From Pity to Praise

Your emotions are the slaves to your thoughts, and you are the slave to your emotions.

Our emotions have a big amount of power over our choices and actions. And we either become a master or a slave to them.

When you are a slave to your emotions, they can motivate you to do things the are negative and destructive. Such as feeling angry while in a heated argument then retaliating with insults of aggression.

When you are a master of your emotions, they can motivate you to do things that are positive and constructive. Such as feeling inspired by someone and then using that to fuel something creative like design a room full of pictures, or writing a story about someone and then sharing it with them, or take piano lessons to learn how to play.

One central concept in emotional intelligence is finding a balance between our rational thinking mind-vs- our impulsive and feeling mind. When we learn how to learn how to use both of these then we have mastered our emotions, and not become a slave to them.

Here are some signs that you are becoming a slave to your emotions if you find these apply to you, then it may be time to change the way you approach your emotions.

You React Without Thinking

One of the biggest signs that your a slave to your emotions is to find yourself reacting to situations in your life without thinking.

Mine was my husband had a habit of every time something went wrong. He played the blame game, I would react by yelling at him, I would end up crying and he would end up leaving. Finally I got to where I could just tell him matter a of fact.

That when he wanted to sit down and have a calm talk this matter over I would be willing to do that, but until them I refused to speak of it again.

In psychology, there is a term known as amygdala hijack which refers to the phenomenon when the emotional parts of your brain have completely taken over the thinking part of your brain.

We seem to feel like things are worse that it is. And it reeks havoc on our emotional system. This is when you are so overwhelmed with emotions that your aren’t even capable of being reasonable.

Have you ever seen two people really arguing at the top of their lungs and their arms are flying every which way? And their voices begin to change as if someone else is speaking?

That’s one example of people becoming hijacked by their emotions. It can really bring outthink worst side of you when it happens.

It feels right in the moment, but wrong afterwards

When your caught up in the moment, your instincts may feel right when they are wrong.

It always feels like a good idea at the time to snap back at someone, or insult them, or punch them, but that short high is often followed by a long comedown.

We have all had emotional outbursts, and we tend to regret them soon after. We feel really awful for what we did, and we wish we could take it back. But we can’t.

High levels of regret is often a sign that your emotions are running the show in a certain area of your life. You don’t have good control over then, and you are always acting in ways that you let yourself down.

Your actions hurt yourself as well as others.

When your emotions get the best of you, it can often end up hurting yourself and others.

When people are a slave to your enemy they are rarely pleasant to be around. You’ll never know what your mood they will become engulfed in next, sadness, anger, jealousy, fear and you’ll never quite know how you may react to those emotions while around you.

Our emotional slave ends up acting in ways that spread their negative emotions like a virus. They walk into a room feeling gloomy and upset, and before you know it everyone in the room is feeling the same way.

When someone is a slave to their emotions, even their positive moods can become out of hand and destructive. Sometimes they become so caught up in their joy, spontaneity, and elation that they end up acting in risky and careless ways that scare people or turn them off.

You ruminate at night and can’t sleep

Another sign that you’re a slave to your emotions is if you spend a lot of time at night thinking excessively and not being able to get much sleep.

Staying up all night ruminating is often a byproduct of regret. It could be about how we expressed a particular emotion in a particular situation.

The other side of being to much of a emotional slave is not knowing how to express yourself at all and just suppressing your emotions.

So if you find yourself staying up many nights thinking about how you really need to talk to your boss, co-worker, friend, family, or whoever, it could be a sign you need to learn how to speak your mind more often. ( in a polite and healthy way).

People who are masters of their emotions aren’t in emotionless they know how to talk about their emotions and express them in a constructive way that’s appropriate.

Without healthy expression, you’re going to find yourself dealing with a lot of emotional baggage at the end of the day.

You keep repeating the cycle

Everything describing the above happens to everyone to some degree. No one is perfect and we all have moments when our emotions bring out the worst in us.

Mastering your emotions doesn’t mean you’ll never mess up, but it does mean that you’ll learn from those mistakes and you won’t keep repeating the same cycle over and over again.

When you start making active changes in improving how you respond to your emotions forever, those outbursts tend to become less frequent and less intense.