Hey everyone here 👋
I’ve been wondering: how do you handle cases, when you get overwhelmed with emotions to the state, that you simply cannot focus on anything but that emotion? I hate that feeling, because it really makes me to feel sick with just being emotional.
My take is that I usually just break from a situation, take an hour or two, and try to stim myself with something else: a game, a movie, something like that. Though, sometimes I don’t have a time space to do it: I need to be gathered and focused here and now, with no space for wiggling.
had this during exams and such.
take a step back, check if the intensity of the emotion is warranted and let it wash over you, extreme emotions tend to be short lived.
i was not about to die, even if my brain suggested that, and it had to relent after me being still alive after 5 minutes sitting right there before my tasks.
my problems started when i would ‘feed’ those emotions by fantasizing about the impending catastrophe or giving in and acting on them, by fleeing the class room for example.
i guess this would be harder in a social encounter, but the first step is allways realizing that an emotion is to intense, once that’s done its easier to return to reason and not instinct.
tl;dr :
took me a lot of therapy to start at step 1 and not going from step 2 to “do a stupid thing you’ll regret in 5 minutes”
Great advice. There’s a book called The Practice of Embodying Emotions with tons of science backing up the basic advice of: let emotions take up as much of your body as you can, which helps them process and release faster.
researching CBT, cognitive-behavioral-therapy, don’t make this weird!, will yield tons of material, but that’s a journey best undertaken with someone you trust.