourself. In order not to be the main obstacle to understanding with others, a person needs to know the psychological rules of communication, and above all, learn to manage their emotions, which most often become a source of interpersonal conflicts.
Our attitude to emotions is very similar to our attitude to old age, which, according to the witty remark of Cicero, everyone wants to achieve, and when they reach it, they blame it. The mind constantly rebels against the unlimited power of emotions in human relationships. But his protest can most often be heard “after a fight”, when it becomes extremely clear that fear, anger or excessive joy were not the best advisers in communication. “There was no need to get excited,” prompts the mind, which received the fair name “backward”, “first you had to weigh everything, and then already reveal your attitude towards the interlocutor.” It remains only to agree with the wise arbitrator, in order to act no less recklessly next time, reacting to others with all the emotionality inherent in us.
It would be easiest to recognize emotions as a harmful legacy of the past, inherited from the “smaller brothers”, who, due to their evolutionary immaturity, could not use the mind to best adapt to the environment and were forced to be content with such primitive adaptation mechanisms as fear, which forced them to run away from danger; a fury that without hesitation mobilized the musculature to fight for survival; pleasure, in the pursuit of which they did not know fatigue and indulgence. This point of view was held by the well-known Swiss psychologist E. Claparede, who with increased emotionality rejected the right of emotions to participate in the regulation of human activity: “The uselessness or even harmfulness of emotions is known to everyone. Imagine, for example, a person who has to cross the street; if he is afraid of cars, he will lose his cool and run.
Sadness, joy, anger, weakening attention and common sense, often force us to commit undesirable actions. In short, the individual, once in the power of emotion, "loses his head." Of course, a cold-blooded person crossing the street has all the advantages over an emotionally excited one. And if our whole life consisted of a continuous intersection of tense highways, then emotions would hardly have found a worthy place in it. However, life, fortunately, is arranged in such a way that crossing the streets in it is most often not a goal, but a means to achieve more interesting goals that could not exist without emotions. One of these goals is human understanding. It is no coincidence that many science fiction writers associate the worst prospect for the development of the human race with the loss of a wealth of emotional experiences, with communication built according to strictly verified logical schemes. The gloomy specter of the future world, in which rational automata triumph, or rather, dominate (since triumph is a state not devoid of emotionality), worries not only writers, but also many scientists who study the influence of scientific and technological progress on the development of society and the individual.
Modern culture actively invades the emotional world of a person. At the same time, two, at first glance, opposite, but essentially interconnected processes are observed - an increase in emotional excitability and the spread of apathy. These processes have been discovered recently in connection with the massive penetration of computers into all spheres of life. For example, according to Japanese psychologists, fifty out of a hundred children who are fond of computer games; suffer from emotional disorders. For some, this manifests itself in increased aggressiveness, while for others it manifests itself in deep apathy, the loss of the ability to emotionally respond to real events. Such phenomena, when a person's emotional states begin to approach the poles, when control over emotions is lost and their moderate manifestations are increasingly replaced by extremes, is evidence of a clear ill-being in the emotional sphere. As a result, tension in human relationships increases. According to sociologists, three-quarters of families are subject to constant conflicts that arise for various reasons, but manifest themselves, as a rule, in one - in uncontrolled emotional outbursts, which most of the participants later regret.
Emotional outbursts are not always detrimental to relationships. Sometimes, as we noted, they also bring some benefit, if they do not drag on for a long time and are not accompanied by mutual, and especially public, insults. But emotional coldness will never benefit relationships, which is unpleasant in social role-playing and business communication, as a demonstration of an indifferent attitude to what is happening, and in intimate personal communication is simply unacceptable, since it destroys the very possibility of mutual understanding between close people. The polarization of emotional manifestations, characteristic of modern civilization, stimulates an active search for rational methods of regulating emotions, the release of which out of control threatens both the internal psychological stability of a person and the stability of his social relations. It cannot be said that the problem of managing emotions is characteristic only for modern society. The ability to resist passions and not succumb to immediate impulses that are not consistent with the requirements of reason has been considered the most important characteristic of wisdom in all ages. Many thinkers of the past elevated it to the rank of the highest virtue. For example, Marcus Aurelius considered non-passion, which manifests itself in a person's experience of exclusively reasonable emotions, as an ideal state of mind.
And although some philosophers, like the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, called for the subordination of emotions to reason, while others advised not to enter into a hopeless struggle with natural impulses and submit to their arbitrariness, not a single thinker of the past was indifferent to this problem. And if it were possible to hold a referendum among them on the issue of the relationship between the rational and the emotional in people's lives, then, in our opinion, the opinion expressed by the great Renaissance humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who argued that "there is one and only the path to happiness: the main thing is to know yourself; then do everything not depending on the passions, but according to the decision of the mind.
