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Having emotional control takes practice; it’s a skill that you have to work to develop. It doesn’t just happen overnight. Developing emotional control is an important part of human development, as well.

In order to function as an adult in society, you have to have emotional intelligence and emotional control. Through this article, we’ll explore the topic of emotional control; what it is, how to strengthen it, and why you should bother.

What is emotional control?
The term “emotional control” is pretty self-explanatory; it refers to the skill that can be practiced, strengthened, and developed over time to help you keep yourself from making decisions you might later regret in the heat of your emotions. Having a strong sense of emotional control requires emotional intelligence, strength, perseverance, and self-awareness.

Emotional intelligence: Emotional intelligence refers to your awareness of the emotions you’re experiencing, the signs that indicate how you’re feeling, and how to handle them appropriately and healthfully. Your emotional intelligence will help you to identify the emotions and help you determine an appropriate response when you need to control your emotions.

Strength: To exhibit emotional control, you have to have both emotional and physical strength. You have to be able to have the emotional strength to calmly analyze the situation and what you’re feeling so you can determine the most appropriate reaction. You also have to have the strength to admit you’re wrong if that’s what the situation calls for.

Perseverance: It’s often hard to confront those who have upset us, especially when they aren’t receptive to what we’re saying; it requires perseverance to ensure you handle the situation in a healthy manner for you wherein your emotions are under control and in check. It also takes perseverance to admit there is the potential of a problem within yourself.

Self-Awareness: Self-awareness is a crucial part of your emotional control; the two most important parts are emotional intelligence and self-awareness, though the other two play key roles as well. It requires self-awareness to identify there’s a problem, to begin with, identify the emotion, and resolve the problem within yourself.

How can you strengthen your emotional control?
There are a number of ways in which you can strengthen your ability to control your emotions; it’s mostly done with practice and training, like any skill. The first way you can work to strengthen them is by making a diligent and noble effort to recognize your emotions and feelings. If you don’t know your triggers or your warning signs for certain emotions, you won’t be able to control them.

You can regularly practice by taking a minute to slow down and analyze your emotions when you start to notice yourself getting worked up in any way. Pay attention to how long it takes for the emotions to escalate, what triggered them specifically, and what seems to help to calm you down. Another good way to practice strengthening your emotional control is clearly expressing your feelings to those around you when necessary.

Make it a regular practice to clearly and calmly explain what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it in a way that won’t hurt anyone else but helps to resolve the issue in a healthy way. This will also help to keep you from just bottling up things that truly bother you.

Emotional control is an important part of being a well-functioning adult in society. If you’re unsure if you have emotional self-control, you can ask yourself a few questions but to determine the true answer, you’ll have to be honest with yourself.

Do you often find yourself not expressing your emotions properly so that you have frequently feel overwhelmed?

Do your friends frequently tell you to calm down or curb their behavior to preserve your feelings?

Do you tend to overreact to situations?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you need to work on your emotional control.

– Scott Blessing

At some point in many societies, it became viewed as inappropriate to express, claim, or “own” certain emotions. These days, feelings have become things washed over with some form of instant gratification. Many of us lack emotional control, emotional intelligence and we suffer professionally and personally.
Emotions are an important indicator as to the extent to which we are fulfilling our needs and wants. When other people share their feelings, we understand that they are telling us how they are doing, but when we interact with our own emotions, we often try to ignore them or convince ourselves that they are invalid.
This article will talk about ways and reasons to own your feelings and improve yourself and your life.

Owning Your Feelings Protects Your Interests
As said above, our feelings are how we understand when our emotional needs are being met or not being met, just as satisfaction, hunger, and thirst let us know when our physical needs are being met or not being met.
The biggest reason to own your feelings is the same reason to own these other sensations: they let you know what you need to do in order to lead a better life. When you are hungry you find something to eat. When you are sad, should you not find something that makes you happy?
While our feelings can sometimes seem like they get in the way of doing what is practical, they are often the first indicators that something is not right about a situation that needs to be changed or avoided.
Our emotional health and physical health is more closely connected than many people realize and tending to your emotional needs by owning your feelings can help you to avoid very physical dangers that come from neglecting our emotional needs.

