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Negative emotions can damage beyond repair one’s life. They can bring grief and self-loathe, emotions that don’t have their place in our lives. However, emotion management is a thing that not all of us successfully achieve. It can be progressively difficult for someone experiencing intrusive thoughts to stop the process entirely. Unfortunately, most of us experience such thoughts at one point or another: small self-doubt, a disturbing piece of news that passed by us, an image or a feeling. These can all damage our mood and self-esteem and might even leave us to feel miserable.
While some people think that this is a normal part of everybody’s life, that these thoughts have to take place, this isn’t the case. We can all learn some techniques and methods to stop the whole process and redirect our thoughts to sunnier events and experiences.
Guilt is one of those emotions that women experience more frequently than men do. Generally, women are taught to be more sociable and be attentive to others’ feelings. This makes them feel exhausted and accountable for most of the things and processes in their and other’s lives. When they fail or forget something, they, naturally experience guilt.
While keeping these feelings on a leash is not as easy as many people think, below we have some simple strategies that will help women manage their feelings easier.
Learn how to appreciate yourself and everything that you do
This is a simple strategy that most psychologists swear by. If you feel that you’re having a difficult time finding those things that you manage perfectly and for which you should be grateful for at the end of the day, try keeping a self-gratitude diary. Put down daily in your diary at least three things that you accomplished and that you’re feeling proud of. If three things are too many for you, try to put on your list at least one thing that makes you feel proud and accomplished. At the end of the week, go through last weeks’ lists and read what you succeeded. This will make you pay more attention to everything that you do right and concentrate less on those things that may be more difficult to tackle.
Learn not to compare yourself to others
Seeing others’ accomplishments and successes is not as easy as you may think. This makes women feel less than their peers, when in fact, those women are far from having a perfect life that they want us to think. While being competitive and ambitious will surely help some women achieve more in their lives, it can also have negative outcomes for other’s mental health and general well-being. The best way to keep yourself from comparing your life to others’ is by avoiding checking their social media accounts. Their lives might seem bright and glamorous, their relationships perfect and their jobs more rewarding than yours, but in reality, you don’t know what is truly happening in their personal lives. Those social media accounts may only be a façade they use to distract themselves and others from their problems.
While people search tools and engines are surely useful in a variety of instances, you shouldn’t use those to bring yourself down over others’ lives and achievements. Use those when you want to identify spam callers, use them to find more info and background on your potential employers, use them to check your date’s criminal record, use those for any other purposes, but don’t check others’ “perfect lives”.
Ditch the black-and-white mindset
If you’re the type of person who sees life as a succession of achievements and failure, and there is nothing in between, you should stop that. While there are various instances in life when such an attitude is the right one, your personal life isn’t. You don’t have to be perfect to be a valid person. If you’re not the best, this doesn’t mean that you are the worst. Integrate a grey scale in your black-and-white vision and try to evaluate things in other ways than your usual way. Judge how many efforts you put in the whole context, how did you tackle various problems and learn that perfection, is, in fact, a rare thing to achieve.
Take care of your needs and wellbeing
In the process of always taking care of others, women forget how to take care of themselves. Well, as much as you’d like to forget about those, you also have needs. Your mental and physical well-being have to be taken care of. This will help you deal better with negative emotions, will help you achieve the necessary mindfulness state to tackle with a positive attitude your life events, relationships, be those romantic or not, and your general well-being. Silencing your needs or simply ignoring them will not help you in any way or form to learn how to properly deal with your negative emotions. Similar attitudes will only make you grow increasingly frustrated with your life and status.
Try to see things from others’ perspective
If you were to see similar efforts and actions in your partner, friend, parent, would you be just as critical as you are with yourself? Most probably, you wouldn’t. You would appreciate and encourage all their actions and efforts and you would try to show them all the positive things they achieved on the way. Try to have the same attitude when it comes to your actions as well. If there is nobody else there to praise your efforts and successes, do it for yourself. Show yourself some love just the same way you would show to a person you care about. This may be one of the most effective ways to cope with and tackle the negative emotions that you experience once in a while.
Seek professional help
If you don’t seem to be able to manage these emotions, it might be the time to search for and receive specialized help. Talking to a psychologist will be more effective than bottling these emotions and letting them accumulate.