It is difficult to judge how true such a statement is. Since emotions arise primarily as reactions to real life events that are far from the ideal of a reasonable world order, the call for their coordination with reason rarely finds fertile ground. Modern psychologists, relying on many years of experience in the scientific study of human emotions, as a rule, recognize the need for their rational regulation. The Polish scientist J. Reikovsky emphasizes: “In an effort to control the world around us more and more effectively, a person does not want to put up with the fact that something can exist in him that nullifies the efforts made, interferes with the implementation of his intentions. And when emotions take over, very often. everything happens that way.” As you can see, according to Reikovsky, emotions should not take precedence over reason. But let's see how he assesses this situation from the point of view of the ability of the mind to change the state of affairs: “Up until now, people have only been able to state the discrepancy between the “voice of the heart and the voice of reason,” but they could neither understand nor eliminate it.” Behind this authoritative judgment are the results of numerous studies, psychological observations and experiments that reveal the contradictory nature of the relationship between "unreasonable" emotions and "unemotional" mind. We just have to agree with J. Reikovsky that we have not yet learned how to intelligently manage our emotions. Yes, and how to manage when there are many emotions, but the mind, at best, is one. Not possessing the logic inherent in the mind in solving problem situations, emotions take on others - a kind of worldly resourcefulness that allows turning a problem situation into a problem-free one. Psychologists have established that emotions disorganize the activity in connection with which they arose. For example, the fear that arose with the need to overcome a dangerous section of the path disrupts or even paralyzes the movement towards the goal, and stormy joy over success in creative activity reduces creativity. This shows the unreasonableness of emotions. And it is unlikely that they would have survived in the rivalry with the mind if they had not learned to win by "cunning". Violating the original form of activity, emotions greatly facilitate the transition to a new one, which allows you to solve the problem without hesitation and doubt, which turned out to be a “tough nut” for the mind. So, fear stops before an elusive goal, but gives strength and energy to escape from the dangers lurking on the way to it; anger allows you to sweep away barriers that cannot be intelligently circumvented; joy makes it possible to be satisfied with what is already there, keeping from the endless race for everything that is not yet.
Emotions are an evolutionarily earlier mechanism for regulating behavior than the mind. Therefore, they choose simpler ways to solve life situations. To those who follow their "advice", emotions add energy, since they are directly related to physiological processes, in contrast to the mind, to which not all body systems obey. Under the strong influence of emotions in the body, such a mobilization of forces occurs that the mind cannot be called up either by orders, or requests, or prodding.
The need to rationally manage one's emotions arises in a person by no means because he is not satisfied with the very fact of the appearance of emotional states. Both stormy, uncontrollable experiences and indifference and lack of emotional involvement equally impede normal activity and communication. It is unpleasant to communicate with someone who is “terrible in anger” or “violent in joy”, and with someone whose dead look indicates complete indifference to what is happening. Intuitively, people are well aware of the "golden mean", which provides the most favorable atmosphere in various communication situations. All our worldly wisdom is directed against emotional extremes. If grief - “don’t be too hard on yourself”, if joy - “don’t be too happy so that you don’t cry later”, if disgust - “don’t be too fastidious”, if apathy - “shake it up!”
We generously share such recommendations with each other, because we are well aware that uncontrolled emotions can damage both the person himself and his relationships with others. Alas, wise advice rarely resonates. People are much more likely to infect each other with out-of-control emotions than they are to achieve the beneficial effects of their recommendations for their intelligent management.
It is difficult to expect that a person will listen to someone else's voice of reason when his own is powerless. Yes, and these voices say the same thing: “We need to control ourselves”, “we should not succumb to weakness”, etc. Suppressing emotions “by order”, we most often achieve the opposite effect - excitement increases, and weakness becomes intolerable. Unable to cope with experiences, a person tries to suppress at least the external manifestations of emotions. However, external well-being with internal discord is too expensive: raging passions fall on your own body, inflicting blows on it, from which it cannot recover for a long time. And if a person gets used to keeping calm in the presence of other people at any cost, he runs the risk of getting seriously ill.
The American psychologist R. Holt proved that the inability to express anger leads to a subsequent deterioration in well-being and health. Constant containment of manifestations of anger (in facial expressions, gestures, words) can contribute to the development of such diseases as hypertension, stomach ulcers, migraines, etc. Therefore, Holt suggests expressing anger, but doing it constructively, which, in his opinion, is possible if a person overcome by anger, wants to “establish, restore or maintain positive relationships with others. He acts and speaks in such a way as to directly and sincerely express his feelings, maintaining sufficient control over their intensity, which is no more than necessary to convince others of the truth of his experiences.
But how to maintain control over the intensity of feelings, if the first thing that is lost in anger is the ability to control one's state? Therefore, we do not give free rein to our emotions, because we are not sure of the possibility of maintaining control over them and directing them in a constructive direction. There is another reason for excessive restraint - traditions that regulate emotional manifestations. For example, in Japanese culture, even about their misfortunes, it is customary to report with a polite smile so as not to cause embarrassment to an outsider. The traditional reticence of the Japanese in public expression of feelings is now perceived by them as a possible source of increasing emotional tension. It is no coincidence that they came up with the idea of creating robots that perform the functions of a "scapegoat". In the presence of a person violently expressing his anger, such a robot bows humbly and asks for forgiveness, which is provided for by a special program embedded in its electronic brain. Although the price of these robots is quite high, they are in great demand.
In European culture, men's tears are not encouraged. A real man "shouldn't" cry. A stingy male tear is considered acceptable only in tragic circumstances, when it is clear to others that grief is unbearable. In other situations, a crying man is perceived with condemnation or squeamish sympathy. But crying, as established by scientists, performs an important function, contributing to emotional discharge, helping to survive grief, get rid of sadness. By suppressing the natural manifestations of these emotions, men, apparently, to a lesser extent than women, are protected from the effects of severe stress. Unable to show their tears in public, some men cry in secret. According to the American researcher W. Frey, 36% of men shed tears over films, TV shows and books, while only 27% of women cry about the same thing. The same study found that overall, women cry four times more than men.