Owning Your Feelings Helps Others To Help You
Owning our feelings is an important step to satisfying our own needs but it is also an important way to help others satisfy our needs, or at least not harm us.
As mentioned above, we tend to listen when other people express their feelings towards us. This is an important communication skill that allows us to tend to the needs of those people, or at least, not to harm them in some way. It takes a lot of courage to express certain emotions, however, and this can prevent us from letting others know our needs.
If you have certain needs, or if something that someone else is doing is affecting you negatively, it is important to own your emotions as a step to confidently communicating them.
This is one of the best ways to get what you need to be comfortable and productive or to avoid things that others unknowingly do that make you uncomfortable or unproductive.
Owning your feelings and airing them when necessary can also be an important step to creating an atmosphere in which people feel safe and comfortable expressing their feelings. These environments are the best to work in, and people often do their best work in these environments.

Owning Your Feelings Helps You To Grow As A Person
While our feelings will seldom lead us astray, sometimes it is important to analyze feelings that we are suspect of. This does not always satisfy our wants, but it still helps us to grow as people.
If you want to eat but you know that you are not hungry, it is usually best to ask yourself whether you really need food and not eat if you don’t. If you feel jealousy or covetousness but all of your needs are met, it similarly makes sense to ask yourself whether indulging those emotions is really what is best for you and do not satisfy them if you don’t think that they are guiding you towards your best life.
Just like we have can develop bad physical habits that make us feel like we need things that are bad for us, we can develop bad emotional habits that make us feel like we need things that are bad for us.
It might seem like watching for these is not owning your emotions, but just as quitting smoking doesn’t mean that you will no longer allow yourself to eat, avoiding jealousy does not keep you from feeling happiness.

– Scott Blessing

People tend to talk about egos like they’re a bad thing, which is unfortunate. Ego — your sense of self-worth – can help you to challenge yourself and achieve your full potential. It can help you to take care of yourself and to seek out opportunities and relationships that work for you rather than settling for what life throws at you.
Unfortunately, our egos can also get a little… inflamed. When our egos get too big for our own good – and it happens to everyone from time to time – they can actually work against us. An ego that is too big can lead you to take on tasks that are too big for you and to probably blame someone or something else when it doesn’t work.
They can also lead you to pass up good opportunities because you have convinced yourself that they deserve better. They can also lead you to seek out relationships that you can control or personally gain from rather than relationships that help you to grow as a person.
But how do you know if your ego is unhealthy and getting in your way?

Is It A Discussion Or A Debate?
How you engage with others can be a good sign that your ego has gotten too big. People with big egos tend to treat conversations as competitions – if they can’t get the last word, they should present themselves as being on the side that does. This may turn friendly discussions into arguments or lead the individual to chime into conversations about things that they don’t understand in order to feel like they are contributing.
Discussions should be seen as opportunities for learning rather than opportunities to showcase our own abilities. This means that you should be able to enjoy a conversation with someone who knows more than you and enjoy listening to a conversation about something that you don’t know much about. As the old adage says, “one should know everything that one says, but not say everything that one knows.”
This attitude can be difficult when talking to someone with a big ego, however. You may be trying to keep the conversation friendly and enlightening while the other person is trying to make it into a Lincoln-Douglas debate.

Is It Criticism Or Advice?
How you handle criticism is another important indicator. Whether it’s about how you do your job, how you mow your lawn, how you cook dinner, whatever, criticism has a way of cutting us pretty deep.
In most of our lives, reacting to criticism is a personal matter that comes up in the conversational realms of our lives. In some professions, however, it’s in the job description and an inability to take criticism can hold you back professionally.
Most of the time, when we think “criticism” we should instead hear “advice” or “concern.” Most of the time, when people “criticize” how we do things, it isn’t because they enjoy putting us down but because they have a genuine desire to see us do better. Just because they think that their way of doing something may be better than ours, does not mean that they think that they are better than us.
Of course, like the above situation, sometimes they really do think that they are better than us. In cases like these, it can be difficult to take what probably is best labeled “criticism.” It is probably best in these cases, however, to assume – or pretend that you assume – that the person really does mean the best.
Respond with gratitude and an intention to try it that way next time. If they seem put off or a little too pleased, perhaps they really did just want to put you down. If they seem excited, maybe you misjudged them – another sign of an unhealthy ego.

