4 Tips for Managing Your Emotions at Work
Being emotional at work just means that you’re human. It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a problem. But if your emotions become so big or disruptive that they affect your productivity, reputation, or relationships, then you probably need to pay attention. Let’s go through the steps for how to manage your emotions maturely and constructively.
Before we get to this, it’s important to say that research shows that our old-fashioned version of what to do with emotions at work, which is to repress them, leads to negative health outcomes and all sorts of negative relationships with your team. In other words, don’t pretend you don’t have emotions. The research says what you want to do is reassess, work with, and work through your emotions, not pretend you don’t have them.
Focus on BreathingYou’ve heard this a million times, but our breathing is essential to our ability to kick into a more mature, grownup way of dealing with an emotion. You have to start with that. The only thing I can give you as a different tip from what you’ve read everywhere else is that when you’re triggered and emotional, you can often breathe very shallowly. You can’t get any air in when you try to take a deep breath. If you feel this way, focus instead on exhaling as hard as possible. After a big breath out, your body will naturally take in a nice, juicy breath of oxygen. So breathe first, but don’t try to take a deep breath; that will backfire. Go the other way and breathe out.
Check in With YourselfYou need to tune into what’s happening in your body and brain. Literally, where are you and what are you feeling? Are your palms sweating? Is your stomach feeling sick? Is your heart racing? And what are you thinking? What words are you mulling over? What loop is running through your mind? Tune into it. Don’t judge it and don’t be upset by it, just be fascinated by it; almost as if you were your own psychologist sitting on the couch watching yourself.
Come Up With Better AlternativesThe next question to ask is what do you feel like doing? What is your primal, immature brain telling you to do in this situation? Now, to be fair, we should give it some credit. It’s trying to protect you. Whether thinking about fighting, making yourself bigger, blowing yourself up to scare away whatever you’re emotional about, making yourself smaller, running away, or getting clear, it’s trying to keep you safe. It’s just not very sophisticated, and we want to know the urges so we can move to the next step, which is to develop better alternatives.
In other words, understand what your default is. What do you really want to do in that moment? It could be running away, screaming, or contradicting, but understanding your urges allows you to say, “Or, I could do this or this or that instead.”
What’s interesting about alternatives is research shows that if you deal with an emotional reaction and think of it as a challenge, you can overcome it. Instead of it being a threat you need to protect yourself from, much better things happen. Still, that is the challenge. For instance, what can you do if someone says something that feels critical, condescending, and embarrassing to you? Maybe your urge at that moment is to run away or to say nothing, or maybe back down. But what are your alternatives?
Let them know, “Hey, I don’t think the way you just said that is an accurate representation of my work.”Ask a question. “Alright, if you want my product to be better, what do you think I need to pay more attention to?”There are a couple of alternatives.
Take ActionThe final thing to do is do something. When we get anxious and our emotions take over, the worst thing we can do is sit still and ruminate and get stuck in it. We want to do something to move forward. So what is it? What action are you going to take? What’s the best thing you can do? And try to do something. To be fair, that doesn’t mean you have to do something with the person or a colleague at work. It may be that doing something is going for a quick walk. So you can act, you can act with that person, or you can act on your own; but do something to process that emotion, let it move through you.
If you have a big emotional reaction in front of your peers or in response to your boss or something like that, don’t apologize. Instead, thank the person for sticking with you or for something you can genuinely and legitimately thank them for. Try to do that. It’s just a way to end the conversation on a nice note. If you’re too emotional to do it in the moment, do it the next day. For example, send a note and say, “I want to thank you. I was working through a lot of really big emotions. I’m really grateful that you gave me a forum to share that.” Whatever it is, try to create a nice closure.
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We have big emotions, that’s a given, and not something that we want to try and repress because that makes things a lot worse. Instead, we want to breathe through it, determine where we’re feeling it or what we’re feeling, what we’re thinking, and figure out the difference between those urges, those things our primal brain is telling us to do, and the alternatives we have that offer much better ways of dealing with the situation. Managing emotions, no matter what, even if you learn how to do it well, still takes a lot of energy.
In my next post, I’ll discuss how to lower our emotional response and be less triggered. Check out managing your emotions at work for advice on how to do that.
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