As you can see, a person too often has to suppress emotions both for individual reasons and following traditions. Using a similar mechanism for managing emotions, he acts reasonably to the extent that he needs to maintain normal relations with others, and at the same time, his actions are unreasonable, since they are detrimental to health and psychological state. Does not the management of emotions generally belong to that category of conscious actions that cannot be called rational, and is it not more reasonable to leave emotions to themselves without interfering with their natural course?
But as studies by psychologists show, the emotional element is contraindicated even for actors who, by the nature of their activities, must immerse themselves in a stream of emotions on stage in order to completely merge with their characters. However, the success of acting creativity is the higher, the more effectively the actor is able to control the dynamics of emotional states, the better his consciousness regulates the intensity of experiences.
Convinced that the struggle with emotions brings the winner more thorns than laurels, people tried to find ways to influence their emotional world that would allow them to penetrate into the deep mechanisms of experiences and use these mechanisms more intelligently than nature ordered us. Such is the system of regulation of emotions, based on the gymnastics of yogis. Observant members of that Indian sect noticed that during unpleasant emotions, breathing becomes constrained, superficial or intermittent, an excited person assumes postures with excessively increased muscle tone. Having established a connection between posture, breathing and feelings, yogis have developed a number of physical and breathing exercises, mastering which allows you to get rid of emotional tension and to some extent overcome unpleasant experiences. However, the philosophical concept of yogis is that the goal of constant exercise is not reasonable control over emotions, getting rid of them in an effort to achieve complete serenity of the spirit. Separate elements of the yoga system were used to create modern method psychological self-regulation - autogenic training.
There are many varieties of this method, first proposed by the German psychotherapist J. Schultz in 932. Schulz's classical technique included a number of self-hypnosis formulas that, after repeated sessions, freely evoke a feeling of warmth and heaviness in various parts of the body, regulate the frequency of breathing and heartbeat, and cause general relaxation. Currently, autogenic training is widely used to correct emotional states with increased neuro-emotional stress, to overcome the consequences of stressful situations that arise in extreme conditions of professional activity.
Experts in the field of autogenic training believe that the scope of this method will constantly expand, and autotraining can become one of the important elements of a person's psychological culture. In our opinion, auto-training is one of the methods of suppressing emotions, although not as primitive as a call to control oneself when emotions “overflow”. During autogenic training, a person first masters those functions that were not subject to conscious regulation (thermal sensations, heart rate, etc.), and then an attack on his experiences comes from the “rear”, depriving them of the support of the body. If experiences can be dealt with bypassing the social and moral content, then there is a great temptation to get rid of, say, remorse, causing a feeling of pleasant heaviness and warmth in the solar plexus, and from a painful feeling of compassion, feeling like a bird soaring freely in the radiant heavenly space. . "I'm calm, I'm completely calm," the character of the movie The Traveler repeats one of the autosuggestion formulas every time his emotional well-being is threatened. Its moral revival is precisely manifested in the fact that this spell gradually ceases to fulfill its regulative function.
The true psychological culture of a person is manifested not so much in the fact that he owns the techniques of self-regulation, but in the ability to use these techniques to achieve psychological states that are most consistent with humanistic norms of behavior and relationships with other people. Therefore, a person has always been worried about the problem of criteria for reasonable control of emotions. Common sense suggests that such a criterion may be the pursuit of pleasure. Such a point of view was held, for example, by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristippus, who believed that pleasure is a goal to which one must strive without fail, bypassing situations that threaten unpleasant experiences. Among subsequent generations of philosophers, he had few supporters. But among people who are not inclined to a philosophical understanding of reality, Aristippus has much more like-minded people. The prospect of getting maximum pleasure without experiencing suffering seems very attractive, if we ignore the moral assessment of the egoistic position "to live for your own pleasure." Yet the roots of selfishness are not so deep that most people can be distracted from the principles of humanistic morality, which rejects the idea of achieving emotions of pleasure at any cost. The failure of the pleasure principle is also evident from the point of view of man's adaptation to the natural and social environment.
The pursuit of pleasure is just as detrimental to the physical and mental health of people as constant trouble, suffering and loss. This is evidenced by studies of physicians and psychologists who observe the behavior of people who, in the course of treatment, have electrodes implanted in their brains. By stimulating various parts of the brain with electricity, the Norwegian scientist Sem-Jakobson discovered zones of experiencing pleasure, fear, disgust, and rage. If his patients were given the opportunity to independently stimulate the "zone of happiness", then they did it with such zeal that they forgot about food and went into convulsions, continuously closing the contact associated with electrical stimulation of the corresponding part of the brain. The creator of the theory of stress G. Selye and his followers showed that there is a single physiological mechanism for adapting the body to environmental changes; and the more intense these changes, the higher the risk of depletion of a person's adaptive capabilities, regardless of whether the changes are pleasant to him or not.
The stress of joyful change can be even greater than the stress of adversity. For example, according to the scale of the stress load of events developed by the American scientists T. Holmes and R. Ray, major personal achievements put a person's health at risk to a greater extent than friction with the leader. And although the events associated with losses (death of loved ones, divorce, separation of spouses, illness, etc.) turned out to be the most stressful, a certain stressful effect was also associated with holidays, vacations, vacations. So turning life into a “continuous holiday” can lead to exhaustion of the body rather than to a constant state of pleasure.
