When challenges arise, difficult emotions tend to surface as well. Since it’s a natural part of life to encounter obstacles, it makes sense to cultivate behaviors that limit your suffering and enhance your resilience when this occurs.
To this end, let’s explore six healthy outlets for dealing with difficult emotions, thereby cultivating resilience which will increase your wellbeing.
- Exercise
- Write
- Talk with people you trust
- Find a safe place to cry
- Practice forgiveness
- Breathe
- Exercise
You’ve heard it before, and you’ll hear it again, exercise is good for you. Not only does it increase cardiovascular health, move lymph, strengthen the skeletal muscular system and aid in detoxification, but it also improves mood. It’s likely nature’s way of encouraging you to do the right thing.
Give it a try. Next time you feel angry, frustrated, anxious, or otherwise unsettled emotionally go for a walk or a run, take a dance class, do some yoga, or hit the gym, you choose it, just get moving! Do it and you’ll see, it’ll work wonders.
Write
Getting things off your chest and onto the page can lighten your burden. It is an effective way to extend your mind relieving some of the cognitive load that life can pile on. When you write down what you are feeling, or even just describe the situation, it creates some distance between you and what is occurring around you. This little bit of space encourages clearer perspective and limits the negative impact of the troubling emotions you struggle to manage.
Talk With People You Trust
Vocalizing what you’re feeling unburdens your mind and heart in a similar way to writing. Only in this case do you not only gain personal perspective through having to articulate what is going on internally, but you also have the additional benefit of gaining another person’s perspective on the situation.
Few things make difficult emotions more manageable than a broader lens. Often all that is needed to overcome them is to recognize that they are temporary and that there are many ways to view them and overcome them.
Find A Safe Place To Cry
Releasing intense, difficult emotions enables you to move on from them more rapidly. Being able to cry (or even scream and yell) without fear of judgment or worry over upsetting or offending others can be, particularly healing. If you can couple releasing negative emotions with reframing, the benefits are even greater.
In a study for Anxiety, Stress, & Coping Eftekhari et al. found that “individuals who reported infrequently and ineffectively regulating their emotions (low regulators) also reported higher depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In contrast, individuals who reported frequently and effectively using reappraisal and low levels of suppression (high reappraisers/low suppressors) reported the lowest levels of these symptoms, suggesting that this specific combination of emotion regulation may be most adaptive.”1
Practice Forgiveness
Everyone has been hurt at some point and if you’re lucky enough to live long, your wounds will multiply. However, experiencing pain doesn’t mean that you are cursed to continue suffering negative emotions indefinitely. A powerful tool for moving on from being hurt is to practice forgiveness.
It doesn’t matter if the pain originates in the behaviors of others, or from your own misdeeds. In either case, letting go of anger, desire for vengeance, and feelings of resentment will allow you to heal and move on.
Breathe Deeply
Sometimes all the outlet you need for difficult emotions is a few deep breaths. This simple shift can also reframe the situation and reduce your feelings of threat.
Developing breathing practice will help to train your body to quickly respond to changes in your breathing. This will increase your effectiveness at navigating difficult events and help you to let go of negative feelings before they have the opportunity to take root in your body. This simple and effective tool can be utilized anywhere and will soon make even the most difficult of emotions appear as child’s play.