Use These Easy Tips to Calm Your Emotions
Years ago, I found myself standing right in the face of an office worker where I was teaching, telling her off in a very loud voice because of I don’t even remember what the problem was. That was over 20 years ago and I’m still embarrassed by how I behaved. Can you relate? Have you maybe had an episode like this or maybe many? Hi! I’m Karoline and today I’m going to share some techniques that I have recently learned for coping with stress and emotions without bottling them up, without exploding, and without turning to food. Other folks turn to other substances or habits, but for me, it’s always been food. Obviously it’s food.
4 months ago, I finally learned why I have outbursts of emotion, why I get weepy so easily, and why I turn to food to handle life’s stresses and the emotions that come with it. And, I have to tell you that this knowledge has changed my life. In fact, I’m pretty ticked off that somebody didn’t clue me in to this earlier. Well, maybe they did and I’m the one who didn’t clue in, but either way, now I know and because I know, I’m calmer and I’m happier. I feel like a normal person now instead of a crazy, irritable, mess of big emotions that always came out in not so pretty ways. It’s all because 1. I have learned to identify my emotions, 2. I’ve learned how to feel those emotions and let them pass which usually happens pretty dang quickly, and 3. I have learned how to release emotions from the past that I never dealt with, but are stuck inside causing me to be triggered and react in ways I don’t want to react. what I’m saying is that I am finally emotionally regulated and my nervous system is now humming along happily most of the time. This is huge because before learning the techniques I’m sharing today, I was living in constant emotional dysregulation causing me to be anxious and stressed and over react all the time. I was living in survival mode. And now I’m just living life and loving every minute of it.
What do I mean by dysregulation? This is the term that refers to the inability to control our emotions and how we act on those feelings. All of us have feelings, but most folks learn to control those feelings when they are young, it’s just part of growing up and maturing. Like how little dudes have temper tantrums until they learn skills for regulating those emotions which makes it possible to grow out of them. However, for some of us, dysregulation happens because it is a symptom of another condition that we have. For example, folks who are neurodivergent, people who have had trauma to the brain, as well as those of us who have mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and bipolar often struggle with dysregulation. There are a few other conditions that will cause this problem for people too. Dysregulation can be very severe which may require the help of a mental health professional.
Why has dysregulation been a problem for me? It’s because I have what is called Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or CPTSD. Basically this is PTSD that is chronic, because the trauma was recurrent or constant. Being raised in an alcoholic home, being molested as a child, and being married to an abusive narcissistic man is what has put me in the CPTSD category and it’s also what explains a lot of why I have had such a hard time navigating life “normally”. I will be talking all about CPTSD and the problems that it can cause in an upcoming video. Which is probably a good time for me to remind you to hit the subscribe button and notifications bell so you know when I post new videos like that one.
The first thing we have to do when we are experiencing dysregulation is tune in. which of course means that we stop and really just pay more attention to what’s actually going on. Like if people are feeling uncomfortable around you or having strong reactions to your behavior, that’s a pretty good indication that you may be over-reactiing. If you are feeling weepy or overwhelmed with sadness or anger or anything that feels like a lot, your body is trying to tell you something. It’s trying to tell you to pay attention, your nervous system is overloaded.
Once you’ve identified the emotion, you’ve got to sit with it and feel it. This might sound scary if you are used to stuffing, but trust me, this is way, way better than stuffing. Because when you let your emotions take up the space it needs to be felt, it usually passes very quickly, freeing you up to deal with the situation more rationally because your nervous system is not on high alert, you know the fight, flight, or freeze thing? I added another F in there, Feed because that’s what I do when I get overloaded.
But what does it mean to sit with an emotion and let it be felt. This is what baffled me for years. Like do you just sit there and think about what’s going on and why? Yes. That’s exactly what you do. If emotions are piling up and you feel yourself starting to react, just give yourself some space. Take a walk, go to the bathroom, go to the other room. Give yourself space. To do what? Well, for one thing to give yourself time to analyze the situation to see if what you are feeling is really real or are you being triggered by something. The way I do this is I pretend that I am in the other person’s shoes and I try to look at the whole thing from their perspective. This has served me very well. Many times I have come back to my kids and said I’m sorry for reacting so strongly and then I can have a calm conversation and work to resolve the problem or I just drop it all together because I realize that I was out of line.
