Control Your Emotions

Chapter 7. Preventative Care

What is preventative care in the context of mastering your emotions and keeping calm while the world spins on? It is recognizing the fact that our brains have an intense negativity bias, even while things are going well and we aren’t on the brink of disaster. And thus, we should seek to immunize our resilience through daily actions.
Be grateful. Savor everything. Enjoy the moment, because you’ll never get it back. Both gratitude and savoring (slowing down and being intentional with your actions) have been scientifically shown to reduce stress and increase positivity and happiness. It’s awfully tough to be both grateful and miserable at the same time. Proper perspective and expectations can be transformative for your emotional resilience.
Journaling and writing your feelings down is not an uncommon piece of advice. It is the act of expressing yourself and then being able to introspect later on. Most of us miss these two important steps, and our emotions remain pent up and unable to develop and unfurl. Of particular use is writing down all of your worries and then writing down solutions for them. Also, you can write down two distinct types of lists: “Stop Doing This” (something detrimental) or “It’s Okay To” (something beneficial).
Mindfulness is a key part of preventative care. It is the release of stress from a past that doesn’t matter anymore and a set of futures that may never come into existence. It is the act of letting go and feeling your emotions swirl around you, then observing them settle back into a normal place. It is the conscious ignorance of everything but one singular focus; this is a state of mind where no stress or anxiety can exist. You are peaceful; the more you practice, the more peace transfers into your daily life.
Finally, we come to defense of your boundaries. This book has talked about how to deal with yourself—but what about others? After all, people are probably our strongest emotional triggers and they hold enormous power over us. The best step for this is to understand boundaries. Most of your negative spirals with others are related to boundaries, so we must see the warning signs, set boundaries, and enforce them. Any set of negative feelings probably means that your boundaries are being violated in some way.

Chapter 6. Philosophical Perspective

Sometimes a shift in perspective is all that is needed for something to finally click inside you. At the very least, we can combine these new perspectives with the techniques and tools we’ve learned to make you emotionally bulletproof.
Here, we cover two of the world’s oldest philosophies in dealing with hardship and optimizing for happiness. Buddhism is all about understanding that we cause our own suffering through attachment to people, things, outcomes, and thoughts. Everything is impermanent, and good and bad come and go like waves on the ocean. When we form an attachment, we form an expectation, which puts us in a position to tumble and fall. Thus, we must detach from the notion that external things or people are necessary for our happiness. In this way, we make ourselves entirely responsible for our state of mind.
Stoicism has some philosophical overlap with Buddhism, but the emphasis is on what we can and cannot control. We cannot control anything in this world but our actions and thoughts, so we must condition our happiness to depend happiness on those things. To do otherwise would be to remove all power from us. The world is a neutral place, and we can interpret it however we want; we only have to choose a favorable interpretation. In Stoicism, we must also turn the obstacle upside down and not see negative events as tragedy, but rather interpret and reframe them as learning experiences.

Chapter 5. The Emotional Immune System

Self-esteem is the emotional immune system because it insulates you from emotional triggers, needs, and pains. The person who generally feels positively about themselves is not prone to emotional instability or reactivity because they simply aren’t affected in the same way.
Like the external world, our identities are entirely neutral, and self-esteem is a lens we view ourselves through. This means we have the power to see ourselves however we want, and for some of us, this is terrible news. A primary reason is an unreasonable set of expectations about yourself, the world, and your place in it—you will never live up to these expectations, so you can literally only fail in your mind, which makes you feel even worse than before.
Self-esteem, as with many things about emotions, is not living in a vacuum and is best understood as a cycle of causes and effects. We begin with inaccurate assumptions and arbitrary (and disempowering) rules about life that are confirmed through inevitable failure. Then our narrative begins to include this data point and creates an increasingly negative self-evaluation. The inaccurate assumptions and beliefs are then strengthened, and it becomes even more difficult to climb out of this pit of despair. Deciphering these beliefs and seeing them nullified by reality is key.