What has been said about the inconsistency of the pleasure principle as a criterion for the rational management of emotions can sound like a warning only to an optimist who knows how to discover the pleasant side of life. As for the pessimists, they probably did not expect anything else, since the joys of life in their worldview are worth little in comparison with sorrows. A similar point of view was actively defended by the pessimistic philosopher A. Schopenhauer. In confirmation, he cited the results of rather naive experiments on himself. For example, he figured out how many grains of sugar you need to eat to kill the bitterness of one grain of cinchona. The fact that ten times more sugar is required, he interpreted in favor of his concept. And so that the doubters themselves could emotionally feel the priority of suffering, he urged to mentally compare the pleasure received by the predator and the torment of his victim. Schopenhauer considered the only reasonable criterion for managing emotions to be the avoidance of suffering. The logic of such reasoning led him to the recognition of non-existence as the ideal state of the human race.
The philosophical concept of pessimism will cause few sympathy. However, a passive strategy of avoiding suffering is not uncommon. Pessimistic people put up with constant depression because they hope that giving up the active pursuit of success will relieve them of great stress. However, this is misleading. The prevailing negative emotional background, characteristic of many people, significantly impairs their productivity and vitality. Of course, it is impossible to completely avoid negative emotions, and, apparently, it is not advisable; to a certain extent, they organize a person to fight obstacles, counteract danger. A study conducted on monkeys showed that an experienced leader who has endured many battles has a more favorable reaction to a stressful situation from a biomedical point of view than young monkeys. However, the constant experience of negative emotions leads to the formation of not only psychological, but also functional negative changes, covering, as studies by a team of scientists led by N. P. Bekhtereva, all parts of the brain and disrupting its activity.
According to physiologists, a person should not allow his brain to "get used" to troubles. G. Selye strongly recommends striving to forget about the "hopelessly disgusting and painful." It is necessary, according to N. P. Bekhtereva and her colleagues, as often as possible to create for yourself, albeit small, but joy that balances the experienced unpleasant emotions. Need to focus on positive points of your life, to remember pleasant moments of the past more often, to plan actions that can improve the situation. The ability to find joy in life's little things is inherent in centenarians. In general, it should be noted that the psychological type of personality of a long-liver is characterized by such traits as benevolence, lack of a sense of irreconcilable rivalry, hostility and envy.
Currently, there are many psychotherapeutic methods for regulating emotional states. However, most of them require special individual or group lessons. One of the most available ways improvement of the emotional state is laughter therapy.
The French doctor G. Rubinstein substantiated the biological nature of the usefulness of laughter. Laughter causes a not very sharp, but deep shake of the whole body, which leads to muscle relaxation and allows you to relieve tension caused by stress. With laughter, breathing deepens, the lungs absorb air three times more and the blood is enriched with oxygen, blood circulation improves, the heart rhythm calms down, and blood pressure decreases. With laughter, the release of endomorphine, a pain-relieving anti-stress substance, increases, the body is released from the stress hormone - adrenaline. Dances have approximately the same mechanism of influence. A certain “dose” of laughter can make you feel good even in difficult situations, but an “overdose” of even such a harmless remedy as laughter can lead to a departure from intelligent emotion management. Constant fun is the same departure from life as immersion in gloomy experiences. And it's not just that emotional extremes can worsen well-being and health. The imbalance of positive and negative emotions prevents full communication and mutual understanding.
There are two categories of people who will never be understood by others, no matter how much they want it. Those who are constantly depressed, immersed in bitter thoughts about the imperfection of human nature, people will, if possible, avoid, fearing to be infected with a gloomy mood and pessimism. It can sometimes be difficult to see the difference between the painful state of depression, when a person completely loses the ability to regulate emotions, and the state of "withdrawal" into unpleasant experiences, characteristic of some generally healthy people who find themselves in difficult life situations. But there is still a difference. In disease states, negative emotions are directed mainly inward, concentrated around one's own personality, while "healthy" negative emotions are constantly looking for a victim among others in order to splash out in an aggressive outburst or in a bitter complaint. But since most people cannot withstand prolonged exposure to a difficult emotional atmosphere, they begin to avoid communication with a person immersed in unpleasant experiences. Gradually losing habitual contacts, he is forced to transfer negative emotions to himself.
And if the ability to rejoice at everything that exists and that can happen is inherent in a person and he invariably stays in high spirits, enjoys life in any circumstances? It remains, it would seem, only to envy and try to follow his example. Indeed, in most neutral communication situations that do not require sympathy, help, support, merry fellows evoke sympathy and approval with their ability not to take anything to heart. But only those who know how to rejoice in everything, even someone else's grief, can constantly rejoice. Without sharing the suffering of other people, a person runs the risk of being in a psychological vacuum when he himself needs support. Constantly staying in a rosy mood, he accustoms those around him to a “problem-free” attitude towards himself. And when the time comes for serious strength tests, a breakdown occurs. According to the observation of the psychotherapist V. A. Faivishevsky, the lack of experience in overcoming unpleasant experiences caused by failures and losses can lead to “victory neurosis”, which is observed in constantly successful people at the first failure.
A gross violation of the emotional balance does not benefit anyone, even if a positive emotional background dominates. It may seem that a person who does not lose fun in the presence of those who suffer is able to infect them with his mood, lift their spirits and give vigor. But this is an illusion. With a joke or a cheerful smile, it is easy to defuse situational tension, but it is just as easy to achieve the opposite effect when faced with a deep experience. In this regard, a parallel can be drawn with the effect of music on human emotions.