– Scott Blessing

We all experience a wide range of emotions on a daily basis; that’s part of what makes us human. Unfortunately, we have to deal with the bad in order to experience and truly enjoy the good.

While negative emotions are hard to get through, overcoming your grief, sorrow, anger, etc., then getting through it will cause you to grow as a person and help you to learn how to persevere or avoid it entirely in the future.

There are ways in which you can help to heal your negative emotions and expedite that process. The most important thing to understand about emotions is that ignoring, stuffing ort avoiding them only leads to emotional problems that will impact your physical, psychological and emotional health. Facing our feelings is the only road to good health.

Through this article, we’ll explore a few of the many ways in which you can heal your emotions.

Express your emotions in some way
Bottling up your emotions is a surefire way to hinder your moving on from the problem. You have to express your emotions in a healthy manner, which can be difficult for some people. Many people find it difficult to express their emotions verbally, not being accustomed to discussing their feelings.

There are a lot of healthy ways to express your emotions, though. You could express your emotions in a creative way, by writing a song or poem or creating a piece of art through sculpting or painting. You could also get your emotions out through physical activity if that’s more of your style. This can be done by playing sports, running, boxing, wrestling, etc. These are just a few of the healthy alternative ways to express your emotions.

Get closure
A closure may not seem like a huge deal at the moment, but it certainly helps to expedite the moving on process. When you get closure, you feel more at ease with how things ended. Think about when a television series you love ends with an unsatisfying conclusion; you feel cheated like you need something more.

The same thing happens when you don’t get closure with events and situations in your life. Getting closure can help you to feel more like you’re done with the issue and you can move on. It makes it easier to resolve it.

Seek additional help
If you’re struggling to work through your emotions and heal from them, you might benefit from talking with a professional. This could help if you feel like you don’t have anyone to talk to or could even just help you find a way to work out your emotions. There’s no shame in seeking additional help or guidance from a professional.

You can find counseling or psychological services near you by searching the internet; many may even take your insurance for payment to lower the payment for you. You mental and emotional health is important; it’s imperative and crucial that you get the help you need.

Healing from your emotions is an important process that not only helps to make you feel better quicker, but it also helps to make you a better person.

Through each hurt and the healing process, you learn a valuable lesson about yourself and other people. You learn both to avoid that sort of issue in the future and how to handle it.

Most importantly, you learn that you have the strength and the perseverance to get through hard times. The process of healing from your negative emotions can be difficult or easy, long or short; it all depends on the cause, how much you feel those emotions, and how well you handle it.

– Scott Blessing

What are emotions?
Our brains carry out thousands of responses every second throughout its various parts. And one of these parts is the limbic system, the area that processes emotions. Emotions are complex and involve a number of physiological and mental responses to a particular input.

Emotions are powerful and influential, and they’re what make us unique from other creatures. Even though emotions may be multifaceted, they can be measured through brain wave activity, facial expressions, body stances, and blood flow.

The link between emotions and logic
The emotional center of the brain is situated right behind the neocortex which is responsible for reasoning, decision making, and conscious thoughts. But do emotions impede logic and or work together with them?

That question has been the center-point of many studies and scientific research, but no one has reached a definitive answer. Some researchers have concluded that emotions are a pivotal part of logic while others believe that they hinder intelligent decision-making.

Yet there are many studies using brain-imaging techniques show a clear neural link between emotions and logical reasoning. So, while it can’t be denied that emotions have a strong effect on our reasoning, it’s also indisputable that logic that lacks emotions will never be adequate. Emotions are extremely important for making decision and choices, even when you’re armed with all the facts.

A legal study was published in the Arizona State Law Journal in which legal scholars Susan Bandes and Jessica Salerno state that, “Emotion helps us screen, organize and prioritize the information that bombards us. It influences what information we find salient, relevant, convincing or memorable.”

What emotions are not
Emotions are not the same as feelings, nor are they the synonymous with moods. Moods are usually more general than emotions but are longer-lasting. They can either have a positive or negative impact without a clear starting point. Being in either a good or bad mood is less likely to be as a result of an external event or circumstance.

