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Foreword
Do you ever make some decision that makes you regret it when you are under the control of your emotion? Do you feel strengthless about it? Do you want to change this situation? Do you want to get rid of getting controlled by your emotion? Probably. Anger, Anxiety, Depression, and fear are the most undesirable emotions that people hate. Under these feelings, people often do something “wrong” and regretful. However, these emotions are unavoidable. So, what can we do with them? How can we stop them from affecting our decision?
Recently, I have read a book called Emotional Intelligence, published in 1995, written by Dr. Daniel Goleman. Although it is an old book, the knowledge written inside the book is still applicable to today’s lives. In the book, Dr. Goleman has explained a lot about emotional intelligence, such as why emotions will pop up and, the most important thing, how we, humans, can overcome being controlled by emotions, especially anger, anxiety, and depression. (Fear is not included in the book, but I want to talk more about it too).
In this article, I will walk you through what I have learned about emotional intelligence and how you can overcome being controlled by emotions, such as anger, anxiety, depression, and fear.
What is Emotional Intelligence?
Before explaining anything about getting rid of any control of any emotions, let me first talk about emotional intelligence, the thing that affects our life, and does matter whether we can succeed or not in whatever task.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) (or some may call it EQ) is how people recognize emotion in themselves and others and react to those emotions. It matters how people make decisions. Often, people make wrong and regretful decisions when they are weak at controlling their emotions, or we can say they are weak at resisting getting controlled by their feeling. Same as the Intelligence quotient (IQ), Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of the most important things that matter one’s success. Imagine that if one is often controlled by his feeling, how can he finish his task fast, accurately?
Why developing emotional intelligence is important?
Emotional Intelligence (EI) plays an essential role in building personal success, happiness, and growth. However, people nowadays do not realize the importance of developing one’s emotional intelligence, and all they care about is the Intelligence quotient. Seems like in their eyes, IQ matters the most than anything in the world when talking about personal development. I understand why they are so into one’s IQ since these days having a high IQ can make one succeed easier than having a low IQ.
However, whether having a higher IQ equal easier success? The answer is no. In modern society, people often are required to work as a team no matter in what industry. Imagine if one doesn’t know how to interpret others’ emotions or control his emotion. How can he communicate with others without barriers and further build his bonding and work with his teammates? Even if you are working alone, without good management of your emotion, you will fail or give up tasks you have never tried before (since you don’t know how to deal with fear, anxiety), and then it keeps cycle again and again.
Apart from building up success in your career, without good development in emotional intelligence, one’s interpersonal relationship is often sucks. Friends and family are who accompany us the most time except ourselves in our life. Understanding how to recognize their emotions and further react to them is vitally essential when staying with them. If we are unable to recognize their emotions and react to them accurately, they may leave us.
Emotions can get in the way or get you on the way
Mavis Mazhura
Developing Emotional Intelligence
Different from the Intelligence quotient (IQ), our emotional intelligence can be cultivated, through three steps, learning, experiencing, and self-emotion-recognizing.
| Steps |
|---|
| 1️⃣ Improve our emotional intelligence is to learn why those feelings appear. |
| 2️⃣ Tell your feeling when you are under those emotions. |
| 3️⃣ Recognize them whenever they appear, |
| 4️⃣ Act to them, control them or let them take control of you. |
There are numerous feelings when it comes to human emotions. However, due to the article’s length (I don’t want to make it too long), I will only explain the four worst and unwanted feelings I found people are worse at dealing with, anger, anxiety, depression, and fear.
