Managing Overwhelming Emotions

It always baffles me that some people cope better with adversities than others do. Even if you are aware of PERMA and are applying the principles consistently, you may occasionally feel helpless and get sucked into the dance of life rather than remain emotionally objective. Learning mood management techniques and making these techniques part of your daily resilience practice may help you remain objective.

In this blog, I would like to share some of the most popular and well-researched mood management techniques that, when applied consistently, will help keep you emotionally objective. These techniques can be applied to most emotions and are more generic in their use—that is, they are not designed to deal with one specific emotion such as anger, anxiety, or sadness per se, but can be used on most emotions with similar effectiveness.

From the Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) research, we know that our reactions are based on how we think about the stressful event and how we explain it to ourselves. These explanations determine how we feel and act.

Psychologist Dr. Albert Ellis created the ABC model to help us understand our reactions to stress and adversity. In this model, A represents the adverse or stressful event, B our beliefs or explanation about the adversity, and C represents the consequences—that is, the feelings and behaviours that our beliefs result in.

For example: Dylan has been going to the gym every day for the last two months, eating healthy, and drinking very little. He finds out that he was not invited to the football game with a group of friends, but that his best friend John was invited (Adverse Event). As an explanation to himself, Dylan thinks, “I am such a loser—the guys don’t like me” (Belief or explanation). These thoughts lead to him feeling sad, and instead of going to the gym, he goes to the bar instead, where he gets drunk and overeats McDonald’s (Emotion and consequent Behaviour).

However, Jason, another friend in the group, was also not invited. Jason, however, reacts very differently. He thinks, “That is disappointing, but I know that there were only four tickets available, and I don’t know the host very well. He may not have invited me because he wants to offer the tickets to friends who are closer to him than I am.” Because of his explanation, Jason does not beat himself up and feels energetic enough to go for a run, downloads a new comedy, and calls a friend to come and watch it with him. In this example, the adverse event (A) is the same, but Jason’s belief (B) about the event is different. When he chose to believe that he was not invited because of the limited tickets and not knowing the host very well, it helped Jason to let go of his initial disappointment, do things that help him feel more positive about himself, and enjoy the rest of the day (C). Using the ABC model to track our explanations of adversity will help us better cope with overwhelming emotions.

Worksheet 16: Know Your ABCs on my website

https://www.drcmorganpsychology.com/worksheets will help you identify some of the explanations you give yourself during adverse situations. The secret is to consistently complete these worksheets after each stressful situation in which you became aware of your emotions rising, preferably every day initi,ally when you are learning about your emotional reactions. When you have tracked your ABCs a few times, you will become aware of how you typically use about 6–10 explanations recurrently to explain why bad situations happen to you. You may also be surprised at how often you will feel the same emotion when you think about a situation in a particular way. Understanding that your explanations about a situation may result in hurtful emotions brings us to the point of considering whether these explanations are useful to hold onto or not. As a rule of thumb, I tell my clients that if the emotion hurts (except for bereavement and trauma), their interpretation of the situation is most likely not accurate and objective. When it hurts, you have most likely descended from the balcony and started dancing on the dance floor. And if you dance for too long, your feet will start to hurt! Staying away from objectivity for too long will undermine your resilient responses, and feeling hurt is a cue for us to search for more helpful explanations. In my book, I help you further tease out the connection between your explanations and their resultant emotions.

When you become good at spotting how your explanations affect your feelings, you can start to play around with the interaction between your thinking and feeling a little. Emotion surfing is one such technique where you become aware of the hurtful effects of your explanation and see how long it takes for the physical hurt to die down. In my book, I give you step-by-step instructions on how to surf the hurtful thought and make room for it to pass, and therefore manage it from being too overwhelming. I have also created Worksheet 18: Emotion Surfing, which is an adaptation of the excellent self-help book by James Baillie and Ronald Rapee (1998). Have a look at my website where you can download it.

Enjoy playing with your explanations!