Feelings are more personal to each one of us and develop through experience. Emotions, on the other hand, are wired into our genes. They’re universal. As an example, happiness is a feeling, while joy is an emotion.

Joy needs little analytical awareness which means we feel good without any conscious decision, and without there being an event leading to it. It’s an internal state of being rather than depending on external conditions. Plus, joy lasts longer.

Happiness (a feeling) on the other hand, is prompted by external factors and relies on tangible verification.

In 2009, a review was published that identifies and contrasts basic emotions based on 3 main criteria that differentiate emotions from feelings and moods:

• mental experiences that have a strong motivator, as pleasure or pain
  a response to an event or object
  trigger various kinds of behavior

Different kinds of emotions
Scientists have attempted to make a list of emotions based on various factors, ranging from the very general to the extremely specific. Here’s a list of emotions as classified by psychologists and medical experts:

• Sympathy
  Surprise
  Shame
  Sadness
  Relief
  Pride
  Nostalgia
  love
  Joy
  Horror
  Hope
  Gratitude
  Guilt
  Fear
  Excitement
  Pain
  envy
  Disgust
  Disappointment
  depression
  Confusion
  Craving
  Contempt
  compassion
  Calmness
  Boredom
  Awe
  Anger
  Amusement
  Adoration
  admiration
  Anxiety

Essentially these emotions are what encourage us to go on with our lives, even after hardships and distress. Emotions have been dissected, grouped and re-grouped by medical experts and psychologists over the years. The book The Hourglass of Emotions (2012) sorted emotions into four main sets and distinguished between positive (anger, anticipation, joy, and trust) and negative (fear, surprise, sadness, and disgust) emotions.

Emotional intelligence
Figuring out how to monitor our emotions and how they’re affected by others is known as emotional intelligence. Those with high emotional intelligence have high self-esteem, work well with others and enjoy healthy relationships.

People with low emotional intelligence, however, have a hard time correctly understanding other people’s emotional signals, making it harder on them to cooperate with and motivate others. It’s been proven that persistent negative emotional states can lead to exhaustion and disgruntlement.

But psychologists strongly feel that there are ways to help guide those with low emotional intelligence to help them enhance their emotional states to better serve them. They call them the four building blocks which can help develop a higher level of emotional intelligence.

• Self-awareness. Evaluating, identifying and disclosing specific emotions
  Self-management. Applying emotions in a positive way.
  Social awareness. Recognizing emotions in others.
  Relationship management. Managing emotions in yourself as well as others

  – Scott Blessing

Many people these days are all-too-quick to ignore their emotional wellness, even if they are strong proponents of physical health.
Emotional health, however, can influence your overall health and wellness, and of course, it has its own benefits. But what is emotional wellness?

What Is The Seven Years War
Emotional Wellness refers to the ability to respond to stress. It is closely linked to mental health, which has more to do with the ways in which we actually solve problems, and our emotional health can also impact our physical health, which refers to the proper functioning of our living bodies.
If all of these sound similar, it’s because they are. Emotional wellness, physical wellness, and mental health are less than half of the “dimensions of wellness” that are currently recognized by healthcare professionals. All of these dimensions interact with one another and contribute to your overall wellness.

Improving Emotional Wellness
Now that we know what emotional wellness is, how does one improve it?
There’s a popular misconception that the way to improve your emotional health is to avoid all stress. This misconception comes from the fact that emotional wellness refers to how you deal with stress.
Because most of us are more comfortable talking about physical health than emotional health, let’s use a little analogy. Suppose that stress is a pathogen – it’s everywhere, and it can make you sick. Suppose that emotional wellness is your immune system – it protects your body from stress so that you can live a healthy life.
Just like you don’t improve your immune system by creating a world free of germs, you can’t improve your emotional wellness by trying to eliminate all stress. Just like we can make our lives safer by cleaning our homes and limiting our exposure to people who are sick, we can safeguard our emotional wellness by reducing unnecessary stress in our lives and trying to avoid people who make our lives more stressful, but that doesn’t strengthen your emotional health. To strengthen your immune system, you need to combat pathogens, and to strengthen your emotional health you need to confront stressful situations.