Anger 😡
From the book Emotional Intelligence, Anger, also known as wrath and range, is an emotion that appears when one is threatened by danger and chooses to face it. “Danger” here can be anything that causes harm to one’s spiritual or mental health, not a must to physical. Be treated unfairly or rudely, be insulted or looked down on, facing failure when pursuing personal goals can also be the reasons that trigger one to be angry.
| Process |
|---|
| 1️⃣ Threatened by a danger |
| 2️⃣ Fight or escape (Unconscious mind) |
| 🔥Fight: Ones turn angry |
| 🚪Escape: Ones turn fear (illustrated in later part) |
In terms of controlling your anger, here are two ways you can take to improve your emotional intelligence in controlling them. The first thing is to enhance your empathy. By understanding why people are doing something that makes you mad, you may, in most cases, forgive them and stop being angry. For instance, when someone is late for an hour for your date. If you know he went out early but is stuck in a traffic jam, you will stop angry.
Another way is to boost your self-esteem. As previously mentioned, people often get into angriness since they feel they are offended. By boosting your self-esteem, the chance you get into angriness will significantly lower as you don’t care what others are talking about you anymore.
However, sometimes you may not avoid being angry about something. It’s normal. We are all humans, and we cannot avoid not to be angry anytime. So, how could we do with our anger in such cases? There are two ways for you to deal with them.
The first way is to distract yourself from the source of anger. Often, people allow the thing that triggers their emotions to stay in their minds. They become much angrier when they keep reminding themselves why they are angry. So, to avoid thinking about what makes you angry, try to distract yourself from them, maybe go for a walk or whatever.
You may think the first way is hard to achieve as you may think it is hard for us to be distracted from other things when we are in angriness. True. So, that’s why you may look at the second way, keep quiet, and don’t make any decision. Often, people make wrong decisions or say something that hurts their loved ones when they are angry. To avoid being regretful, keep quiet and don’t make any decisions when you are angry. Then, instead of raging and yell at someone, find a way to relieve your angriness, maybe shout aloud somewhere, punching sandbags or whatever that makes you feel comfortable.
| What should you do when you are angry? 😡 |
|---|
| 1️⃣ Distract yourself from the source of angry. |
| 2️⃣ Try not to talk to anyone before you calm down |
| 3️⃣ Try not to make any decisions |
| 4️⃣ Find alternative ways to relieve your angriness |
A man only mad about something when his unconscious mind admit that it is the truth.
Gordon Chan
Fear 😱
The book Emotional Intelligence does not cover the emotion of fear. However, I would like to talk more about it since we face fear frequently.
As previously mentioned, anger is an emotion that appears when one is threatened by danger and chooses to face it. But what if we don’t face the danger and choose to escape from it? At this moment, fear appears.
Fear is an emotion that pops up when one is threatened by danger, but instead of facing it, the one chooses to escape from it. Same as anger, “Danger” here can be anything that causes harm to one’s spiritual or mental health, not a must to physical. Often, the emotion of fear appears when people are facing something they are not familiar with. Or, in other words, stepping out of their comfort zone. Other than that, people may also become fearful when they are too anxious about something in extreme cases.
| Process (Normal) |
|---|
| 1️⃣ Threatened by a danger |
| 2️⃣ Fight or escape (Unconscious mind) |
| 🔥Fight: Ones turn angry |
| 🚪Escape: One turn fear (illustrated in later part) |
| Process (Anxiety) |
|---|
| 1️⃣ Worry about something for a long term and repeatedly |
| 2️⃣ Become fearful of everything related to that thing |
To overcome fear, here are several steps you could take. First, identify your fear. Knowing what makes you step back from what you are pursuing is vitally essential when fighting against your fear. Then, write why you are afraid of them. By understanding why you are frightened of them, you can then try to address the source of your fear. Here are the approaches you can take to try addressing the source of your fear.
| What you can do to overcome fear?😱 |
|---|
| 1️⃣ Try it first. |
| 2️⃣ Change your thought. |
Often, people become fearful before they are doing anything they are afraid of. This is usually caused by various reasons such as having misunderstandings of what they are frightened of, thinking they are too small to overcome the obstacles or fear. Fear is a common emotion we encounter in our daily life. I understand how hard it would be to overcome fear. However, if we are unable to get out of our comfort zone, never will we grow.