If I’m really keyed up and trying to get another perspective doesn’t work, I have a whole bunch of techniques I can choose from to get me to calm down and think more rationally. One of them is to do slow, deep breathing. There are lots of ways that I’ve seen deep breathing explained and to tell the truth, I don’t think it really matters which method you use, whether you breathe through your nose to a count of 3 and exhale to a count of 5 or you breathe in slowly, hold it for a few seconds and then breathe out slowly or any other way that you have been taught to breathe. I will say that, while doing the deep breathing, it is important to take your focus off of the situation that is pushing your button and put your attention just on the breathing. And if you have been able to shut yourself away somewhere private, you might also do a variation of a technique called havening where you cross your arms so that your hands are able to start at the top of your shoulders and slowly move your hands down to your elbows as many times as it takes to calm down. This is kind of like the butterfly hug where you also cross your arms and give yourself a good squeeze. You also tap your hands alternating each arm. I love these methods. In fact I don’t use them just for calming myself when I am feeling emotional. I am using it to calm my nervous system done all together.
Because my system has been so keyed up for so long, I have added these techniques into my normal bedtime routine to just bring more peace and relaxation into my life as a whole. What I do is I give myself a butterfly hug every night when I crawl into bed as I mentally recite all of the things that I accomplished and succeeded at that day. I can’t begin to tell you how this has helped me to feel more centered, not just at night, but overall during my days. Ok. Back to being in the bathroom or somewhere alone, once you’re calm, you can go back to thinking about the situation because now your brain is in the right mode to handle it rationally and when you’re ready you can return to the situation that provoked the emotion in the first place.
But what if you can’t get out of the situation? Here’s where I use some kind of touch or distraction to bring me down. Touch is very powerful and soothing to our nervous systems, which is why I bought my daughters fidget rings. Spinning the ring or fiddling with it can be very soothing. It can be done mindlessly as a way of coping with stress or anxiety, or you can put your full focus on the spinning to relax your mind too. I also have rubbed or tapped my hand or my leg or whatever body part is not so obvious to the person that I’m talking to. They don’t know that I’m secretly dialing down my emotional reaction, but doing this has really worked. Especially when I’m dealing with certain family members.
If you can kind of time out, even when you’re in a situation like a work meeting or at school, you can use a technique called 5 senses or 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. This is where you tune in to your senses and notice 5 things that you can see, 4 things that you can touch, 3 things that you can hear, 2 things that you can smell, and finally one thing that you can taste. This, with all of the other techniques that I’ve shared, has the purpose of 1) a pattern interrupt. You’re giving your brain a second to just pause and step back and have a moment to regroup 2) to look for another viewpoint to see if there is another way to see the situation and 3) calm down so you’re moving your thought process to the part of the brain that is in charge of making rational decisions instead of reacting with a fight, flight, freeze, or feed response.
Listening to music, massage, meditation, mindfulness (meaning getting in touch with your surroundings and grounding yourself in the here and now), and progressive muscle relaxation are also ways to calm your nervous system down. Oh, and humming! I’ve tried humming and it is super effective. I will also mention that you may have instinctively been using your own technique for relaxing. Twirling your hair, rocking, tapping your feet one foot at a time, rubbing your hand in a soothing way. There are tons of ways to do this. Experiment with some of the ways and find one that works well for you. I tend to use different ways depending on the situation and emotion that I’m feeling.
Whew, that was actually a lot of information, right?! There is one more thing that I want to talk about though and that is dealing with pent up emotions. Those of us who deal with dysregulation often have stuff that we’ve stuffed down, stuff that we may not even know is there. As you start practicing the techniques I’ve told you about, and since most of these techniques give us time to mentally process what the heck is really going on, you will likely become more aware of that deeper stuff. Dealing with that deeper stuff is often done best with the help of an experienced professional, however, my therapist taught me EFT tapping and it is something that I have been able to do on my own, between sessions with her. It has been such a transformative practice for me that I have made tapping a daily practice. My quick progress in healing so far over the past couple of months is due to me being able to do tapping at home in conjunction with the work I do with my therapist.
I won’t go into too much detail about tapping in this video, but here’s the gist of it. Tapping is a technique where you say a set up statement 3 times and then you tap through certain points on your body. I first was exposed to the idea of tapping several years ago, but dismissed it as too woo woo or out there. And that was a huge mistake. Things I have carried with me for years, beliefs that have driven me to act against my best interest … so many things have been cleared within one or a few sessions of tapping. I’ll put a link in the description to connect you to Maria LiPuma, a therapist here on youtube that does guided tapping sessions. You will want to check her out. Amazing relief. Amazing.
Wow! That was a lot, right? I hope you were taking notes. If not, throw this in your queue to watch again later to remember some of the things we talked about. I personally have experienced how transformative all of the things I talked about today can be. And I hope it will be a big benefit to you too by 1st, knowing that you are not alone. That there are other people who are dealing with similar struggles than you and there is an actual name for the symptoms that you have been experiencing. 2nd, learning some techniques for giving yourself space to identify and process through emotions that are popping up in your daily life, and 3rd, having the tools to work through past stuff and clear out emotional crap that that has been plaguing you for years.
Stay Positive!
Karoline