Emotional Wellness And Emotional Awareness
The key to surviving a stressful situation is as much emotional wellness as it is emotional awareness.
To go back to the immune system analogy, you are able to combat a sickness more quickly and efficiently – or even get sick less often – if you regularly check in with your body and know how you feel when you are healthy as opposed to when you are sick. Emotional awareness is this ability to check in with your feelings and recognize when something isn’t right – whether you are mad or sad, happy or scared, and why.
This allows you to better address these issues at the moment, as opposed to most people’s method of pushing their feelings to the back of their minds until the stressful situation has passed, and then dealing with them once it is already too late.
Emotional awareness is not only being aware of your own emotions, however, but is also being able to recognize and understand the emotions of those around you. Just like addressing your own feelings at the moment can keep you from over-reacting, addressing the feelings of others can help to keep them calm as well.
If you want to use the tools of emotional awareness to keep other people calm for their own sake, that’s wonderful. For the rest of us, however, it is worth pointing out that if we are able to keep other people calm, it is more likely that we will be able to stay calm.
Sometimes it can be tempting to annoy or upset people that we don’t like but, in the end, this usually only makes things harder for us. Again, like our physical wellness, we are more likely to have good emotional health if those around us are emotionally healthy.

– Scott Blessing

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

We’re born with an innate sense to connect with others and create positive relationships. But as we grow older, it can get a bit tricky to be as emotionally aware as we were when we were younger. Emotional awareness is the ability to distinguish and identify with our own emotions and how they affect us and those around us. In other words, we try to make sense of our emotions.

But in order to make any sense out of them, you need to first pinpoint where they stem from, what triggers certain emotions. This requires a bit of soul searching because you may realize that your constant bouts of anger are a result of a deep-seated belief that fate is out to get you. So, you blame everything little thing that goes wrong during the day on fate and you fly off into a full-blown rage every time something bad happens.

This is true especially in this day and age when everything goes by so fast; it may be hard to become aware of our emotions, let alone other people’s. We experience many emotions during the day. They can take you from an emotional high to an extreme low which can have serious effects on your overall well-being.

Medical experts continue to study the connection between the mind and body. The question they often ask is: are emotions the cause of how we interpret the world around us or the result?
Even though they may not have found an answer to that one, they have, however, come a long way in identifying the process of how emotions are felt and conveyed.

The basic steps are:

• We experience a certain situation
  We think about its meaning
  We give out an emotional response based on our assessment of this situation

But studies show that even though our first response may indeed be automatic, they can be controlled by switching to the part of your brain does rational thinking (prefrontal cortex). Psychologists believe that there are ways to cope with the stress of everyday mishaps, such as:

• Deep breathing
  Counting to 10
  Meditation
  Yoga

Some emotions are positive and healthy, like laughing when it’s appropriate. But other emotions, like expressing your irritation to everyone within earshot, should be regulated because it can lead to setbacks at work, make it difficult to be around you as well as cause health-related problems. There are other ways to express these emotions that can release your anger in a suitable manner and calm you down.

The inability to regulate your emotions can result in chronic diseases, such as depression and various personality disorders, known as emotional toxins. It’s healthy to feel negative about various things in life, it’s a normal part of life.

But it’s what you do with these emotions that matter. And while regulating your emotions may not come easy, it can be done with practice and patience. Some of these tips can help you regulate your emotions in a healthier way:

