How to Regulate Your Emotions with Mindfulness
How often do you feel focused and calm? Do you often wish to have power of your life experiences. Life can be beyond challenging for most of us. It can throw many things at us to distract our long term focus and make us lose control of our attention such as social media, notifications, checking emails, watching videos. When we are seeking out short-term gratification these events can trigger some pretty strong emotions in us and lead us to be overstimulated seeking out quick dopamine fixes continuously. Mindfulness can help us delay impulses and work towards more meaningful long term goals and values.
We never want to fully deny our emotions. Feeling them is how we process the events of our lives. But there comes the point where we need to figure out a way to move through the emotions and get safely to the other side. One of the most effective ways to do this is through mindfulness.
What is Mindfulness & How Can It Help?
Mindfulness is a simple, non-judgmental awareness of the present moment. It is a powerful way to connect with our bodies and emotions, but in a higher state of awareness.
Mindfulness helps us regulate our emotions by putting us in a calm and relaxed state of presence. From here we can have a more mature and sensible point of view of the events in our lives.
Second, when practiced regularly, mindfulness can help us develop skills that promote emotional maturity and self-regulation. These skills include self-awareness and attentional control. It can help us exercise and strengthen the focus muscle in our brain.
And finally, mindfulness can increase the time between trigger and response. In this way, mindfulness acts a bit like an advanced warning system, alerting us to a potential ugly scene, giving us time to engage in emotional self-monitoring. This gives us the opportunity to choose our emotional response very, very carefully reducing our levels of anxiety, stress and anger to name a few.
Getting Started with Mindfulness
There are many online resources for getting started with a mindfulness meditation practice. Spend some time searching Google and exploring Youtube for some helpful sites and videos. Better yet, getting a workbook on mindfulness activities and setting some intentional goals to practice each week.
If you are interested in working privately with someone on regulating your emotions, please reach out to me. I use mindfulness along with Cognitive Behavioral Techniques to help reframe thinking, declutter your mind and gain control of what is most important to you and would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
Sources:
https://mentalhealthmatch.com/articles/skills/what-is-mindfulness-and-how-to-use-it-to-regulate-emotions