It is known that music has a powerful emotional charge, sometimes more powerful than real life events. For example, psychologists who interviewed students, teachers, and other workers at Stanford University found that among the factors that arouse emotions, music ranked first, touching scenes in movies and literary works were second, and love was only sixth. Of course, one cannot absolutize the data obtained in one study, but one cannot but admit that the emotional effect of music is very great. Considering it, psychologists use the method of musical psychotherapy to correct emotional states. With emotional disorders of the depressive type, cheerful music only exacerbates negative experiences, while melodies that cannot be attributed to cheerful ones bring positive results. So in human communication, grief can be mitigated by compassion or aggravated by serene cheerfulness and on-duty optimism. Here we again return to empathy - the ability to tune your emotions to the "wave" of other people's experiences. Empathy avoids constant immersion in your own joys and sorrows. The emotional world of the people around us is so rich and diverse that contact with it leaves no chance for a monopoly of positive or negative experiences. Empathy contributes to the balance of the emotional sphere of a person.
Some philosophers took the principle of balance literally, arguing that in every person's life, joys exactly correspond to suffering, and if you subtract one from the other, the result will be zero. The Polish philosopher and art critic V. Tatarkevich, who analyzed this kind of research, came to the conclusion that it is impossible to prove or disprove this point of view, since it is impossible to accurately measure and unambiguously compare joys and sufferings. However, Tatarkevich himself does not see any other solution to this problem, except for the recognition that "human life tends to equalize pleasant and unpleasant sensations."
In our opinion, the principle of balance of emotions is important not because it can indicate the exact proportion of positive and negative experiences. Another thing is much more important for a person to understand that stable emotional balance as an indicator of reasonable control of emotions cannot be achieved only by situational control over experiences. Satisfaction of a person with his life, activities and relationships with others is not equivalent to the sum of the pleasures received at each individual moment. Like a climber who experiences an incomparable sense of satisfaction at the top precisely because success has cost him many unpleasant emotions on the way to the goal, any person receives joy as a result of overcoming difficulties. The small pleasures of life are necessary to compensate for unpleasant experiences, but deep satisfaction should not be expected from their sum. It is known that children who experience a lack of parental affection are drawn to sweets. One candy can relieve a child's stress for a while, but even a large number of them cannot make him happier.
Each of us is somewhat reminiscent of a child reaching for a candy when trying to influence our emotions right at the moment of their occurrence. The short-term effect obtained with situational control of emotions cannot lead to stable emotional balance. This is due to the stability of the general emotionality of a person. What is emotionality and can it be controlled?
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the first studies of emotionality were carried out. Since then, it has been generally accepted that emotional people are distinguished by the fact that they take everything to heart and react violently to trifles, while low-emotional people have enviable composure. Modern psychologists tend to identify emotionality with imbalance, instability, and high excitability.
Emotionality is considered as a stable personality trait associated with her temperament. The well-known Soviet psychophysiologist V. D. Nebylitsyn considered emotionality to be one of the main components of a person’s temperament and distinguished in it such characteristics as impressionability (sensitivity to emotional influences), impulsivity (quickness and thoughtlessness of emotional reactions), lability (dynamic emotional states). Depending on the temperament, a person is emotionally involved in various situations with greater or lesser intensity.
But if emotionality is directly related to temperament, which is based on the properties of the nervous system, then the possibility of rational control of emotionality without interference in physiological processes seems extremely doubtful. Can a choleric person reasonably regulate the intensity of his "choleric" outbursts if his temperament is dominated by impulsiveness - a tendency to quick and thoughtless emotional reactions? He will have time to "break wood" over a trifle before he realizes that the most reasonable principle of managing emotions is balance. And a calm phlegmatic person, organically incapable of vividly and directly demonstrating his feelings, will always be perceived by others as a person who is deeply indifferent to what is happening. If emotionality is understood only as a combination of the strength, speed of occurrence and mobility of emotional reactions, then for the mind there is one area of application: to come to terms with the fact that there are emotional and unemotional people, and to take into account their natural characteristics. In itself, this mission of the mind is extremely important for human understanding.
Features of temperament must be taken into account in various situations of communication. For example, one should not be offended by the violent reaction of a choleric person, which more often indicates his impulsiveness than a conscious intention to offend the interlocutor. He can be answered in kind without risking protracted conflict. But even one harsh word can unbalance a melancholic for a long time - a vulnerable and impressionable person with a heightened sense of self-worth.
In order to learn to reasonably relate to the peculiarities of the emotional makeup of other people, it is not enough to know these features, you also need to control yourself, maintain balance, no matter how intense your own emotional reactions are. Such an opportunity appears if, from fruitless attempts to directly influence the intensity of emotions, a person proceeds to managing situations in which emotions arise and manifest. Emotional resources of a person are not unlimited, and if in some situations they are spent too generously, then in others their deficit. Even hyper-emotional people who seem to others inexhaustible in the manifestation of their feelings, being in a calm environment, are immersed in a state of inhibition to a greater extent than those who are classified as low-emotional. Emotions, as a rule, do not arise spontaneously, they are tied to situations and turn into stable states if the emotional situation persists for a long time. Such emotions are called passion. And the more important one life situation is for a person, the higher the likelihood that one passion will crowd out all the others. Only great passion, said the French writer Henri Petit, is capable of taming our passions. And his compatriot writer Victor Cherbulier drew attention to the possibility of the opposite effect, arguing that our passions devour each other, and often the big ones are devoured by the small ones.
One of these judgments, at first glance, contradicts the other, but it is not. You can concentrate all emotional resources in one situation or in one area of life, or you can distribute them in many areas. In the first case, the intensity of emotions will be extreme. But the more emotional situations, the lower the intensity of emotions in each of them. Thanks to this dependence, it becomes possible to manage emotions more intelligently than by interfering with their physiological mechanisms and direct manifestations. Formally, this dependence can be expressed as follows: E == Ie * Ne (where E is the general emotionality of a person, Ie is the intensity of each emotion, Ne is the number of emotional situations).
