It is your emotions, or rather your reactions to them, that largely make the world around you dangerous in your eyes, and life unbearable. If you learn to change automatic reactions to more constructive ones, you will notice a decrease in the level of stress in your life.

1. Work with your perfectionism

Your desire to do everything perfectly makes you a lot of nervous: you often procrastinate, don’t do many things at all or take too long to complete tasks, you waste a lot of effort and don’t trust anyone.

Each of these points makes your life more difficult. Think about how you can reduce the impact of perfectionism on your life. For example:

Make a list of things that you will purposely do imperfectly. You will encounter negative emotions. If you learn to live through them without rushing to fix everything, you will get the opportunity not to try to make absolutely everything perfect.
Break large tasks into smaller tasks to combat procrastination.
For the sake of experimentation, allow others to do some of the work for you and not demand perfection from them. Perhaps you will suddenly realize that delegation is something that you have been missing for a long time.

2. Don’t jump to conclusions

Your first impression of a situation or a person’s action can be deceiving. If you accept it as truth, you may become very worried. But it will be completely pointless.

Gather as much information as possible before making a conclusion.

For example, you might think that a colleague no longer wants to communicate with you because he didn’t say hello to you in the morning. This can cause a whole range of different emotions. If you give in to this impression, you may lose a good friend. Try to find out why your colleague didn’t greet you. He may say that he forgot to put on his contacts today and that’s why he didn’t recognize you. Or maybe he was offended by you. But then you will have a chance to apologize and re-establish communication.

3. Don’t connect to other people’s emotions.

If you are a very sensitive person, other people’s emotions may cause you to react strongly. The problem is that a person with strong emotions is in a state of narrowed consciousness. We can say that he is slightly inadequate at this moment. If you succumb to his emotions and also begin to get nervous, you will end up with “blind to deaf” communication.

Try to practice relaxation and contentation techniques in such situations so as not to fall into strong emotions. You can also try to feel compassion for the other in order to understand him better.

To do this, listen carefully to what the person says. Ask questions to understand him better. This will help you better understand the situation. It may turn out that the other did not want to hurt you at all. Maybe he just had a nervous breakdown or didn’t know how to communicate differently in these situations. Or he tolerated something on your part for a long time, afraid to tell you, and now his patience has run out.

If you learn not to connect to other people’s emotional outbursts and keep a cool head, you can not only avoid conflicts but also help others with their unbearable emotions.

4. Avoid accusations, insults, labels and complaints.

Use “I messages” instead . Talk about yourself, your feelings and facts. Don’t remember the past. Talk about one situation at a time. Remain respectful of your interlocutor. This will help him hear you instead of immediately becoming defensive. Perhaps he is not against solving your problem peacefully. Do not deprive him and yourself of this opportunity because of the habit of starting a dialogue with “you”.

5. Learn to recognize your emotions

Not all people are able to distinguish between their emotions. When they talk about how they feel, they may use formulaic terms such as “I feel so bad.” The problem is that this method of definition does not provide an understanding of what is happening to a person and how best to behave.

“Bad” can mean sadness, jealousy, anger, and envy. And in each case these will be very different ways of behavior.

Keep a journal to help you recognize your emotions. Use the emotion catalog to identify emotions based on bodily reactions.

6. Learn to decipher emotional messages and make constructive decisions based on them.

For example, you may feel disgusted at the thought of having to go to work. Instead of ignoring this emotion because you have a mortgage, think about what this emotion means and what to do about it.

Disgust means it’s time for you to do something that suits you better. And you don’t need to quit your job right away, that’s not constructive either. Instead, prepare yourself the field for a comfortable job change: save up money, improve your qualifications, look for another place. This way you will react correctly to the message of emotion and in the long run it will make you happier.

If you ignore disgust, you will end up with a nervous breakdown or even burnout.

7. Practice mindfulness

Observe yourself, your emotions, thoughts and reactions and try to ask yourself more often:

Why do you react this way?
Do past negative experiences influence your perception now?
Are you missing something important?
How else can you react besides the usual ways?
What do you want and does your reaction interfere with achieving your goals?

Unfortunately or fortunately, it is simply impossible to be conscious all the time. The brain is designed in such a way that we perform a huge proportion of actions automatically. Otherwise, our brain would simply explode from the amount of work.

Automatic reactions save energy. We can’t change this. But we can, through mindfulness training, identify and influence negative patterns of behavior and attitudes in our psyche.

Gradually, we can even replace destructive automatic reactions with more constructive ones. Awareness in this sense helps to re-adjust.

8. See a psychologist or psychotherapist

It is likely that you are not actually an empath or a hypersensitive person. You may have had traumatic experiences in the past that are now making it difficult for you to cope with your emotions. Psychological trauma distorts your view of reality and makes your life illusorily more difficult.

A psychologist or psychotherapist will help you work through the trauma and then your life will gradually become simpler.

Also, if you do happen to be an empath or highly sensitive person, a specialist will help you learn to live with this with less stress and suffering.

Increased emotionality is definitely not a destructive sentence. Quite the contrary – this is evidence that you have a huge amount of vitality, you just need to direct it into the direction of creation and harmony.