Emotional control is an important part of life. In order to be a functioning adult in society, you have to exhibit some level of emotional control. Controlling emotions is an important part of life and functioning in all areas of society: romantic, professional, and familial.
There are a few ways to determine if you have your emotions under control. However, in order to legitimately determine this, you have to be completely honest with yourself in answering these questions. Through this article, we’ll explore how you can determine if you have emotional control.
Do you hold back expressing your emotions?
The first question you should ask yourself when determining if you have control over your emotions is whether or not you express your emotions properly. If you bottle up your emotions, rather than expressing them, you can cause yourself to boil over.
Another way to identify if this is your problem is to see if you have a tendency to feel overwhelmed by your emotions; if you don’t express them properly, they’ll build up and by the time you notice them, you’re feeling overwhelmed, as if you can’t take anymore. This is a condition we call “emotional overload.” You should properly express your emotions in a healthy way, rather than letting them fester and boil.
Do your friends frequently tell you to calm down or curb their behavior to preserve your feelings?
It’s rare that, when self-reflection is the task at hand, you are asked to look at those around you but the way your friends act around you could be a helpful signifier. If your friends act like they’re always walking on eggshells around you or babysitting your feelings, you might have a tendency to just exist in emotional overload, where any tiny thing can push you over the edge.
You need to openly express your emotions in a healthy way as you experience them, so you can resolve any potential problem in an appropriate and healthy manner and you should allow your friends the same courtesy.
How others are treating you could be an important signifier of your own behavior. Observe the way your friends and loved ones treat you on a regular basis; think about how they’ve told you bad news in the past or how they’ve handled situations that might upset you.
Do you have a tendency to overreact to situations?
If your go-to response is often an overreaction, you might be existing in a state of emotional overload. As we said before, being in emotional overload puts you in a position of every emotion being all or nothing. Imagine your emotions are a cup of water; the cup is already almost overflowing and every time something goes wrong, adding more water to the already full cup, it overflows a little.
How this looks, in reality, is that you have big, blown out responses to the normal situation and then it dissipates as quickly as it came. If you find that you’re always overreacting to situations, you should work on your emotional control.
Emotional control is an important part of being a functional adult. You have to have some level of emotional control to succeed in your career, with your friendships, and with your relationships. Emotional control doesn’t happen overnight, however, it’s a skill that you have to work at and practice in order to develop it.
There are a number of ways to determine if you are in control of your emotions, but the most accurate way is an honest personal reflection. Ask yourself the questions listed above and be honest with yourself about the answers. You have to be objective when observing yourself; you’re hurting no one more than yourself by denying your level of emotional control.
– Scott Blessing