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December 10 - December 20, 2023
Emotions are among the trickiest things to deal with and, unfortunately, too often, you and I will fall prey to their mystical power. We find ourselves unable to break their spell. Because emotions determine the quality of our lives and affect every aspect of it, our inability to understand how emotions work can prevent us from designing our ideal life and from fulfilling our potential.
The mind is its own place and, in itself, can make a heaven of Hell, a hell of Heaven.
Knowing how you feel is the first step toward taking control of your emotions.
Feelings manifest as physical sensations in your body, not as an idea in your mind.
Your Free Step-By-Step Workbook To help you master your emotions I’ve created a workbook as a companion guide to his book. Make sure you download it at the following URL: https://whatispersonaldevelopment.org/mye-workbook I’ll also send you a free eBook. It will help you tremendously on your personal development journey. If you have any difficulties downloading the workbook contact me at: thibaut.meurisse@gmail.com and I will send it to you as soon as possible. If you want to get a physical version of the workbook go to the URL below: http://mybook.to/MYE_workbook
To take control of your emotions, you must understand the role dopamine plays and how it affects your happiness.
Your mind quickly acclimates to new situations, which is probably the result of evolution and our need to adapt continually to survive and reproduce.
Once the initial excitement wears off, you’ll move on to crave the next exciting thing. This phenomenon is known as ‘hedonic adaptation.’
Dan Gilbert’s TED Talk, The Surprising Science of Happiness
What it means is that, in the long run, external events have minimal impact on your level of happiness.
The How of Happiness, fifty percent of our happiness is determined by genetics, forty percent by internal factors, and only ten percent by external factors. These external factors include such things as whether we’re single or married, rich or poor, and similar social influences.
Your attitude towards life influences your happiness, not what happens to you.
The ego refers to the self-identity you’ve constructed throughout your life. How was this identity created? Put simply, the ego was created through your thoughts and, as a mind-created identity, has no concrete reality.
Events that happen to you bear no meaning in themselves. You give them meaning only through your interpretation of those events.
Note that the ego is neither good nor bad; it’s just a result of a lack of self-awareness. It fades away as you become aware of it since ego and awareness cannot coexist.
Your ego is a selfish entity, only concerned about its survival.
your ego needs an identity to exist. The way it does that is through identification with things, people, or beliefs and ideas.
Loneliness is not cured by human company. Loneliness is cured by contact with reality, by understanding that we don’t need people.
Once you realize you don’t actually need anyone, you can start enjoying people’s company. You can see them as they really are rather than trying to get something from them.
The first thing to understand is that emotions come and go.
While you do have some control over your emotions, you must also recognize their unpredictable nature.
To start taking control of your emotions you must accept they are transient. You must learn to let them pass without feeling the need to identify strongly with them. You must allow yourself to feel sad without adding commentaries such as, “I shouldn’t be sad,” or “What’s wrong with me?” Instead, you must allow reality to just be.
the way you interpret emotions, as well as the blame game you engage in, creates suffering, not the emotions themselves.
Your emotions are not here to make your life harder, but to tell you something. Without them, you wouldn’t grow.
Emotions work the same way. They signal you to do something about your current situation. Perhaps, you need to let go of some people, quit your job, or remove a disempowering story that creates suffering in your life.
Your emotions come and they go. Your depression will go, your sadness will vanish and your anger will fade away.
Negative emotions act as a filter that taints the quality of your experiences. During a negative episode, every experience is perceived through this filter. While the world outside may remain the same, you will experience it in a completely different way based on how you feel.
An emotion usually represents an amplified energized thought pattern, and because of its often-overpowering energetic charges, it is not easy initially to stay present enough to be able to watch it. It wants to take you over, and it usually succeeds—unless there is enough presence in you.
Often, a vicious circle builds up between your thinking and the emotion: they feed each other. The thought pattern creates a magnified reflection of itself in the form of an emotion, and the vibrational frequency of the emotion keeps feeding the original thought pattern.
The point I’m making is, no matter how great your life is, if you spend most of your time focusing on your problems, you’ll become depressed. Thus, to reduce negative emotions, you must learn to compartmentalize your issues. Don’t let your mind over-dramatize things by clustering unrelated matters. It will only make you feel worse. Instead, remember that negative emotions exist only in your mind. Taken separately, most of your issues aren’t such a big deal, and no rule that says you have to solve them all at once.
One of America’s most distinguished psychiatrists, Dr. A. A. Brill, goes even further. He declares, “One hundred percent of the fatigue of the sedentary worker in good health is due to psychological factors, by which we mean emotional factors.
Too many of us are addicted to our problems. Instead of letting go, we complain, we play the victim, we blame other people, or we discuss our issues without doing anything to solve them. To reduce this mental suffering, we must refuse to interpret our emotions in a negative and disempowering way.
Your mind operates on the famous computing principle of GIGO - garbage in, garbage out. If you do ill, speak ill and think ill, the residue is going to leave you sick. If you do well, speak well and think well, the outcome is going to be well. OM SWAMI, A MILLION THOUGHTS.
The quality of your sleep and how much of it you get affects your emotional state.
Sleep deprivation can impact mood in many different ways.
Sleep deprivation also increases mortality risk.
sleep deprivation also seems to reduce an individual’s ability to enjoy positive experiences.
Make sure your bedroom is pitch black.
Avoid using electronic devices. This applies to smartphones, tablets, televisions, and the like.
Relax your mind.
Avoid drinking too much water within two hours of going to bed.
Have an evening ritual. This alone will help you fall asleep more easily. It’s best to try going to bed at the same time every night, including the weekends.
Our bodies change our minds, our minds change our behavior, and our behavior changes our outcomes. AMY CUDDY, SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST.
Depression can be created by sitting slouched in a chair, shoulders hunched, head hanging down. Repeat these words over and over: ‘There’s nothing anybody can do. No one can help. It’s hopeless. I’m helpless. I give up.’ Shake your head, sigh, cry. In general, act depressed and the genuine feeling will follow in time. DAVID K. REYNOLDS, CONSTRUCTIVE LIVING.
“Failing to exercise when you feel bad is like explicitly not taking an aspirin when your head hurts.”
regular exercising improves, not only your physical well-being, but also your mood.
when it comes to mastering your emotions, make sure exercising is part of your toolbox.
You become what you think about all day long.
Your thoughts define who you are and create your reality. That’s why you should channel your thoughts towards what you want, not what you don’t want. As the success expert Brian Tracy says, “The key to success is to focus our conscious mind on things we desire, not things we fear.”
Meditation helps tame the monkey and cure it of restlessness. As you meditate, you become aware of the incessant flow of thoughts popping into your mind. With practice, you learn to distance yourself from thoughts, reducing their power and their impact.
