7 Tips For Dealing With Bad Emotions

You’ve probably often felt like you couldn’t control your bad feelings, or when you tried to do something about them, it just seemed to make matters worse. You may have noticed that controlling the burst of unpleasant emotions and breaking away from them is a rather difficult task. Sometimes the key is that we have to deal with emotions without facing them directly.

You may have heard of something like “tolerance of frustration”  and how it is a good way to raise our children. This is largely a rural order, as life does not always give us what we want or act exactly the way we want.

Life makes us frustrated. Just as life provokes us to be stronger. Often our plans don’t work the way we imagined them to work, but this may not be such a bad thing if we know how to make things work for us. Even inevitably, we will run into unexpected changes that will disrupt our lives and test us.

That is why it is so important to teach our children how to deal with bad emotions and start from this starting point. For if we don’t teach it, our children will start to feel frustrated and they will throw in the towel almost immediately, or they will let the anger take over from them. Frustration must be managed wisely.

Skills for dealing with bad emotions

The same things happen with much any bad feeling. It feels like a dull pain that only appears around but doesn’t go away very easily. However, it comes on purpose and has a reason, just like any other emotion. That is why it is important to listen to and understand them as well.

We should not close our ears and eyes when we encounter something we don’t like. It’s more about not letting it flood our lives and not letting it dictate our behavior. This is what these skills are all about; of very helpful strategies that help us deal with the bad feelings that so often invade us.

1. Activity: Find yourself an activity where you can channel your frustration

The activity you do should be one that you enjoy, that you feel comfortable doing, and that is satisfying. It should be an activity where you can go with the flow and feel peace, for peace is the unmistakable source of positive emotions. Find your own activity. Everyone is sure to find for themselves an activity that suits him or her perfectly and that makes him or her feel good.

For some, drawing their own mind and its movements acts as such an activity. For others, this activity may be, for example, cycling or running, while for some the best thing may be playing an instrument. Find your own activity and let it evaporate your bad feelings… little by little they will disappear completely. 

2. Contribution: improving our environment

When we talk about “contributing,” we mean giving time to others, helping others, or collaborating with them, solely for the simple reason that we get pleasure from it. It’s about feeling useful and improving our environment. When we promote the well-being of the people around us, we feel useful and effective. As a result, our bad feelings also tend to disappear.

3. Comparisons: make realistic comparisons

Sometimes when we compare ourselves to another person who is experiencing situations much worse than us, we get a certain sense of relief. The same thing happens when you compare the current situation to another, much more difficult situation that you have had to deal with in the past. All of this helps us distance ourselves from what we feel.

Often we tend to see ourselves in the eyes of a hurricane… a  place where chaos is born and where it grows. Moving ourselves away from the center of this destructive force and realistically assessing the situation are healthy exercises if you want to make your bad feelings disappear.

4. Emotions: using emotions against emotions

This idea has a connection to the first skill we mentioned: activity. Here we are talking about  producing emotions other than the bad emotions we feel right now. One way is to engage in some activity, to do something. This helps us get rid of those feelings that we don’t like at all.

That is, don’t care what others say or might think. Don’t lock yourself in your home after a divorce or a near death, people looked at you badly or not. Do exactly as you feel best. Most of the time, the people who criticize you aren’t even the ones who really love you and help you.

5. Push away: Move yourself away

By “pushing away,” we mean  putting that bad-feeling creative situation in the background for a moment. While this idea doesn’t work in all situations, in most situations it does work. Think about how many bad feelings you could get away with if you just focused your attention somewhere else.

But deal with the matter and feel later if there is a need for it. Keeping ourselves busy with someone else’s activity reduces our negative emotions  and helps us stay away from that emotional hurricane.

6. Thoughts: Thoughts feed emotions

Sometimes we just have to stop feeding our bad feelings with our thoughts. When we stop this, many emotions simply die. It is positive to learn from mistakes, especially because we do not repeat them again, but it is not positive to bind ourselves to eternal repentance. We don’t want to constantly come up with theories about what happened or reflect on “what if…”

Learn, heal, forget. Remember the lesson, but forget what happened. Don’t go back again and again to punish yourself. If you do this, you lose, as all the punishments turn into a dark and frightening maze.

7. Knowledge

Now may be the time to create feelings that can help us turn away from our bad feelings. By knowledge we refer to things that we perceive with our senses. Tasty food, moving film, relaxing massage…  Feelings can bring our feet back to the surface of the earth and get us out of the inside of our heads.

Accepting bad feelings is something we just have to learn. This task requires different strategies or steps, such as those mentioned above, that do not involve a direct confrontation with our emotions.