Resilience, Confidence, and Positive Thinking

6The Three Methods of Controlling Emotions

Cool Your Emotions Down with Breathing Exercises

Three effective methods can be used to handle negative emotions:

1. Cooling your emotions down with breathing exercises
2. Labeling your emotions
3. Finding a diversion from your emotions

To begin, it's important to cool your emotions down.

The power of thinking is not enough to calm down your emotions. In order to calm yourself down safely, you can use a breathing technique such as the three‐minute mindful breathing meditation, which has been proven scientifically to work. The graphic on the next page demonstrates the method.

First, you let your body relax by taking a seat in a quiet place. It's up to you whether you keep your eyes open or shut, but it's important to pay attention to your breathing and to breathe slowly. This method is effective at relieving stress.

I have personally made it a habit to calm myself down with this technique before I talk in front of a crowd.

Label Your Emotions

Next up is labeling your emotions. The goal is to label emotions that result from stress or failures and to take a step back to look at them from a distance. By doing so, you should be able to effectively control them.

Adding labels to your emotions allows you to visualize the mixed‐up emotions inside ...