Taking Care of ME: 5 Effective Ways to Manage Negative Emotions + FREE Meditation Room

No matter who you are and where you live, this is a challenging time. We’re all dealing with a lot of uncertainty and fear of the unknown. And unfortunately, that can often be the perfect recipe for bringing up negative emotions.

After all, if you don’t know what the future has in store for you, you might feel anxious or stressed. And if you’re constantly stressed, it’s easy to get triggered by people or events and end up feeling irritated, angry, or sad. This doesn’t just make it hard to feel happy day-to-day and satisfied with your life. It can also compromise your relationships by making you more irritable and more reactive when interacting with your partner—even if your negative emotions have nothing to do with them.

I know this all too well because it’s something I experienced when my marriage ended and I spent months wallowing in sadness, self-pity, and shame. My emotions definitely affected me and how I felt about myself. But they also hindered my relationships and limited my ability to be a patient and open partner.

As I mentioned in Part #1 of my Taking Care of ME series, when you’re feeling stressed and particularly emotional, one way to take care of yourself and, therefore, improve your relationships, is to build your love quotient by boosting your capacity for self-love. Cultivating self-love is key for creating the life you want and welcoming more joy, love, and anything else that you’re looking for into your life.

But although cultivating self-love is something anyone can do, it’s not exactly a walk in the park. It takes work to build self-love. And it can be especially hard to do when you’re consumed with negative emotions like stress, anxiety, anger, or sadness.

When you feel anxious, angry, or sad, it can seem like your emotions have a tight grip on you and have taken over control of your life.

Fortunately, no matter how much or how long you’ve been dealing with these emotions for, you absolutely CAN learn how to manage them and get back in the driver’s seat of your life. And that way, you can stop feeling worried, frustrated, or upset all the time and get back to living your life with joy.

Ready to learn how?

In this blog post, I share how to take care of yourself by managing your emotions effectively.

Negative Emotions Aren’t Always Bad

It may not seem like it on the surface. But negative emotions aren’t inherently bad. In fact, in the right context, they’re helpful.

I know what you’re thinking: “How can something like stress possibly be helpful???”

But think about it this way: Imagine that you’re driving on the highway and a car suddenly veers into your lane right in front of you and cuts you off. In this moment, your stress level will probably shoot up right before you swerve to avoid a collision. You might not realize it, but the stress is what helped you avoid the collision. How? By preparing your body mentally and physically to react quickly and escape a dangerous situation.

Okay, so now you know when stress can actually be a good thing. But what about anger or frustration? How can these emotions ever be helpful?

Well, all negative emotions, even ones like anger, frustration, and sadness, act as signals. They tell us that there’s something going on in a situation or in our life that isn’t right for us. 

For example, if you always feel angry around your partner, the anger is a sign that something in your relationship isn’t working for you and needs to change. Maybe there’s something you need to change about how you and your partner interact, or maybe it’s time to end the relationship altogether.

Similarly, if you find that you almost always feel unmotivated and miserable at work, it’s a sign that your job or career may not be right for you.

Although these negative emotions can be difficult to experience, they allow us to become aware of things in our life that aren’t right for us. And they signal that it’s time for us to do something about it by making a change.

Of course, if you’re constantly dealing with negative emotions, they can take a major toll on your mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. And they can affect your relationships, your ability to fulfill work and social responsibilities, and your ability to do the things in your life that truly matter to you.

After all, when you’re consumed by negative emotions, you can end up…

• getting “stuck in your head” and continuously overthinking, overmanaging, and criticizing things
• being reactive and easily triggered
• always seeing problems in situations
• having a hard time recognizing what’s going well

That’s why an important part of taking care of yourself and protecting your relationships is learning how to manage negative emotions.

Here are 5 effective ways to do this:

1. Pause and Breathe

Ultimately, you want to tackle negative emotions in ways that allow you to manage them over the long term and reduce how frequently and intensely they affect your relationship and other aspects of your life. But it’s also helpful to have tools that can help you manage negative emotions when you’re experiencing them in the moment.