Change your thought and you change your world.
Norman Vincent
Anxiety 😨
From the book Emotional Intelligence, anxiety is a feeling of unease that appears when one is worrying about something for a long term and repeatedly. In normal cases, worry is not a bad thing. We, humans, evolve from the past till now. All we rely on to survive from danger throughout six million years is the ability to worry. By worrying will things go wrong, humans, this species has survived no matter how the environment changes. This ability has then been passed to us through natural selection, proposed by Leonardo da Vinci.
Worry is good since it helps us to avoid something that may cause harm to us. However, if we are worrying about something that may not happen and worry about it repeatedly for a long term, it turns to a bad cycle, and we call it anxiety.
In terms of easing anxiety, here are few things you can do to take. The first thing, same as what we did when we are angry, is to relax and distract from the source of anxiety. Often, when people started to worry about something, they never stop thinking about what will happen next and keep them in their minds for a long time. This then makes them anxious.
To avoid it, when you started worrying and recognized that maybe you are anxious about something, just find something to do, maybe go for a walk, or whatever distracts you. In such cases, you can stay away from what you are afraid of happening. Of course, this is a short-term strategy only. I believe everyone will start worrying again about something when they finished the on-hand tasks.
For the long term, it will be best for us to tackle the source of anxiety. Here are some questions we should ponder when we are worrying about something repeatedly.
| Questions asking yourself when you are anxious 🤔 |
|---|
| 1️⃣ What is the possibility of the thing you worry about happens? |
| 2️⃣ Is there any method to stop it from happening? |
| 3️⃣ Is there any approach you can take to minimize the consequence when it happens? |
| 4️⃣ Is it good for you to worry about it for the long term? |
If you find the possibility of the thing you worry about happen is extremely small, just stop thinking about it. If there is a method that helps you stop it from happening, just give it a shot. If there is any approach you can take to minimize the consequence, just take action now. If you find it does nothing good to you when worrying about something for the long term, just stop worrying. Keep in mind, if something is inevitable, do your best to seize happiness. It’s just like what we should do when facing death.
Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.
Leo F. Buscaglia
Depressed 😞
From the book Emotional Intelligence, the feeling of depression is one of the emotions that appear after something sorrowful happened. In normal cases, two emotions may pop up when one encounters something sorrowful, one is depression, and one is feeling down. The biggest difference between them is that feeling down may make one learn from what he has experienced and move on, while depression may make one stuck and become desperate to live. Among those worst emotions, the feeling of depression is the one that everyone wants to get rid of the most. Meanwhile, it is also the most difficult one to get rid of.
In terms of getting rid of being depressed, there are few steps you should take first. First, you are to admit that you are depressed. It is the most important thing you should do first since if you deny accepting that you are depressed, no one can help you. Second, you should try to remind or even talk to a psychotherapist, your friends, or your family about what is causing you such pain. This allows you to know the reason why you become depressed. Afterward, you can try to take these few approaches to ease the feeling of depression.
| Easing the feeling of depression 🔜 |
|---|
| 1️⃣ (if possible) Stay away from everything that makes you depressed. |
| 2️⃣ Make a packed schedule. |
| 3️⃣ Spend time with your friends and family. (Don’t stay alone) |
| 4️⃣ Sleep early (We, humans, tends to be much more emotional during nighttime) |
I understand it will be arduous to overcome the feeling of depression. However, no one can get you out of that abyss. It is one’s game only. Cheer up! You can do this.
(If you cannot get rid of depression, you should seek help from a psychotherapist.)
What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Final Thought
Emotional Intelligence (EI) is one of the essential things that contribute to one’s success, happiness, and growth. The ability to override the control of your emotion will definitely make you become a better one. Learn and spend time developing your Emotional Intelligence (EI).
If you want to learn more about Emotional Intelligence, be sure to check out the book Emotional Intelligence. (However, the book is quite boring after the part about how we control our emotions, to be honest, 😜)
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