In essence, this formula means that the general emotionality of a person is a constant (relatively constant value), while the strength and duration of an emotional reaction in each specific situation can vary significantly depending on the number of situations that do not leave this person indifferent. The law of emotional constancy makes it possible to take a fresh look at the established ideas about the gradual age-related decline in emotionality.
It is generally accepted that in youth a person is emotional, and with age, emotionality is largely lost. In fact, with the accumulation of life experience, a person expands the spheres of emotional involvement, more and more situations evoke emotional associations in him, and, consequently, each of them evokes a less intense reaction. At the same time, the general emotionality remains the same, although in every situation observed by others, a person behaves more restrained than in his youth. Of course, there are cases when, even with age, the ability to react violently and continuously to certain events is not lost. But this is typical for people of a fanatical warehouse, who concentrate their emotions in one area and absolutely do not pay attention to what and how is happening in others.
The expansion of the range of emotional situations contributes to the general cultural development of the individual. The higher the cultural level of a person, the more restraint in the manifestation of emotions is observed by others in communication with him. And vice versa, uncontrollable passions and violent outbursts of emotions, called affects, are usually associated with limited areas of manifestation of emotions, which is typical for people with a low level of general culture. That is why the role of art in the regulation of human emotionality is so great. Enriching his spiritual world with aesthetic experiences, a person loses dependence on all-consuming passions associated with his pragmatic interests.
Taking into account the law of constancy, it is possible to master ways of controlling emotions, which are aimed not at a hopeless struggle with destructive manifestations of emotional extremes, but at creating conditions for life and activity that allow one not to bring oneself to extreme emotional states. We are talking about managing an extensive component of general emotionality - emotional situations.
First way - distribution of emotions- consists in expanding the range of emotional situations, which leads to a decrease in the intensity of emotions in each of them. The need for a conscious distribution of emotions arises with an excessive concentration of human experiences. The inability to distribute emotions can lead to a significant deterioration in health. So, J. Reikovsky cites data from a study of the emotional characteristics of people who have had a heart attack. They were asked to recall the most negative events that preceded the disease. It turned out that patients two months after a heart attack recalled significantly less stressful events than healthy people. However, the strength and duration of unpleasant experiences about each of these events in patients turned out to be much higher; they were significantly more likely to complain of feelings of guilt or hostility and of difficulty in controlling their experiences.
The distribution of emotions occurs as a result of the expansion of information and the circle of communication. Information about new objects for a person is necessary for the formation of new interests that turn neutral situations into emotional ones. The expansion of the social circle performs the same function, since new social and psychological contacts allow a person to find a wider sphere of manifestation of his feelings.
The second way to manage emotions is concentration- is necessary in those circumstances when the conditions of activity require the full concentration of emotions on one thing, which is of decisive importance in a certain period of life. In this case, a person deliberately excludes a number of emotional situations from the sphere of his activity in order to increase the intensity of emotions in those situations that are most important for him. Various everyday methods of focusing emotions can be applied. The famous film director N. Mikhalkov spoke about one of them. In order to fully concentrate his efforts on the concept of a new film, he shaved his hair and thereby lost the emotional incentive to appear in public once again. The popular theater and film actor A. Dzhigarkhanyan formulated for himself the “law of conservation of emotions”. He considers it obligatory at least once a week to exclude situations in which the emotions necessary for creative activity are generously spent. The most common method of concentration of emotions is the restriction of information from the usual sources and the exclusion of favorable conditions for activity in those situations that contribute to the "dispersion" of emotions.
The third way to manage emotions is switching- associated with the transfer of experiences from emotional situations to neutral ones. With the so-called destructive emotions (anger, rage, aggression), it is necessary to temporarily replace real situations with illusory or socially insignificant ones (according to the “scapegoat” principle). If constructive emotions (primarily interests) are concentrated on trifles, illusory objects, then it is necessary to switch to situations of increased social and cultural value. The use of these methods of managing emotions requires some effort, ingenuity, and invention. The search for specific techniques depends on the individual, their level of maturity.
How to manage your emotions? Part one
Tags: Emotion managementDo your emotions get out of control? Do you experience experiences that reduce the quality of your life? If yes, then be sure to read this article!
To be honest, writing about managing emotions is not at all easy for me: there are so many nuances and aspects in this topic that, starting to describe one side of the issue, you realize that you are missing a lot of other, no less important things.
Today I planned to describe a very effective meditation exercise for managing your emotions. But simply describing the essence of the exercise, its stages, is too little: there will be little sense from thoughtlessly following the instructions. For maximum benefit, it is necessary to understand the mechanisms by which our emotions function.
And so I began to describe the mechanisms. Having finished my description, I realized that the amount of text is fully consistent with a full-fledged article. But I haven’t even begun to describe the exercise itself!
So, I decided not to inflate the article to the size of "War and Peace". Detailed Instructions I will write to the exercise in the next article, in a week. And today we'll talk about how it works. I will list a few points that are most often associated with difficulties in managing emotions. It is these moments that the meditation exercise will affect.
So let's go...
1. Awareness of emotions
In order to manage your emotions, it is important to be aware of them. Many people are often not accustomed to paying attention to their emotional state. Therefore, if you ask them how they feel in this or that situation, they will answer very vaguely: “Good”, “Bad”, “Somehow not very”, “Normal. What emotions are hidden behind these words? Unknown.