Fortunately, you already have one of the best tools to do this—your breath! You see, if you’re experiencing a negative emotion, your sympathetic nervous system is probably activated. This is the system in your body that prepares you to deal with threats and other difficult situations. Your sympathetic nervous system boosts your heart rate, breathing, blood pressure, and muscle tension. So it can fuel negative emotions by putting you in an aroused physiological state.

The good news is that you also have a system in your body that reverses this process and induces relaxation. It’s known as the parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system decreases your heart rate, slows your breathing, lowers your blood pressure, and relaxes your muscles.

One of the best ways to activate the parasympathetic nervous system is to do diaphragmatic breathing (also known as belly breathing). With diaphragmatic breathing, you take slow, deep breaths using your diaphragm. This type of breathing brings more oxygen to your body, reduces muscle tension, helps you get centered, and clears your mind.

In fact, diaphragmatic breathing is so effective that science shows that when people do it for just 10 minutes a day, they cope with stress more effectively, have better mood, sleep better, have a stronger immune system, can concentrate more effectively, and have a lower risk of cancer and heart disease.

That’s why I always say that your breath is your best friend—it’s always there when you need it. All you need to do is call upon it and accept the help that it offers you when you’re feeling stressed, anxious, angry, or irritated.

Diaphragmatic breathing is pretty easy to learn and do—it isn’t anything fancy. But if you’ve never done it before and would like someone to walk you through it the first time around, feel free to use my guided diaphragmatic breathing track. You can access it for FREE right in my online meditation room.

As a side note, if you visit my online meditation room, you’ll find that it also contains several meditation tracks. I won’t get into too much detail on meditation here. But if meditation is something that interests you, know that building a practice can also help you manage negative emotions. That’s because meditation teaches you that your emotions are just that—emotions. It also encourages you to focus on the present moment instead of worrying about the past or future. And it helps you cultivate positive emotions by allowing you to tap into the inspiration, wisdom, joy, and love that are deep within you.

If you’d like to build a meditation practice as a way to manage your negative emotions, using the guided tracks in my FREE online meditation room is a great place to start.

2. Change What You Can

Diaphragmatic breathing is a great way to manage negative emotions when you’re experiencing them. But it isn’t a long-term strategy that gets to the root cause of these emotions. That’s why it’s helpful to use diaphragmatic breathing in conjunction with other approaches.

One of these is to identify the root causes or triggers of your negative emotions and change them. For example, if you take some time to reflect and realize that you’re stressed and lashing out at your partner because you’ve taken on too many extra projects at work, find ways to cut back on what you already have on your plate. And practice saying “no,” so that in the future, you can avoid spreading yourself too thin in the first place.

Similarly, let’s say that you realize that you feel unhappy and “behind” in life whenever you go on social media and see posts about other people’s engagements and weddings. In this case, you might decide that it would be healthier for you to take a break from social media, limit the amount of time you spend on it each day, or delete your accounts altogether.

3. Challenge Negative Thoughts

When a situation in your life triggers a negative emotion in you, it usually isn’t the person or situation that causes the emotion. Instead, it’s how you perceive the situation that causes the emotion.

For example, if your aunt doesn’t call you on your birthday, here’s what you might think: “I always call her on her birthday, but she can’t even be bothered to take a few minutes to reciprocate by calling me on my birthday? I’m clearly not that important to her!”

In this situation, you might feel angry. But you don’t feel angry because your aunt forgot to call you. Instead, you feel angry because you’ve assumed that the lack of phone call means that you’re unimportant to your aunt.

That’s why another effective way to manage your emotions is to target the negative thoughts that trigger them.

Sometimes, our negative thoughts are so strong that they feel like facts. But in most cases, they’re just beliefs or assumptions that we have, and they don’t represent reality.

Here’s how to challenge your negative thoughts so you can ultimately manage your negative emotions:

• When you experience a negative emotion, take a few moments to write down the thoughts that are going through your mind. For example, if you’re thinking, “I always call my aunt on her birthday, but she can’t even be bothered to take a few minutes to reciprocate by calling me on my birthday? I’m clearly not that important to her!”, write that down.
• Next, ask yourself some questions about each thought you wrote down:
  • Is this thought true?
  • Is it always true?
  • How do I know it’s true? What evidence do I have?
  • What evidence do I have that this thought is NOT true?
• Finally, replace each thought with a more balanced thought.
  • Instead of “I always call my aunt on her birthday, but she can’t even be bothered to take a few minutes to reciprocate by calling me on my birthday? I’m clearly not that important to her!”
  • Think “My aunt cares about me and loves me, so there might be a good reason why she didn’t call me today.”

