How are you?

Really. Not “I’m fine,” or “I’m good,” or “I’m okay.” Does that really describe how you feel? The problem with this answer is it is not at all descriptive of how you are actually doing. With an answer like that can you really tell if someone is doing well? Probably not.

Emotions can often be a very difficult thing to control and rightly so. Your amygdala, which is your emotional control center, has been around longer than your ability to rationally think and contemplate things. With this as an anchor, there is no wonder that you constantly get frustrated, angry, or have many moments where you are no longer in control of yourself.

What I’m referring to is being in “the heat of the moment.” You say things you don’t mean, you act in a way you never do, you are no longer _you, y_ou become a whole different animal. This is like children who have no sense of control and always act on impulse without any consideration of the consequences of their reactions. With a little bit of guidance and time, the child can control their impulses to a considerably decent degree.

Now think of your emotions the same way: an impulse. In the beginning, it takes you over and you are not in control of yourself, and with a little bit of guidance and time, you can overpower your emotions and become in charge of your own reactions. Similar to trying to stop impulsiveness of children, it is not that simple.

The main problem for many of us when dealing with these emotions is we lack the concept of how to deal with them. If every time we feel stress, anxiety, anger, or sadness we start eating junk food, watching Netflix, and going on social media. Your negative emotional state is going to last for way longer than we expect and definitely way more than we would’ve liked. In the short term, we will be “okay” (whatever that means), but long term we are setting ourselves up for failure.

These typical reactions to what we deem as negative emotions are only quick fixes that negatively impact us in the future. Generally, the reason the emotional intelligence of people is so extremely low is that we are simply unaware beings. Anthony De Mello’s book Awareness has a great thought on this matter.

“Most people, even though they don’t know it, are asleep. They’re born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without ever waking up. They never understand the loveliness and the beauty of this thing that we call human existence.”

In this quote, he is referring to awareness. If I ask “Who is you?” (philosophy behind this question and phrasing here) how would you reply? The point is not to talk about your school, your work, your projects. What is it that makes you who you are? What makes you special? Many of us would get stuck humming and hawing before we give some sort of non-generic and surface-level answer. Now let’s think about the fact we don’t really understand who we are as people, how do we think we can control something as complex as our emotions without ever understanding who we are people?

It Starts With The Phrasing

We usually say “I am sad” or “I am depressed” without realizing it, you are characterizing your identity (who you are). When you say “I am ___ “ you are asserting the idea that whatever you put in the blank space as something that defines you, which builds your identity. You can think of identity almost like an instruction manual, whenever we feel lost or not sure whether we are doing the right thing, we consult it and use its rules and abide by them.

Now again when we say “I am sad.” Being sad becomes part of our manual, making it more likely to be sad on any given day just because it is associated with who we are, but of course as it is with any other habit you need reinforcement to make it take. You say these ideas enough times, you create a strong association with that we tend to believe it can’t be any other way.

Reframing Our View of The Self

An important distinction to get right from the start is that your emotions are not you. Think of your entire life as 2 separate entities (to be honest there are probably 100 versions of every single person, but bear with me), there is observer you and normal you. With normal you, is the person whose perspective you are using right now.

On the other hand, observer you is an entity that is probably new to you. As the name suggests, it observes, but instead of observing the world, it observes normal you as an outsider (keep in mind it is an abstract concept). The point of this observer is to be able to look at normal you from an outside perspective. During observation, normal you can be seen sometimes reacting, acting, or simply not acting.

When you think of yourself in that lens you can start to recognize the trigger that make you angry, scared, or any other emotion. You also get to view yourself in a momentary lapse in judgement which helps you recognize that whatever emotion you feel at any given time does not define you. The separation from yourself and your emotion is to helping you navigate your emotional force field.

Understanding Lapses in Judgement

Think of that friend, family, or partner. You felt like they wronged you in some way. Without even trying to understand their perspective, you go into a field of rage and anger. You do everything in your power to let the other person know how much you distrust them, how much you hate them, how bad of a person you think they are. At that moment we all feel like we are correct and all of our actions are justified. The thing that you don’t realize is that none of your actions were even chosen by you, if anything we brainwashed ourselves into believing that our actions were caused by our own thinking, we were merely reacting, we had absolutely no control of that situation, but we were too unaware to realize it.

When you start understanding that your emotional reaction does not represent who you are, you are well on your way to overcome these emotional tantrums. A key question to ask yourself is “Why am I feeling this way?” More often than not you will realize that anger is often second emotion, this means the reason you are angry is because of another emotion. Think of someone who broke your heart. One day out of nowhere…it’s over. You could not foresee it, you could not imagine it, this was not a thought in your wildest dreams, but it happened. You are so hurt by that situation that you became angry. The action in itself was not what made you angry, how you felt as a result of that action is what took you over.

Not to mention that there could be many underlying problems in this situation, whether that be previous trauma, bad situations, lack of love from the people around you. As difficult as it is to admit we all have some sort of problem. We constantly avoid thinking about it because we don’t want to see what is on the other side. We are so scared of that reality that is right next door because we think that we can’t handle it. Often times, the perceived risk is never as bad as the actual risk. Acknowledging the problem is the first step on your journey of self emotional understanding.

I know this isn’t what you want to hear but it is the truth, don’t let yourself get sucked into the victim mentality, the one where you feel like you are not good enough for things, where you reject yourself before others do. Don’t let yourself be held back by your fears. The reason we are so emotional is that our fear is the one guiding it in the background. After a break up our worst fears are realized that fact that we are alone and it feels like there is no there for us. There are times when we get angry because we are hurt, our fear here is the idea the nobody ever loved us (not necessarily a relationship). There are so many examples where our emotional reactions are guided by a fear that we subconsciously know is there, but we never seem to give ourselves time to acknowledge it.

So until we let go of the idea that everything is okay (all the time) and that you have problems everything will start opening up. This is not some thought that comes and goes, this thought can haunt you for your entire life. You already know your fears and don’t think you can BS yourself, you know that there is a problem, you just need to admit it and take action. After taking action and tackling your fear, you take away the fuel to your emotions. When you reach a point where you dealt with your issues, your identity does not need to be defended, no need to hesitate, nobody to hide who you really are. That in its own right is one of the most freeing things you can do.

There is no feeling like it. Words can’t articulate or give this feeling justice. Once your reach that point, you will know that emotion is no longer something that controls you. Understanding emotions is not necessarily a difficult task, we often fail to realize the actual root cause and we take things at face value, it is crazy to think you can solve such a large overarching problem by just fixing the immediate issue. There is always a long term issue that is occupying our minds. We never leave ourselves with time to think. There is always stress from the job, your family obligations, school, etc. This can’t interfere with you time.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s [or women’s] inability to sit quietly in a room alone,”- Blaise Pascal.

In this day and age that thought has never been more true. With the age of phones allowing you to see what someone else is doing at any given moment, hustle culture where people are grinding so much that they are destroying their own mental health, and everyone fostering sheep mentality, we sometimes don’t even know what thoughts are our own and which of those belong to others.

To be honest, a lot of your problems can get fixed this way, it is really interesting seeing the effect of thinking about important principles of your life and allowing yourself not to be influenced by other people. Your thoughts are precious, don’t let people corrupt your thinking with shallows ideals and everything that goes into wasting your potential as a person. Your potential is not how much money you can make, or how many followers you have, or how much swag you own. You need to let go of the things you know don’t matter to you. I know there is the fear of social displacement in there, that’s why you still haven’t let go of these ideals, but trust me, a year from now you will be thanking yourself for the change you made today.