Managing Your Emotions

Emotions can often be complex and confusing, yet our days are filled with an almost constant barrage of different feelings. Some such as happiness, excitement or contentment are positive and make us feel good. Others such as shame, anger or embarrassment are almost always much less positive and have a real effect on ourselves and our families if we cannot identify and manage them.

Identifying Emotions

Looking inwards, reflecting and being honest with yourself is important. Men in particular can struggle with this as emotions that lead to a feeling of perceived weakness might be hard to acknowledge. On the other hand, research shows that women can experience emotions more strongly. Some emotions are easy to identify, yet others can be difficult, the difference between envy and jealousy for example, or shame and embarrassment. It can be helpful to ask yourself “what am I feeling right now?”

Choose to Enact your Rational Mind

How you feel about a situation is largely beyond your control, but how you respond to it is. Imagine arriving at a crossroad, one path leads to an instant and perhaps negative reaction, the other to a much calmer more analytical approach. Consider asking “what does my rational mind think is the best course of action?”

Relaxation

Everyone needs an appropriate venue to vent their emotions, to feel understood and get things off their chest. Friends, an online psychologist (or your Gold Coast psychologist if you are in the area) are excellent resources to help you feel understood. E counselling can definitely help you to reduce the stress. Sometimes a different perspective can change how you feel, sometimes the simple act of talking is enough to relax you. A good psychologist can give you a number of strategies to calm down quickly that are tailoured to your specific needs.

Keeping a journal can also prove helpful to give your thoughts and feelings a safe place to exist outside your own mind. Online psychologists tend to agree that writing is therapeutic.

Practicing positive emotions, communication skills and meditative reflection won’t just help you to rehearse the reactions and emotions you want, it will also help you to relax. Not just in those moments but much more generally throughout your life, giving you much better emotional regulation and helping you to stay more relaxed and positive.

For further information on relaxation techniques and strategies for emotional regulation, click, tap or call me if you are in the Gold Coast area. You can also check out the online psychologist resources on my website at PSYCoaching.com.au

A closer look at Mindfulness

By Richard Moore – psychologist

Mindfulness has become something of a buzzword in recent years and has come to mean different things to different people. Those things are almost always positive, such as feelings of happiness, of awakening and living in the present, but how do we go about achieving them? What can practising mindfulness really do for us and our day to day lives?

Online psychologists all agree that mindfulness is much more than a buzzword, a marketing tool or trending topic on social media. It has the potential to become a different and much more beneficial way to live your daily life; it can be a perspective, one that will reap rewards.

How we define and think about mindfulness though, can vary. If you ask a Gold Coast psychologist for example then their definition may differ slightly from that of a person looking through a more spiritual lens. Each would have something important to say and each approach might have certain things in common and that is no coincidence.

Appreciation

Appreciation is an important factor in mindfulness, moving away from taking things for granted and more towards noticing and realising the value in the things we come across. It might be simple birdsong, or your child’s smile. It might even be the feel of your favourite item of clothing or the first cool evening of autumn. It could be one of a million things we don’t acknowledge because we are effectively on auto-pilot.

Mindfulness is all about switching off that automated way of thinking and purposefully accepting and hopefully enjoying the things we might normally miss.

Returning to the moment

‘Staying in the present moment’ is a phrase we hear a lot when looking at mindfulness, yet any online psychologist knows this is something of a misconception. Can we really do that given what our minds need to process and regulate the events of each day?

What we can achieve much more easily is returning our minds to the present, learning to self-regulate our attention with an ethos of curiosity, acceptance and openness to the things it holds.

That self-regulating, attentive definition can help a lot in understanding the broad nature of mindfulness. Taking ownership of your attention and regulating your focus, whatever that focus may be on at any given time. As well as engaging with, being curious about, and open to the things we might discover and learn as a result.

To learn more about mindfulness and the techniques and strategies for achieving a more mindful lifestyle, click, tap or call me if you are in the Gold Coast area. You can also check out the online psychologist resources on my website at PSYCoaching.com.au and arrange an online consultation.

How do you practice mindfulness? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.