How To Master & Control Your Emotions // Do you want to learn how to master and control your emotions? In this video, peak performance expert and coach Eric Partaker teach you how to develop a strong mind, enhance emotional intelligence and control your emotions through a self improvement process.
KEY POINTS
Acknowledge Your Feelings – If you feel negative emotions, don’t repress them. Allow them to come forth. Give them a name. By naming the emotion it separates you from whatever the emotion is. That distance gives you the ability to decide what you want to do and feel going forward.
Better Food = Better Mood – 90% of your serotonin is produced in your gut, not by your brain. Eat whole, naturally occurring food. Eat mostly plants, leafy greens, and rich colorful vegetables.
Follow Your Dreams, And Go Back To Bed – Get eight hours of quality sleep. Ensure you shut off all electronics one hour before bed, so that your brain has time to relax and you can sleep deeply and restfully.
Your Attitude Determines Your Direction – What are you thinking about? Dwelling on negative thoughts will put you in a bad mood. If you notice yourself becoming overwhelmingly negative, that’s your cue to start tapping into your positive mindset.
TRANSCRIPT
Do you feel your emotions get the best of you? Well, if that’s the case, you’ll have a lot of difficulty becoming the person that you’re capable of being. Today I’m going to show you how to control your emotions, regain emotional stability, and become a master of your mind. Hi. My name is Eric Partaker. I’ve been recognized as one of the top entrepreneurs in the country. I’m also the author of two best-selling books, including The 3 Alarms.
The first thing that we need to do to control our emotions so that they’re not controlling us is to acknowledge our feelings. Too often when we’re experiencing negative emotions, we don’t acknowledge that they’re happening. We just get caught up in that moment and caught up in that despair, that frustration, that anger, without acknowledging what’s going on. It’s okay to have negative feelings and emotions. What’s dangerous is to not acknowledge them.
Allow your feelings to be there. Allow them to express themselves. Don’t try to repress them. Allow them to be, allow them to come forth. Acknowledge your feelings. Number two, we need to give our emotions a name. Now I know this might sound a little bit strange, but in a moment when you’re feeling anger, say out loud, I’m feeling anger right now, I’m angry. Or if you’re feeling frustrated, say right there in that moment, I’m feeling frustrated right now, I’m full of frustration. There’s a power in naming your emotions. As Dan Siegel said, “When you name it, you tame it.” By naming your emotions, what you’re actually doing is creating distance between you and that emotion. Because prior to naming it, it feels like you are one with whatever that emotion is. You feel you are anger. You feel you are frustration. You feel you are despair. You feel you are disappointment. You feel you are sadness.
But when you name the emotion, I’m experiencing sadness right now, I feel sadness. It’s separates you from whatever that emotion is. Briefly you feel that distance and that distance gives you the ability to decide what do you want to do and experience and feel going forward. Do you want to stay with that emotion? Do you want to stay sad? Do you want to stay angry? Do you want to stay frustrated? Do you want to acknowledge that you’ve just been there? You’ve distanced yourself from it, and now you’re going to start taking steps to regain control, to get back to that positive or even just neutral place that you know you should be if you’re operating from a point of mental strength and mental control and emotional control.
Number three. To master and control your emotions, we need to stay physically healthy. 90% of your psychology is going to be driven by your physiology. 90% of your serotonin for example, is produced in your gut, not by your brain. How do we master the fundamentals of our health so that we can master and control our emotional wellbeing? Well, we do that by making sure that we’re paying tribute to, or that we’re doing our best on several different fronts. The foundation of it all is sleep. All the other pillars rest on that foundation. You need to ensure that you’re getting proper sleep. The recommended minimum is eight hours of sleep a day. Now it can range between seven and nine, depending on the person, but on average, eight hours.
A lot of people think that they need less sleep than that. But what they’ve really done is they’ve just become accustomed to operating at a lower baseline. They’ve lost their reference point. For example, if I took the color red out of your world and told you or asked you the question, do you think we should paint this car red? You’d have a lot of difficulty answering it because you’d be simply thinking, well, what does red look like? You lost your reference point. You can’t see it anymore. If you’ve been going through decades or years without sleeping at eight hours, then you’ve probably lost your reference point for what it feels like to sleep so well, to sleep with a full eight hours, to feel energized when you wake up in the morning.