There are many words that can be used to describe emotions: joy, sadness, anger, irritation, sadness, longing, fear, anxiety, resentment, guilt, shame, embarrassment, hope, pride, tenderness, delight, etc.
The ability to describe the inner state using these or similar words is the first important step towards controlling emotions. Read more about why this is so important in this article. Here you will find simple and understandable instructions that will help you learn to better understand and understand the emotional state. In the same article, there is an audio recording of meditation that helps you look deep inside yourself and get to know your emotions better.
The meditation exercise, which I will describe in detail in the next article, also helps to become more aware of your own emotions.
2. Accepting emotions
What happens when we experience something unpleasant? Of course we want to get rid of what we don't like! We are so arranged that we instinctively resist pain, unpleasant sensations. We strive to avoid uncomfortable situations. And of course we do not want to experience negative emotions!
Therefore, faced with a negative experience, many try to suppress or muffle painful emotions, not to notice what is happening inside.
An even more serious variant of the struggle is when, for some reason, a person considers the emotions that have appeared to be unacceptable. For example, many do not allow themselves to be angry. “Aggression, anger, irritation are bad,” such a belief is often present. And then, having felt forbidden emotions, a person begins to push them inside himself.
Some do it so masterfully that they manage to hide emotions even from themselves. Such people, for example, may sincerely believe that they never get irritated, angry, or offended. I must say that such suppression of emotions never goes without consequences, and sometimes the price is too high: depression, chronic anxiety, psychosomatic disorders often result from the struggle with emotions.
Fighting your own emotions is harmful for many reasons. But now I want to dwell on only one of them in detail (read about other reasons).
Any struggle only increases the tension.
There is a principle in aikido called "refusing to fight". Its meaning is as follows: if the opponent strikes, then this strike does not need to be answered with resistance, because in this case you may lose your balance or not withstand the force of the blow. If you subtly feel the opponent's movements and follow these movements, in this case you will be able to use the opponent's strength for your own purposes.
This principle is quite difficult to understand unless you see how it happens. Therefore, I found a video on the Internet where the principle of refusing to fight is shown very clearly.
I am sure that most of my readers are far from martial arts. However, watch this video. It, at first glance, has nothing to do with psychology. But this is only at first glance. Watch it until the end, and then we will continue the conversation.
Looked? Now imagine that the guy in the orange T-shirt from the video is your emotions, and the man in the sweater is you. Do you see what will happen if you put up direct resistance? If your emotions are very intense, you are likely to have a hard time!
So, you can not fight with emotions! This is an absolutely useless business. How then to be?
It is important to learn to accept emotions as they are, without trying to somehow change or suppress them. Only in this case, you will be able to use emotional energy for your own good, and not for harm.
It's easy to say "take your emotions for what they are." It is much more difficult to implement this: when unpleasant experiences arise, most of us instinctively, automatically, out of habit, try to change something and actually turn on the struggle.
By making an emotion an object of meditation, you have much more opportunities to learn to accept it: during practice, it is easier to notice your own attempts to influence emotions and inner experience. Over and over again, stopping your desire to fight, you gradually learn to be kind and accepting to any of your experiences, whatever it may be.
The meditation that I will tell you about in the next article is designed in such a way that you learn to positively accept any of your emotions.
3. Seeing the wider context
Usually, when a person experiences some kind of strong emotions, he tends to go into them "with his head." He dives into the abyss of emotions and spends all of himself on experiences. His whole life, the whole world at this moment narrows down to one specific situation and the emotions associated with it.
If there is resentment inside, then all internal dialogues will be aimed at punishing the offender or proving something to him. If disappointment has befallen, then all thoughts will revolve around the situation associated with these experiences. A person spends all his strength, all of himself on the experiences that have arisen inside.
In order to learn how to manage your emotions, it is important to be able to look at your experiences from the outside. What does it mean?
This does not mean that you are trying to dampen your emotions. No, when you focus your attention on them, they can feel even more intense and stronger than usual.
This does not mean that you look at an emotion and decide for yourself: "Well, it's kind of stupid to have such experiences in such a situation."
To look at your experiences from the outside is to allow yourself to feel, to allow your emotions to be what they are. And at the same time, while living your emotions, it is important to realize that you are something more than the emotions that you are currently experiencing.
Imagine that you are standing in front of a huge picture, resting your nose on it. You see some fragment and are completely concentrated on it. If you take a few steps back, you will continue to see that fragment, but also a whole canvas will open in front of you. You will find that you have only seen a small element that is part of the whole picture.
Roughly the same thing happens when you focus on emotions during meditation. You have the opportunity to go beyond these emotions, to see your experiences in a wider context.
4. Understanding the meaning of emotions
I have already written in other articles that any emotion contains valuable information (for example, read about it). There are no emotions that do not carry any meaning. Each experience has a specific function. That is why it is impossible to simply take and suppress some emotion without negative consequences.
In order to manage your emotions, it is important to understand the meaning behind each of them.
It is far from always easy to understand the meaning of this or that experience, especially if it painfully and tangibly spoils life. The intensified work of thought, the inclusion of analysis and logical reflections are often meaningless here.
Emotions are born from within, and the understanding of their meaning also comes from within. Meditation helps to manifest the meanings inherent in emotions. However, don't expect it to happen instantly.
Imagine that you have entered a completely dark room. At first you will peer into the darkness and see nothing. Gradually, your eyes will begin to get used to, and you will begin to see the outlines of objects more and more clearly.
When you start to meditate, it can be like being in a dark room: you seem to be following instructions, but you don't see anything special. At this stage, the main thing is not to be disappointed, because if you continue to look inside yourself, gradually a lot of important and valuable things will begin to appear out of the darkness.
