Grace Massoud wrote this article in MTV Website:

We all feel overwhelmed sometimes, overtaken by feelings of rage, sadness, disappointment, anxiety or despair. 

Let’s take disappointment for instance, something doesn’t go as planned, you get rain instead of sun and you feel like your whole day just got ruined. You can’t just wish those kinds of feelings away. Something needs to be done to learn how to cope with them and tone them down. For you see, no emotion is bad, it’s just our reaction to it. Even bad emotions are good in the sense that they can point us to some more pressing issue that might be going on. 

We need to take back our power by learning how to self-regulate and ideally, we should be taught from a young age. Coaching kids in emotional self-regulation is as important as their A, B, Cs and 1, 2, 3s. Learning how to be a better human and taking care of themselves, as research shows, will give them better family and peer relationships. Children who don’t know how to manage their emotions suffer in their school performance and run a greater risk of developing emotional disorders later in life. Above all, children mimic adults’ behavior. For that reason, we need to be well-equipped to deal in a healthy way with our own big feelings so that we set a good example for the youngins. 

Preparation matters in all areas. Successful emotional management comes down to preparation. We practice strategies that will save us when we are have an attack and are lost on how to cope.

Better yet, assemble a kit, a toolbox to calm you down. Put a picture of friends and family in it, a relaxing game, a scented candle. Smell and touch can drag us out of our big feelings. Cold therapy will do the trick, like when you hold an ice cube in your hand which will pull you away from your overwhelming emotions. There’s nothing quite like exercise to change your mood and the most basic yet highly effective is to turn the focus to our breath which slows down the heartbeat, decreases the tension in the shoulders, brings more clarity and just slows everything down. Finally, make sure you’re not out there fighting demons on your own. Find a community to remove shame from experiencing shitty emotions in realizing that we are all in the same boat. In doing so, you will come up with solutions in a team effort. 

A most effective game you can play is the 5,4,3,2,1 game which will distract your mind by utilizing your five senses. List 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you can touch, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste. Why don’t you give that a shot next time you find yourself in an emotional shit storm?