When life's tempests rage within, finding tranquility can seem elusive. Unearth the secrets to quelling your inner storm, harnessing the power of calm, and navigating life's tumultuous seas with grace and resilience.
When your emotions become too painful and overwhelming, regain control using skills from dialectical behavior therapy
In the right amounts, emotions serve a useful purpose
- They provide us with information, influence our decisions, and compel us to act
- When emotions become overwhelming and we can’t regulate them in healthy, effective ways, this is known as emotion dysregulation
- Dysregulation also contributes to suicidality and self-harming, and leads to self-destructive behaviors such as substance abuse, disordered eating, or other means of avoiding the painful emotions and thoughts
States of mind
We all have three modes of thinking that we use to different degrees
- Rational mind: logic and facts
- Emotional mind: emotions control our behaviors
- Wise mind: combines our reasoning and emotion with our values, and a consideration of possible courses of action and consequences
- While our wise mind is that balanced perspective we want to be able to access more often, it’s important to understand that the reasonable mind and the emotional mind are also helpful, and we’re not trying to get rid of them.
- Judgments are quite pervasive for many of us. Right and wrong – judgments.
Links & Books
Some of Elaine Aron’s favorite resources are: “The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You” (1996)
- “Calming the Emotional Storm: Using Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Skills to Manage Your Emotions and Balance Your Life (2012)”
- A series of DBT workbooks by American psychologists addressing different diagnoses and problems, including PTSD by Kirby Reutter; anger by Alexander L Chapman and Kim L Gratz; anxiety by Chapman, Gratz and Matthew T Tull; bulimia by Ellen Astrachan-Fletcher and Michael Maslar; and my own workbook for bipolar disorder.
- How to be kinder to yourself
- Self-compassion techniques aren’t self-indulgent – they’ll tame your inner critic while helping you change for the better
What to do
Get re-regulated as quickly as possible
- Try some quick-fix ideas to re-regulate
- Bend over as though you’re trying to touch your toes and take deep breaths
- Focus on your exhale with “paced breathing”
- This activates our parasympathetic nervous system which helps us feel a little calmer
- Increase awareness of your emotions
- In order to manage emotions more effectively in the long run, you need to learn to name your emotions accurately
- Sensitive people who have grown up in a pervasively invalidating environment often learn to ignore or not trust their emotional experiences and try to avoid or escape those experiences, which contributes to difficulties naming emotions accurately
Calm your inner storm
Emotions serve a purpose: they motivate action, provide us with information about situations, and communicate to others
- One of the first steps in regulating emotions is being able to accurately put a label on your emotion
- Self-validation, or accepting your emotions, is soothing
- To reduce the intensity of an emotion, ‘acting opposite’ to what the emotion tells us to do – literally doing the reverse of what we feel compelled to do
