WOW Word-Of-the-Week #518: Self-Management
July 10, 2014 by Susan Clarke
Self-Management – being able to manage our emotions.
Do you feel a need to control your anger? How often do you feel sad or “blue”? Do you remember the last time you worried about something? Do you remember how long you were affected by it?
This is the follow up to last week’s WOW on self-awareness. In Daniel Goleman’s book on Emotional Intelligence he says, “Downs as well as ups spice up life, but need to be in balance.” So how do you bounce back and stay in balance?
- Cooling Down. Distraction is a highly powerful mood-altering device for a simple reason: It’s hard to stay angry when we’r
e having a pleasant time. The trick, of course, is to get anger to cool to the point where someone can have a pleasant time in the first place.
- Soothing Anxiety. Worry is the heart of all anxiety. It is, in a sense, a rehearsal of what might go wrong and how to deal with it; the task of worrying is to come up with positive solutions for life’s perils by anticipating dangers before they arise. The difficulty is with chronic, repetitive worries, the kind that recycle on and on and never get any nearer a positive solution. A close analysis of chronic worry suggests that it has all the attributes of a low-grade emotional hijacking! The first step is self-awareness, catching the worrisome episodes as near their beginning as possible and learning to identify situations that trigger worry.
- Managing Melancholy: The single mood people generally put most effort into shaking is sadness or trying to escape the blues. Melancholy, like every other mood, has its benefits. Both aerobic exercise and relaxation have been found to make people feel better. Cheering oneself up through treats and sensual pleasures is a fairly popular antidote to the blues. Common ways people soothed themselves when depressed ranged from taking hot baths or eating favorite foods, to listening to music or having sex. Buying oneself a gift or treat to get out of a bad mood was particularly popular among women, as was shopping in general, even if only window-shopping.
This week’s focus is on self-management. How often do you feel angry? Do you worry about the same things over and over? How often do you “treat” yourself to something special? How does that make you feel?
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