4. Practice Acceptance

When you’re experiencing negative emotions, you might be very focused on trying to “get rid of them.” But the reality is that negative emotions will come and go throughout your life. That’s why it can be helpful to manage negative emotions by practicing acceptance.

When you practice acceptance, you acknowledge that your negative emotions exist and that the situations that triggered them happened or continue to be present in your life. And you understand that although you’re experiencing these emotions, they don’t have to stop you from feeling happy or being a loving partner.

You can practice acceptance toward your negative emotions using this 4-step process:

1. Identify your emotions: Sit quietly with yourself and identify each negative emotion that you’re experiencing. Give each emotion a name and write it down.
2. Give your emotions space: Close your eyes and imagine that each of the emotions you identified in Step 1 are standing five feet away from you. Create this distance between yourself and your emotions so that you can put them outside of yourself and observe them.
3. Observe your emotions: Identify the size, shape, and color that each emotion would have if it had these physical attributes. Then imagine seeing your emotions standing five feet in front of you and having these physical attributes. Observe and acknowledge each of the emotions for what they are.
4. Reflect: Finally, take a moment to reflect on how your emotions feel now. Did observing them from a distance make them feel different? Did it affect how you feel as a whole?

Keep in mind that practicing acceptance doesn’t mean agreeing that your negative emotions are good or that the situation that triggered them is okay. It simply means acknowledging that you’re experiencing these emotions and understanding that they don’t define you, your relationships, or your life.

5. Exercise

Looking for a strategy that’s a bit more physical and will get you up on your feet? Give exercise a try!

You might think about exercise mostly in terms of its physical benefits. But exercise is also great for your mental health because it can help you manage negative emotions and boost your mood.

How does it do this? When you exercise, your body releases endorphins, which act as natural painkillers. You might also find that because exercise is a physical activity, it helps you “get out of your head” and escape the constant stream of negative thoughts that can trigger negative emotions. That’s why science shows that doing regular exercise can elevate your mood, decrease tension, and improve your self-esteem.

Depending on where you live, you might not be able to exercise at your favorite gym or yoga studio these days. But there are still ways to stay active right at or around your home. For example, you can follow a yoga video on YouTube, bike around your neighborhood, or go for a hike at a local park.

Manage Your Emotions Instead of Letting Them Manage You

It’s normal to experience negative emotions every now and then. But if you find that you frequently feel anxious, stressed, angry, or sad, your emotions might be affecting your life in all sorts of ways. For example, they might be affecting how patient, calm, open, and understanding you are around your partner, which could limit your ability to build a healthy, satisfying relationship. And in a broader sense, your emotions could be holding you back from creating the life you truly want for yourself.

Fortunately, as I’ve shared above, there are simple and effective ways to cope with and navigate negative emotions. These strategies let you get back in the driver’s seat of your life so that you can manage your negative emotions instead of letting them manage you and your relationship.

All 5 of these strategies are great for helping you take care of yourself and manage your emotions successfully. But as you might have noticed, diaphragmatic breathing and meditation are some of my favorites!

That’s why I’ve created a FREE online meditation room with guided diaphragmatic breathing and meditation tracks. They’ll teach you exactly how I leverage the power of the breath and meditation to manage negative emotions, feel centered, and bring joy to my life.

And if you haven’t done so already, follow me on my Facebook page Vera Velini – The Assertive Happiness Coach. That way, you’ll be among the first to hear about new blog posts, resources, and master classes.

See you again soon!

Vera

P.S. If you like the tips I’ve shared here and are looking for more strategies for managing negative emotions, check out my video on the 12 practices I personally use to beat stress. Although the video focuses on stress, the strategies I share work just as well for managing a range of negative emotions.

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