Two Easy Ways to Control Your Emotions
You have more control than you ever imagined.
Tired of those negative emotions crowding your every thought?
Have you ever wished you could feel exactly how you want instead of having to deal with a whole bunch of unwanted emotions that crowd your entire day and leave you drained of the small amount of energy you have?
Cue the informercial host: “Well, now you can!”
Emotions are NOT all-powerful
Emotions have one huge weakness — they’re powered by thoughts. And guess who’s in charge of your thoughts? That’s right! YOU!
When it comes to emotions, you are what you think. As Ralph Waldo Emerson so elegantly put it:
“We become what we think about all day long.”
Gandhi also weighed in on this important issue when he said:
“A man is but the product of his thoughts.”
Emotions are not mystical and mysterious entities that appear out of nowhere to torment us or to bless us with serotonin.
We invoke them into our life with our thoughts. Thoughts are the ouija board of emotions.
The type of thoughts our mind generates are intimately linked to the story we tell ourselves about our life.
If you wish to know the nature of your emotions, you need to understand two things:
1) Thoughts activate emotions
2) The type of thoughts you generate is caused by the story you tell yourself about your life.
The Story of Your Life
The story of your life is not directed by Steven Spielberg. The story of your life is directed by you and by your life experiences.
What you tell yourself about yourself colors everything in your life.
Do you believe you’re a loser? Then your mind will help you find all the things that support your belief that you’re a loser.
Do you believe you’re smart? Your mind will get to work finding all things that support your belief that you’re 10 IQ points away from being the next Einstein.
In short, your mind will always find more than enough evidence to prove you right.
Side note: I knew a girl who truly believed she was the most beautiful creature on Earth. She wasn’t gorgeous. In fact, she was average looking, but her unshakable belief in her own beauty always made her the most popular girl wherever she went. I guess Gandhi is right — You are what you believe.
The story of your life is the most important story you will ever craft. You have the power to make it whatever you want it to be.
People with low self-esteem often have disempowering stories. They believe themselves to be losers, unlovable, rejects of society, pretty much every negative adjective out there.
Our story becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The brain is a powerful organ, able to create whatever reality it is instructed to create.
Our biggest fault as humans is believing that we have no control over it.
Thoughts Activate Emotions
Once the brain gets a hold of a thought through repetitive thinking, it will activate the emotion that is necessary for that thought to become cemented in your mind.
If you’re feeling like a loser, the brain may call on sadness to make you feel the full impact of your failures, shortcomings, and mistakes.
If you’re feeling like God’s gift to humanity, the brain may call on pride to remind you how the entire world benefits from your mere existence.
Do you see where I’m going with this? YOU invoke your own emotions through your thoughts. You have total control over how you want to feel.
Our biggest human power is our imagination. Use it to your advantage and imagine a story where you are the winner. Imagine a story where you are the protagonist and not a disposable character.
Thoughts and Emotions dictate your future
Thoughts turn the invisible into the visible through emotions.
Emotions are the fuel of actions.
The cycle goes like this:
1) You think a thought
2) Your brain calls the appropriate emotion
3) The emotion calls an action
4) Actions determine your entire life path.
As James Allen said:
Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.”
You may not realize this, but your brain is screaming your thoughts out loud through your actions.
We’re usually pretty good judges of other people’s self-esteem.
“Oh, Gloria’s problem is that she doesn’t think she deserves that promotion.”
“Peter had a hard childhood, and that’s why he sees everyone else as a potential enemy.”
We’re really good at evaluating other people’s “problems,” and yet we fall short when it comes to evaluating our own life.
So get to work. Change your thoughts, change your feelings, change your life. You have control of it all!