How can you do that? Well, one of the simple ways that you can actually get better sleep is just making sure you shut off all the electronics one hour before you go to bed so that your brain and your mind calms down and that you can sleep deeply and restfully. The other thing that we need to do on the health front is our nutrition. Really, really simple. This is from Michael Pollan. If you want to do something simple on the nutrition front, eat whole foods. Whole foods meaning things that you would naturally find. A bag of crisps or chips, you wouldn’t find that in nature, right? That is not a whole food. Eat the things that you would naturally find out in nature, almost as if nature was your grocery store.
If it’s a whole food and if it’s naturally occurring and you can just find it out there in the world and not in a factory and not processed by somebody else, then that’s probably a good thing to be eating. Eat mostly plants. I’m not saying that you can’t eat meat. I’m not going to get into the whole carnivore versus vegan, all of that. What I am going to say is try to eat more vegetables, eat mostly plants, the majority of what you eat. If it can be full of leafy greens and lots of rich and colorful vegetables, you’re on a good track there as well. Then last but not least, don’t eat too much. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. One plate. Use a smaller plate. Don’t overfill your plate.
All of this will help you stay mentally strong because if your nutrition is in a good place, your mind is in a good place. Then last but not least, in terms of staying healthy, we want to make sure that we’re exercising. My personal recommendation is doing a mixture of both strength training and cardio training throughout the week. Your strength training could just be bodyweight exercises. Your cardio training could just be going for a walk depending on your fitness level, or maybe swimming or bicycling or running or jogging, but do something. Keep that body moving because by exercising, we’re flooding our body with positive hormones. Positive hormones puts us in a better state and a better mood and in a better position to master and stay in control of our emotions.
Number four, use language to your advantage, positive language. I’ll give you a quick example. When it comes to procrastination, if you were to verbalize what’s going on in your head when you don’t feel like doing something. You’re probably saying something along the lines of, I have to finish something, and that is not empowering language. I have to. You’re being forced to do something that you don’t want to do perhaps. Finish, well, finish is overwhelming. Flip the language around and instead say, I choose to start. Maybe just add a little bit on the end there for just five minutes. I choose, why I choose? Because it puts you in control. You don’t need to like what you’re doing, but you can always choose. Starting is a lot simpler than finishing. Why for just five minutes? Well, it’s just a little bit of a trick.
The truth is you never know when those five minutes pass. If you make it super small to start with, it seems less intimidating and easier to start. That’s just one quick example of how you can be using positive self-talk and using the right language to help you master your emotions, to help you fight that dread and despair and those feelings of overwhelm that you might get when procrastination knocks on your door. Another way in which you could be using positive language is just through the use of positive affirmations. At the start of your day, what’s a list of one, two, three, four, maybe five statements that when you read to yourself make you feel empowered, happy, and really confident and excited to go out and kind of conquer the day and go through the ups and downs and whatever it may be in front of you.
What are the positive affirmations that you can be using as well at the start of your day? Last but not least, one final area in which you can introduce positive language to help you is to embrace challenge, to expect things will go wrong, expect things will be uncomfortable. When those things arrive and when they knock on your door, step towards them and use a powerful phrase to help you do that such as bring it on, or I love challenge. I love hardship. I know it might sound a little bit strange and weird and crazy, but if you can start conditioning your mind to actually relish and love these situations, it will put you in a better situation to overcome them. Number five, what you think about you bring about.
If you’re going to sit there and dwell on negative things throughout the day, guess what? It’s going to put you in a negative mood state and leave you susceptible to negative emotions, which if left unchecked can completely derail you and put you into a downward spiral. Instead, be mindful of what’s going on. What are you thinking about? What are the thoughts that are going through your head? If you notice that they’re being overwhelmingly negative, boom, that’s your cue right there. How can I start tapping into and thinking about things that are more positive? What you think about you bring about. I’d love to hear from you. Don’t forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. If you’d like to get a copy of my new book, The 3 Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com, that’s E-R-I-C, ericpartaker.com where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best-selling book, The 3 Alarms.
