Dealing with Heightened Emotions
Do you find there are certain kinds of exteme emotion that you experience on a regular basis or in particular situations? This might be excessive anxiety or high levels of anger or indignation or strong feelings of jealousy or envy or feelings of annoyance with yourself or other powerful emotions that seem to recur for you.
If your answer is yes, or yes in particular situations or yes when dealing with particular people, you may have tormented yourself with frustration at this or you may have wracked your brains and devoted much energy to finding a solution.
Here's a slightly different approach to try:
When you experience the emotion (or afterwards when you are thinking what you might do about it), ask yourself this question:
'How am I making myself more [anxious]/[jealous]/[angry]*?'
* Insert in place of the emotion in square brackets whatever applies to you.
Now focus on not doing whatever you have identified yourself as doing that is making your emotion more pronounced.
For example, you might find that when you are anxious about something you tend to fret about it and continually seek a solution and that this actually just makes you more and more anxious. If that is so, then try not doing that for a change and instead focus on something else or stop looking for solutions and then see if your anxiety stays the same or lessens as a result
Or you might find that when you are angry you start pacing up and down the room and shouting or waving your arms and that this just seems to fuel your anger and make it spiral more out of control. If so, try not pacing up and down the room etc. Again, see if it makes a difference to how angry you feel.
If you desperately want to knock a wall down you may try harder and harder to push it down. The result may not be that the wall falls down but simply that you injure yourself or exhaust yourself. If that is so, then stopping to push may at least help you not to follow a futile, exhausting course that is detrimental to you. That way you may remain calmer and in a position where you an assess whether best to stop trying to remove the wall altogether or to find a different way of trying to knock it down.
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