Negative emotions such as anger, sadness, fear, frustration, embarrassment, guilt, anxiety, you name it, can pop up in our lives unexpectedly at any time. Sometimes we become completely overwhelmed by these negative emotions. They might be caused by the people around us, the traffic, our jobs, an illness, the weather, and so on.
Unfortunately, we cannot control these circumstances but we can control how we react to them.
If you feel like you have no control over your reactions and emotions, don’t worry. These tips will improve your ability to mindfully walk through your feelings in a productive way.
I will show you how to develop the skills to feel your emotions without letting them control your behaviour.
Imagine a picture or painting that is ok but nothing special. Now put a gorgeous frame around it. It looks amazing, right? Now put a really ugly frame around it. It completely ruined the picture, right?
This is exactly what we do in our lives. We have an issue, we frame it in an ugly frame in our mind and call it a BIG PROBLEM. What you should do instead is to put a beautiful frame around your issue and be surprised how much better, and less serious it looks.
This is a concept called “cognitive reappraisal.” This involves changing your perspective on a negative situation into a positive one.
It’s easy to assume that the worst thing possible is going to happen. This habit creates unnecessary suffering and frequently leads to becoming overwhelmed by negative emotions.
We can get inspiration from toddlers learning to walk. They fall all the time before they can walk. But they don’t think: “OK, I give up, I’m a failure, I’m never going to learn to walk, I’ll just stay on the floor and feel sad and depressed.”
No, they stand up and try it over and over again until they learn to walk (and eat, and speak, and bike, etc.). They don’t think it’s a problem, it’s just something they need to work on.
The pretty frame in these situations is: “I’m building a foundation”. They put all that effort into practising, practising, and practising some more, to build the foundation for more complicated movements in the future. This foundation is: being able to do coordinated movements.
Now you might think: “OK Rita, this is nice, but I’m anxious because I lost my job, I don’t know how I’m going to pay my bills. How can I reframe this?” The pretty frame again is “you are building a foundation”. Now that you are fired you can find a new, better job. All you do before you find this new job, e.g. learn new skills, and search for jobs, is building a foundation for a better job.
“But my boyfriend left me, I’m so sad :-(” Thank God he’s out of your life! Now you can find someone who is a better match for you. Maybe you also need to look into yourself and think about how to improve. Now you can start building the foundation for a better relationship.
“But I’m sad and scared because I’m ill. I’m overwhelmed by negative emotions.” That illness is an indicator. Without that indicator, you wouldn’t know that something is not functioning well in your body. It’s good to have an indicator so you know that something needs to be cured, and maybe you also need to change your lifestyle. You can start to build a foundation for better health.
Can you see how this works? Reframe every issue in your life and you will have no more problems.
Ok, now you reframed your problem to an issue but you still have some negative emotions. What to do?
It’s important that you allow yourself to feel all your emotions. Forbidden emotions won’t go away. Instead, they’ll make their way into the ways you speak to yourself, behave, and deal with your emotions in the future. They can even cause serious illnesses. See the following blog post:
If you learn to accept your emotions, you’ll notice that it’s easier to feel them. Acceptance doesn’t mean that you have to be pleased with your emotions. It doesn’t mean that you have to be at peace with the current situation. Accepting your emotions simply means that you’re acknowledging what you feel.
Acknowledging starts with labelling your emotion. When you label what you’re feeling, “Right now I am feeling anger,” you’ll become a bit separated from it; you are observing it from the outside now. You are not so overwhelmed by negative emotions anymore.
Side note: If negative emotions, stress, and overwhelm drive you to use food as a tool to release stress or as the main source of relaxation and pleasure, check out my How to Stop Eating Your Feelings Workbook to discover what you are REALLY hungry for and finally break free from emotional and stress eating.
You can read a free chapter of the workbook HERE.
The next step to acknowledging your emotions is practising mindfulness.
Mindfulness encourages non-judgmental awareness and will help you sit with your feelings rather than react to them.
Set a timer for three minutes and simply observe your breathing. You don’t need to breathe in a certain way or try to think of anything in particular. If you can spend these 3 minutes simply noticing your breath, you’ll begin to feel calm. When your mind wanders, just go back to focusing on your breathing. Breathe in, breathe out….
Close your eyes and imagine your favourite beautiful place outside. Next, imagine that you hold a nice big red balloon on a string in your hand. Now collect all your negative emotions, put them all in this big red balloon and let the string go. Watch as the balloon flies higher and higher until you can’t see it anymore.
Alternatively, you can put your emotions on a floating cloud, on a leaf on a slow stream or on a car driving on the motorway.
When you are overwhelmed by negative emotions, it is also a good idea to walk outside or, if it’s not possible, look around inside your room with the intention of simply noticing. Observe your surroundings and name the things you see, hear, or smell.
You don’t need to be creative to do some colouring in a colouring book. It’s a great way to focus on one thing instead of getting swallowed up in emotions.
Whether you want to learn an instrument, or you already play one, sitting down to create music is a great way to practice mindfulness.
It’s also helpful to write songs or poems that can help you process your emotions in creative ways.
I’ve made a meditation to help you sit with your feelings when you have the urge to overeat. Listen to this meditation often and you’ll learn how to process your feelings. You’ll be presently surprised to find that you won’t need to eat to suppress or numb them anymore.
After a while, you won’t need to listen to this meditation. Feeling your feelings becomes automatic and you will be free from emotional eating triggered by negative feelings. You’ll start eating your feelings much less often.
Repeating positive affirmations or mantras may also work in stressful situations when you feel everything is out of control and you are overwhelmed by negative emotions. With these positive sentences, you convince your brain that everything is fine or will be fine and you can calm down.
I specifically designed this collection of affirmations to reprogram your mind around food, your body and your life. They are the antidotes to the most common negative beliefs and thoughts about body image, weight loss and habit changes.
My clients absolutely love these affirmations. I make personalized affirmation videos and audio recordings for my clients in the 12-week End Emotional Eating 1 on 1 private coaching program to retrain their thoughts and beliefs that are holding them back.
Now you can have a taste of these for a fraction of the price.
What we tell ourselves shapes and creates our life.
Fortunately, what we tell ourselves also happens to be one of the things that we can actually change!
You can find inspiration in these nearly 400 affirmations to change the script running in your head.
You will find 1 video, 2 audio recordings and more than 300 written affirmations beautifully formatted on printable pages so you can either listen to or read these mantras every day to reprogram your unconscious mind. This way the hard inner work becomes much easier and the desired results come faster.
Mindfulness helps us to tether to the present moment. Doing these things daily helps strengthen your brain function and teaches you good coping skills for the future.
Knowing how to regulate your emotions is a powerful tool. This skill offers the ability to sit with emotions and move on from them without making impulsive decisions.
When you’re going through a stressful period of life, it can feel like everything is out of control and you become overwhelmed by negative emotions. However, you can control your reactions.
If you turn to food when you feel overwhelmed by negative emotions, this free training will show you the exact steps to stop feeling out of control around food and eliminate emotional eating, stress eating, and binge eating.
This workbook will also help.
Click on the picture to get to the workbook.
If you would like to work with me personally as a private client feel free to book a complimentary call to explore your specific challenges and how my program can guide you toward lasting change.
Hope this post helps you. What do you do when your emotions completely overwhelm you? How do you cope? I’d love to know.
If you liked this post don’t forget to share it 🙂 It means a lot to me.
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