So, I repeat: understanding the meaning during meditation is not due to what you analyze, but due to the fact that you fix your attention on your experiences, allow yourself to just feel. As a result, you can suddenly discover something that you did not notice and did not understand before.
5. Letting go of unproductive emotions
There are emotions that obviously interfere with a person. For example, you are preparing for a responsible exam. Anxiety may build up inside. Again and again thoughts come: “Will I be able to do everything on time?”, “What if I get a ticket with questions, the answers to which I don’t know?”
Anxiety can be very painful, taking up a lot of effort and energy that would be better spent preparing for an exam.
Above, we have already said that inside each emotion there is a positive meaning. Even if it seems to us that emotion is absolutely destructive and only interferes, inside, on a subconscious level, there is a conviction that emotion is really needed.
Returning to the example of anxiety, we can assume that the prospect of failing an exam at an unconscious level is perceived by a person as a catastrophe. And then anxiety arises in order to mobilize your forces to the maximum. The fact that the result of such mobilization not only does not help, but even hinders, is not taken into account by the unconscious. The unconscious acts irrationally, outside the laws of logic.
What can be done in such a situation? You can try to convince yourself of something, say to yourself: “Oh, come on! This exam is not that important. There is nothing to be afraid of”, but such actions most often lead to nothing, because we convince ourselves at the conscious level, and the problem is at the level of the unconscious.
Imagine that you live on the second floor, and the neighbors from the first floor turned on the full power music and disturb your sleep. From the fact that you get out of bed, start pacing around the apartment and talking into the void: “Turn off the music and don’t bother me to sleep!” nothing will change. In order to be heard, you need to go down to the floor below and negotiate there.
We can say that consciousness and the unconscious live on different floors. That is why attempts to convince oneself of something and tune in to certain emotions often turn out to be ineffective: in this case, the consciousness tries to prove something to the unconscious without going down to its floor.
Meditation is a practice that helps to establish contact with unconscious processes.
How does today's meditation work? Over and over again, you establish contact with your emotions, realize them, feel them, while accepting them and not trying to somehow change them. You just stay with the emotions as they are. This results in you becoming more and more aware of your emotional reactions. This happens not only and not so much at the level of logic and consciousness. Plunging into direct feeling, you go down to the floor to your unconscious.
As a result, an understanding may gradually come that the emotions that arise have no practical meaning, do not help, but only hinder. This understanding is not at the level of logic and consciousness. This understanding is on a different, deeper level. At the level of the unconscious. If such an understanding comes, emotions go away by themselves.
This happens only if the emotion really does not have any meaning anymore and arises “out of habit”. But often there is an important meaning inside the emotion, which its owner is not aware of. In this case, during meditation, understanding of these meanings can come.
6. Awareness of the roots of emotions
Often the roots of emotional reactions that arise in the present lie in the distant past. Let me illustrate this with the example I gave in the previous paragraph. Exam anxiety. Now I will talk about the common roots of this phenomenon.
There lived a child. Like any kid, more than anything, he needed the love and care of mom and dad. But adults did not have enough time for this, and their child grew up, experiencing a constant, chronic hunger for parental attention.
The child never blames the parents for this situation. He often begins to think that something is wrong with him. “If my parents don’t pay attention to me, then I’m somehow not like that,” says the kid. And then he has a desire to become better. He is trying at all costs to meet the expectations of his parents: to behave perfectly, to study well.
He discovers that the five brought from school makes parents proud, and so the child receives at least a little warmth and attention. He also sees Mom and Dad's disappointment at getting a B. And for him it is very painful, because the most important thing in a child's life is parental love.
So the baby begins to panic fear of bad grades. After all, for him a bad assessment means the loss of love.
Time passes. The child turns into an adult who no longer experiences such a strong need for love from his parents. Perhaps he decides for himself: “Well, yes. I didn't have a warm relationship with my mom and dad. It's sad of course. But that's in the past."
Everything seems to be in the past. But the fear of negative evaluation continues to haunt an adult. He is present at exams, at work, if necessary, to submit reports, etc. A negative assessment is still perceived at an unconscious level as a threat of loss of love. No longer parents, but simply surrounding people. And this is still a very painful topic that causes a lot of anxiety.
Of course, the described situation is not the only one that leads to anxiety before exams. There are other reasons as well.
With this story, I wanted to show that the roots of emotions that arise in the present can stretch from the distant past, often from childhood. A person may not even be aware of it.
Often, in working with a psychologist, people have strong and deep feelings about what they thought was long in the past. “Could it really matter? It was so many years ago! I thought that I had survived this situation for a long time, ”I regularly hear such words in consultations. But suddenly emerging emotions about situations from the past clearly show that this is important.
So we see that an emotional reaction often has a history. Its source may be some kind of long-term trauma, emotional pain. Emotions can be associated with beliefs that were formed a long time ago. For example, exam anxiety may hide unconscious beliefs: “In order for people around me to love me, I must be successful and show high results”, “If I fail, then I am an unworthy and bad person”, etc.
Of course, in order to understand this tangle, it is best to contact a specialist. But you can also do a lot on your own.
During meditation, fixing on emotions, an understanding may suddenly appear where they take their roots. It is not an understanding obtained through intellectual analysis. It is an understanding that is born spontaneously from within. It does not need to be expected, to try to do something in order for it to appear.
All you have to do is stay with your emotions, accepting them and living them. And at some point, understanding may come, and along with understanding, healing from emotional pain.