• Manage your circumstances. It may sound ridiculous, but the truth is, those who know how to positively regulate their emotions, understand this step very clearly. For example, if being stuck in traffic frustrates you, make it a point to leave the house 15 minutes earlier than usual. If a certain person rubs you the wrong way, figure out a way to avoid bumping into them. Knowing what triggers certain emotional responses can help you control your reactions, putting you in control of your emotions, not the other way around. Remember you always have a choice when it comes to expressing your emotions.
• Monitor your expectations. Raising that bar too high always leads to harsh disappointments. So instead of saying ‘yes’ to more work even though you’re already swamped, draw up a work schedule with appropriate deadlines. Be honest with yourself in regard to how quickly and efficiently you can do the work. If you can’t take on more work, stand up for yourself and say ‘no.’ By consciously communicating how you feel, you can process your emotions in a healthy way.
• Shift your attention. Instead of focusing on those who are thinner, richer or more successful than you, shift your thinking to how much you’ve accomplished. Don’t compare yourself with anyone other than yourself – it’s not fair to them or you and you deserve better than that. The important thing is that you own up to your emotions and be responsible for them. Only then can you truly turn the negative into a positive?
• Change how you see the world. Our deepest emotions are driven by our beliefs. If you have to make a speech in front of a large number of people, try to alter your anxiety into confidence. And don’t be afraid to laugh at yourself. Just believing in your abilities will help you get up there and make that speech without fear of being judged or ridiculed. If you don’t believe in your abilities, no one else will. Others rarely judge you as harshly as you judge yourself. So, go easy on yourself and enjoy the situation, taking in the good with the bad so you can learn from it and grow and thrive.
• Learn to cope. There are 2 main ways to deal with negative emotions:
• Problem-focused coping. This is when you try to change the situation that’s stressing you out like instead of lashing out at a dead computer, take it to get fixed. Yes, it’s a hassle and you wish it had never happened. But wasting time being angry won’t get it fixed.
• Emotion-focused coping. This is when you console yourself about situations you can’t change; your favorite shirt is ruined in the wash, you miss the bus, you spill your coffee. Once it happens, there’s nothing you can do change it. But what you can do is control your emotional response to the situation by calming yourself down to reduce stress levels and be able to make the best of it.

Everyone has their ups and down. But it’s those people who are equipped with the right tools and assets to help them cope and make the best out of the situation they find themselves in. They are ones who know how to apply healthy emotional responses and make it work to their advantage.

– Scott Blessing

As humans, we all have a wide range of emotions, both positive and negative, helpful and destructive. In order to have control of our emotions, we have to take control of destructive emotions.

By that, we don’t mean suppressing them or ignoring them, but rather understanding them and how to handle them. We all have negative emotions, but we all also have the power to keep them from becoming destructive. In this article, we’ll explore how to keep your negative emotions under a healthy control, keeping them from becoming destructive.

What are negative emotions and how can they become destructive?
Negative emotions typically refer to those that have a negative connotation, i.e. sadness, anger, fear, etc. These emotions are entirely normal to experience and every human does at one point or another. However, when allowed to get out of hand, these emotions can become destructive. There are a number of ways in which they can get out of hand.

If you don’t possess emotional intelligence, you may not understand how to control what your feeling and thus not see the potential problem. When these negative emotions get out of hand and become destructive, poor decisions are made and dangerous events could take place.

Controlling your emotions
Controlling your emotions refers to expressing them healthily, exploring them, and working through them in a healthy manner. This does not mean to suppress them or ignore them in any way. Keeping your emotions bottled up and allowing them to fester is a surefire way to allow them to become destructive.

When you experience a negative emotion such as anger, fear, or sadness, take a minute to analyze it.

Ask yourself the following:
What am I feeling?
Why am I feeling it?
What would make me feel better in this situation?
What is a healthy way to express how I’m feeling?

You may find that, as you come to better understand what you’re feeling and why you’re feeling it, that you’ve calmed down quite a bit in the process.

Expressing your emotions in a healthy way
There are several, healthier ways to express your emotions and keep you from either bottling them up or overreacting to them. You can express your emotions in a healthy way by first taking a beat to analyze what’s wrong and why you’re feeling what you’re feeling, then expressing to either yourself or the individual that you’re upset with what the problem was and how you can work to rectify it.

Letting your emotions fester and boil inside can cause you to react poorly.

How to identify if your emotions are hitting destructive levels
If you feel yourself starting to get overly worked up and notice that you’re jumping to rash reactions, you’re probably heading down the road to your emotions becoming destructive.

Anger can cause you to do something violent, dangerous, or vindictive that you wouldn’t have otherwise done. Sadness can cause you to say things you didn’t mean and hurt those you love. Mainly you need to be aware of whether or not your reactions are hitting dangerous or unhealthy levels.

We all have to deal with negative emotions that have the potential to take a destructive path. However, if we control our emotions in a healthy way and drive ourselves to act rationally, we can prevent them from getting to that point.

Destructive emotions can damage relationships, cause you to act irrationally or even dangerously, and can cause yourself damage; it could even lead to legal trouble. If you handle your emotions in a healthy way, you can avoid destructive emotions damaging any area of your life.

– Scott Blessing