Think
Don’t believe everything you think! Thoughts are just thoughts.
One Activity you can do is:
Step One: Describe the Situation
Think of a situation from the past where you felt overwhelmed with a lot of emotions. It can be about any aspect of your life. Describe the situation – what happened, where it happened, who was involved.
Step Two: What Caused the Situation
Write down your thoughts on what you think caused the situation. The way you explain the situation to yourself will shape your emotions about the situation. Try to remember the situation you picked and be honest about what your thinking process was like during the event. What do you think caused the main aspects of the situation?
Step Three: Primary and Secondary Emotions
Now that you described the situation and what you think caused it, it’s time to describe how you felt as a result. Try to remember what your emotions were. What did you first feel? Were there other emotions that you felt as a response to the first one? For example, maybe first you felt disappointed at somebody, and very shortly afterwards you felt anger and self-hatred, and eventually that led to you feeling depressed. When you feel overwhelming emotions, you probably have physical sensations in your body because of the emotions. Do you remember how your body felt during the situation? Were you tense, fast heart-beat, sweating? Perhaps you felt like crying and your body started trembling.
Step Four: Identify Your Urges
What did you want to do as a result of your emotions? What was your first urge? What action did you want to take? This is not necessarily what you eventually did, it can be just a thought that you briefly had. This is a very important step as you become more used to this technique. Next time you find yourself in a situation where you experience overwhelming emotions, recognizing your urges can help you to not automatically act on them.
Step Five: What Did You Do?
In this step, think about what you actually did. What action did you take as a result of your emotions? Take your time and try to remember. Did you have an argument with somebody because you felt really hurt and angry? Try to remember what you said to the other person if there are other people involved in the situation.
Step Six: Outcomes
How did this situation, your emotions and your resulting actions affected you later? Was the outcome of this situation good for you or not really? This step focuses on the consequences that you may experienced in the longer term. Being observant and honest with ourselves about whether the outcome of our emotionally-induced actions is good or bad for us can be very important for making a change.
Example
| Phase | Experience |
|---|---|
| Describe the situation | I had a usual day at work, I came home where I live alone, and had an evening by myself. There was nothing extraordinary about the day. |
| What caused the situation? | I live a boring life, I avoid everything that is out of my comfort-zone. So just like every other day, nothing exciting happened…. |
| Primary and secondary emotions | At first I felt really bored, but this grew into a feeling of sadness and disappointment about the lack of interesting things going on in my life. By the end of the day I just felt really empty. |
| Identify your urges | I didn’t feel like doing anything useful, I just wanted to sit in front of the TV and drink wine. |
| What did you do? | That is exactly what I did. |
| Outcome | I drank more than I wanted to, I woke up the next morning, hung-over with a terrible migraine. I had to call in sick and I missed work. |
Here is some resources you can use as part of emotion regulation:
