Emotional Habits
The way you process emotions and react to events that happen in your life is habitual.
You respond to situations in the opposite way you want to. This is so frustrating, but know that your emotional reactions are habits. They are repeated responses that you have memorized.
Your brain can create new emotional habits and change the old ones.
Changing your emotional habits is exactly like changing your eating habits. The reason we are talking about emotional habits is because they are what created your eating habits! The chances of falling back into your old eating habits are very likely to happen, just like it is to fall back into your familiar emotional habits.
Reverting to your default negative thinking is what happens for most people.
You change your house, job, or diet trying to have better emotional patterns. Unfortunately, if you haven't changed the way you think and your reason for the change is to feel better, you will be sorely disappointed.
The novelty of the new thoughts about the latest thing will wear off and you are back to the ingrained emotional patterns.
When you begin to understand yourself and learn how you think and feel on a regular basis you will notice patterns. You will notice that you have a few default emotions..
These emotions feel automatic.
No matter what happens your go-to emotions are the habitual ones.
When something terrible happens you feel a reactive negative emotion. When something goes the way you don't want it to go, you have your emotional reaction.
When someone else has a difficult situation, notice how you probably feel the same set of emotions.
Notice how many of these emotions are not serving you. You don't want to react this way, but it almost feels out of your control.
The good news is that once you understand your emotional habits, you then can plan on them happening!
You know they are coming.
You can even schedule them into your day!
Difficult moments are a sure bet.
When those moments come (like they always do) create a plan to override your normal reactive emotions.
When they show up, pause, and then consciously react to them with the plan you have made.
The reason why most of us don't do this is because it takes a committed, consistent application of doing this until you have changed the emotional habit.
It is not easy to keep overriding the way you have always thought.
It is not impossible, but know that it is not easy!
Here is how to change your emotional habits in 6 steps:
Think of 5 different challenging situations that happened to you in the past couple of years.
Look back and remember how you felt.
See if you can detect a similar pattern.
Take the knowledge of those emotions and create a plan. You will soon be on the lookout for these reactive emotions coming since you have a better idea of your emotional habits..
Decide ahead of time to implement new thought patterns and let the old unwanted ones vibrate through your body and pass by.
Practice this over and over until you have a new set of habitual emotional patterns!
This is the work!
You are not doomed to be a grouchy and depressed person for the rest of your life! You get to decide how you fell! The exercise is awareness, learning how to change, implementing new emotional habits, failing, and then trying again.