January 18, 2011 | 11 Comments

How To: Learn to control emotions, build self confidence, and improve life

With the passing of my father in May of last year, I have sought to learn to cope with different events that happen in life. I have learned a lot about how to do that during my quest this last year. I want to share what I’ve been learning with you. Ideally, I would like your thoughts on what I’m saying here, but for some reason we get a lot of people that read our articles, but not a lot of interaction. Do us a favor and help us spread the word by commenting and sharing our articles with others. We like to learn from you, but we can’t do that if you don’t share.

Sorry for the tangent. Back to what I was talking about. So I want to introduce a series of articles about how we can really learn to control our emotions by learning what our thought process is and how those emotions are triggered. I want to start with a little exercise.

Imagine yourself on a beach somewhere with the sunsetting and the waves crashing in front of you and the cool breeze from the ocean on your face.

Pretty easy to imagine right? Let’s try something else

Imagine yourself in a mountain meadow with big tall trees all around you. Now imagine you see a deer about 100yds off into the distance drinking some water from a small stream.

How quickly did you imagine these things? Was it pretty easy? Now let’s try and do something else.

Now I want you to make yourself feel something. Make yourself angry right now. Seriously try. Are you angry yet? If you did this right you’ll find that you can’t just make yourself angry. You’ll have to think of something that has made you angry before and relive the emotions that event helped you feel. In conclusion, feelings and emotions are something we can control. This is because there is something more at work that helps us get to an emotion. If we can figure out what that force is and learn to control it, then we should be able to learn to overcome our strong emotions.

I want to continue explaining this, but I think this is a good start. I’ll keep posting this series to walk you through what I’ve learned, but let’s get the comments started. What were your thoughts on the activity I took you through? Do you agree with what I’ve said or do you disagree?

Read the next article Controlling Emotions through the Mental Filter

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Author:Gareth Borcherds

I once was in heavy debt, in a crappy job, and not very happy with life. I came up with a plan to get out of debt, improve my life, and make sure I am happy. I've done that, now I want to share what I've done with others.
View all posts by Gareth Borcherds →
  • http://www.dustingtaylor.com/ Dustin Taylor

    Interesting observation. Thanks for sharing. You can’t make yourself feel feelings.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=659515604 Lauren Hutton Whitney

    Imagining something or somewhere you’ve never been is all in your imagination. It’s easy to make things up. That’s what imagination is. Emotion and imagination are two different things. I can easily imagine what I felt like in a situation, but imagining my emotion doesn’t make me angry, or happy, or sad, it only triggers a memory. To truly change my emotion, I’d have to be put into a situation where I am forced to learn to control it. Hence, understanding and learning to be in touch with your emotions, and learning how to control them.

  • Gareth

    But it’s so much more than an observation. It’s a core principle that you need to understand if you want to learn to overcome various difficulties that come from life. You can’t make yourself feel something, but can you change a feeling your having? Can you prevent yourself from feeling something? It’s more than just not feeling something, but it’s about controlling what you actually feel….a bit more profound

  • http://www.youngandprosperous.com Gareth Borcherds

    Fair point. However, my argument is based on the fact that you can’t “make” yourself feel any emotion you choose. Your emotion comes from a situation that you choose to interpret a certain way. So I would say that to learn to control your emotions you have to learn to change the way you interpret the different events that take place in your life. This will make sense tomorrow in my next post.

  • Jransom143

    I don’t think its about controlling your emotions (which can also be construed as avoiding the negative ones), but rather about controlling our response to emotion. At any given time during the day we can all be made angry or sad, or happy or whatever. You cannot always control the situation that will bring these feelings on, but you can control your reaction to them. For instance, if I am in a meeting and my boss says somthing truly stupid that makes me angry I can’t fly off the handle and scream at him, can I? No, that would get me fired. But what I can do is control my reaction to that anger and calmly and rationally react to it at a more appropriate time. When one can learn to react appropriately to various situations without avoiding emotions we become healthier, happier individuals.

  • http://www.youngandprosperous.com Gareth Borcherds

    I agree with most of what you said. I do want to make one thing clear though in what I am saying. I’m saying there is a step between “event” and “feeling.” I think that what most of us get good at is controlling the reaction that we have to the emotion, not necessarily the event. In your example you hint at the notion that you still get angry, you just don’t allow yourself to show that anger. What I’m suggesting is that you can teach yourself to not even get angry when your boss says something stupid to upset you. Or when someone “offends” you.

    Again, I think this will be clearer of the next few days as I continue to expound on this, but this is something I’ve truly come to believe. When dealing with depression in my life, I don’t want to simply hide the fact that I’m depressed from other people (although I think I’m horrible at that in some regards) BUT rather not feel the depression in the first place or at least give myself a fighting chance to change the depression feeling into something else. I don’t want to change my reaction, I want to change how I feel inside.

  • Jransom143

    I look forward to your future posts on this topic, as someone who has suffered with Depression and BiPolar disorder for over 10 years, I am always looking for more information on controlling and frankly, avoiding, depression and anger.This could be an interesting discussion.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=659515604 Lauren Hutton Whitney

    I agree. Depression is a serious issue, and if we can learn to control our emotions, then we might be able to heal ourselves of the illness.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1462516420 Ralph Borcherds

    It will be interesting to see where you go with this. Everyone is different in the way and what techniques they use to learn to deal with emotions. Some are more reactive and other more proactive. I am guessing that you will be talking about becoming more proactive in the way we deal with our emotions.

    With that said everyone has to keep in mind that you will never be totally proactive in the way you deal with the situation that causes your emotions but you can learn to be proactive in how you will respond to the situation and thus keep the emotions in check.

    Being the oldest of the family, and Gareth as the youngest, I see a wide variety of ways that the family is dealing with this tragedy. As the trial gets closer to the start date some in the family are having a very hard time with the stress of the upcoming trial and I hope that with Gareth sharing what he has learnt that some of the family will be able to deal with the stress better. Everyone has to remember and accept that what is going to happen will happen in there is absolutely nothing that we can do to change it. We have no control over it and trying to control it will just make things in our lives more stressful and we will have a harder time controlling our emotions when things do not go as we feel they should. There will be times during the trial when things will not go as we expect and I do expect that it will affect some of the family members negatively.

    I am looking forward to seeing what Gareth has learnt for we have not spoken about it directly. I personally went through a divorce process that was out of my control and if I had let it control my emotions I would have gotten depressed. So looking back I learnt that there are way too many things out there that we have no control over and we cannot and must not let it control the way we feel and act because it will get us nowhere. We have to be proactive in learning how to deal with a situation so that we can control our emotions. Some people will think I am talking just about how to react to a situation to control the emotion. I am actually talking about thinking about a situation, going over it and coming up with a strategy on how to deal with it without emotions ahead of time. This is one of the lessons our father taught me.

    Our dad would always say to think of the worst possible outcome of a situation. Then think of all the things that you can do to deal with that outcome. If you learn to think like that then very seldom will the situation or outcome of a situation be that bad or worse. Most of the time it is not as bad as you think and you can deal with the issue much easier. My father and I spoke about this every time I had to go to court for the divorce and I would talk it out with him. Some of these conversations were while we were flying from California to Massachusetts where the divorce was taking place. This processed help me greatly and it did help me with dealing with the murder of our father.

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