Coping with Anger and Disappointment.

It is a fact of life that we will experience negative emotions such as anger and disappointment. Emotional resilience is the rapidity at which you return to your usual emotional state. When you are triggered by a frightening or stressful event, your body goes into acute stress response (commonly known as fight, flight, freeze or fawn) and chemical changes occur to activate your sympathetic nervous system and help you defend yourself from attack. This automatic physiological response is completely normal, it is part of our make up. The thing is, extended periods of stress can lead to long-term health problems, so it is important to learn how to regulate your emotions.

There are two parts to strengthening your emotional resilience, processing the emotion, and regulating your body’s response. Regulating your body’s response is all about interrupting the acute stress response, processing the emotion is about stopping yourself from replaying the events over in your head.

Step 1: Regulate Your Response.

When you are triggered it is wise to interrupt your emotional response before you begin catastrophizing and get yourself into a stress loop. The fastest way to do this is by stimulating the Vagus nerve, your body’s mainline to the parasympathetic nervous system which restores you to a state of calm. There are many ways to stimulate your Vagus nerve, including yoga, meditation, singing, even taking a cold plunge. But these may not be practical in the moment. Something that you always have with you in every situation is your breath, and you can use it to have an immediate calming effect. Bring your attention to your breath and intentionally make your exhale longer than your inhale by counting to 4 as you inhale, and counting to 6 as you exhale. Try it now and notice how your body and mind feel.

Step 2: Process the Emotion.

You can’t just push that anger down inside and hope it will go away, that will only make it last longer and grow stronger. As soon as you can create the space to do so, you need to process your emotions.

There are 3 parts to this exercise and each one is equally important so do not skip any of it. Start by planning part 3, which is administering self-care to bring you back to a neutral place. This might be going for a walk, taking a bath, reading a book, or phoning a friend. Decide what your self-care is going to be and make sure you have the time and resources you need to do it.

Part 1: Grab a pen and paper and write a letter to the person(s) or situation that hurt you. You are never going to send this letter so let it be messy and tear-stained as you unleash on your tormentor telling them how mad you are, what you think of them, and how they hurt you. When you have finished expelling your rage onto paper, take a breath and shift into part 2 of the exercise

Part 2: Write what you wish had gone down instead. Here you get to right the wrongs, to tell them how you deserve to be treated, to say what you wish they had done, and explain how you would like to see this play out if the situation arises again.

Part 3: Tear the letter up into tiny pieces and flush it down the toilet, then step into your preplanned self-care.

Repeat this exercise as needed. Each time you will find the emotions are less intense, and that you are able to regulate your emotions more rapidly.

Emotional resilience is a skill and you can build it with these two strategies, setting yourself up for a happier, healthier life.

Watch Emma discuss these strategies on the Midday Show, click here.