The term emotional intelligence refers to the capacity that human beings have to recognize or identify their own emotions (or feelings) and those of others, as well as to modulate and manage them.
When we talk about emotional management or control, it is important to emphasize that each and every emotion is necessary and adaptive, so in no case should we repress them, but learn to express them appropriately.
Joy, sadness, anger, fear or disgust; five primary emotions without which survival would not be possible. So where does the problem lie? Quite simply, in the intensity and frequency of these emotions.
Fear, for example, is adaptive in that it allows us to flee from danger. However, if it becomes excessive in frequency and intensity (“I feel frightened on a daily basis”), it may give way to a particular disorder or phobia.
Or anger. Although we may think that feeling anger is useless, it is not useless at all, since the fight against injustice, without going any further, is born from it, allowing us to evolve as human beings. However, feeling disproportionate anger can lead us to perform abominable acts.
In these hard days of confinement that we are all living through due to the coronavirus, emotions and feelings are magnified and everything is lived in a more intense way, so more than ever, it is necessary to work on emotional containment.
We have an individual and social responsibility as citizens, but beyond that, we also have a responsibility to ourselves. We owe as much to ourselves as to the loved ones with whom we live (in many cases a group as vulnerable as children). Therefore, it is essential to work on our emotional awareness and empathy.
We all have the right to explode, especially in crisis situations, but with a conscious practice of our own emotions we will be able to control this explosion, in order to protect both the people around us and ourselves. In this way, we will be able to reflect on what we feel and why we feel it, which will have a direct impact on our well-being.
For that reason, in this article, I want to talk to you about some of the emotional control techniques par excellence, so that you can put them into practice these days if you think it is necessary.
Excessive anger and stress destroy our personal relationships and encourage aggression of any kind, in addition to causing health problems.
Remember that for everyone it is a difficult situation, that we all would like to scream sometimes, but we must channel that scream correctly, in order not to hurt anyone. We all feel fragile these days. Let’s turn our anger and frustration – logical and understandable – into something positive.
I will roughly summarize the techniques I want to share with you, in three main blocks:
– Physiological techniques
– Cognitive techniques
– Behavioral techniques
By physiological techniques, we understand those techniques that will allow us to reduce the discomfort, in terms of the symptoms associated with the emotion. In the face of stress, anger or anxiety, our heart rate increases, which causes us to tense up, our hands to sweat, etc. For this purpose, diaphragmatic breathing is a good ally. When breathing with the diaphragm and not thoracic, which is a more superficial breathing, the amount of oxygen that enters is much greater, so our heart does not have to work so hard and the pulsations are reduced, entering a state of relaxation. We will inhale with the nose until the air reaches the diaphragm (about 3 seconds), we will keep it for about 3 seconds more, and we will empty in 3 or 4 seconds approximately. If we perform the exercise in a time with few stimuli (low light, noise, etc.), it will also allow us to pay full attention to our breathing, which normally is not conscious if not automatic, and with it we will expel the negative or hot thoughts that generate discomfort.
As for cognitive techniques, I would like to place special emphasis on distractors. We understand by cognitive distractor any activity that requires our full attention to be performed correctly, with which we will be able to expel those negative thoughts (and many times irrational, as they are magnified by the extraordinary situation we are living: confinement, etc.) that generate discomfort.
Here we will use, on the one hand, very automatic tasks such as starting to multiply by 2, leaning out of the window and counting the windows of the block of apartments in front of us, looking for words that begin with a specific syllable, etc.
And why? Because if someone at home had said or done something that was going to make us explode, they will allow us to stop the negative thought (“I can’t take it anymore”) and block it with a task that seems absurd, but that will end up expelling it (I can’t multiply 2 by 2 correctly and at the same time keep the thought of “I’m fed up, these kids will drive me crazy”, or whatever it is).
And on the other hand, the distractors known as hobbies. Once we have managed to reduce the discomfort with a more automatic task or diaphragmatic breathing, we can spend some time reading a book, drawing, writing, playing the guitar, listening to music, doing sudoku, cross-stitch, etc. We can have as many positive distractors as we like, as long as for us it is something pleasant and appetizing.
Finally, by behavioral techniques, we mean those that slow down our behavior, such as the famous “counting to ten”. The behavioral technique par excellence is known as “time-out”, since it is a time we give ourselves to reduce our discomfort and not to do or say something we may later regret. Time-out is based on two basic premises:
1. It implies that I have to move away from the stimulus that has caused me discomfort (my partner, my children, something I have seen on television, …). I can go to another room and there put into practice the cognitive distractors or the physiological technique presented above.
2. The involved party, as far as possible, has to know the technique. Firstly, because he/she may also want to use it and, secondly, so that he/she can respect our distancing without misinterpreting it. In the event that my distancing is facilitated by the children, this will allow my partner, for example, to distract them so that they do not follow me into the bedroom.
And remember, today more than ever we see how vulnerable we human beings are. In difficult times there is no difference, we will all suffer this crisis, but if we can do something to bear that suffering in the best possible way and make the suffering more bearable for our loved ones, we will have already won in part, in this battle.