Thibaut Meurisse

Master Your Emotions: A Practical Guide to Overcome Negativity and Better Manage Your Feelings

Thibaut Meurisse is a best-selling author and blogger who has appeared on major personal development websites including Lifehack and TinyBuddha. He is the founder of the Whatispersonaldevelopment. org website which promotes his work around helping people reach higher levels of fulfilment and consciousness.

His book Master Your Emotions: A Practical Guide to Overcome Negativity and Better Manage Your Feelings explores how our emotions work and how negative feelings manifest. It outlines ways that we can reprogram our thinking through a series of exercises which are designed to help us flourish on an emotional level.

The core of the book is split into four parts":

What Emotions Are

- Focuses on our negativity bias and how beliefs impinge our emotions.

What Impacts Your Emotions

- Focuses on the role factors such as our body, thoughts and words have in relation to our emotions.

How To Change Your Emotions

- Focuses on how emotions form and ways to condition your mind to experience more positive ones.

How To Use Your Emotions To Grow

- Focuses on how emotions can be used as a tool for personal growth.

There is also a free step-by-step workbook on the author’s website to accompany the material.

Here are four ideas that stood out to us after we finished reading:

Your emotional set point

Acknowledging where you are and climbing the ladder to where you would rather be.

There’s little doubt that when we experience a negative emotion we can often feel stuck within its grasp. This is why when someone tells you to cheer up when you’re upset - it probably doesn’t help much!

Immediately accessing positive emotions when you’re in the midst of negative ones is rarely ever possible. Instead we can look at these two opposing emotional ranges as being connected by a ladder.

Here the author cites the work of Ester and Jerry Hicks and their scale of twenty two emotional levels (the higher up the happier!) - then offers his own example of how he applied it:

After getting tired of the stories he was telling himself when feeling depressed (level 22) he felt a shift towards anger (level 17) which he acknowledged as a more energising emotional experience. He channelled this energy into getting stuff he’d been putting off done. The sense of accomplishment that came with completing tasks gave him a sense of momentum and helped propel him into a positive emotional range.

In essence, he was able to appropriately channel the energy that came with the negative emotion of anger to get himself higher up the ladder.

A formula to explain how emotions are constructed

Interpretation + identification + repetition

For an emotion to grow in intensity and duration, we interpret a thought, then identify with that thought and then repeat that thought. When we start removing one of these elements from the equation, an emotion starts to lose its power over you.

Interpretation:

We react to an event that takes place based on the personal meaning we give to that event.

E.g. It begins to rain and our plans to head out for a picnic in the park are affected.

Identification:

We allow the attached thought that comes with our interpretation to become the focus of attention.

E.g. We decide that the weather has ruined something we were looking forward to doing.

Repetition:

As the thought become our focus of attention we subconsciously play out the chain of events that we believe brought us to the thought and the intensity to which we experience the attached emotion is heightened.

E.g. We start to remember others times our plans have been ruined - or other things that have recently annoyed us - and start to feel increasingly resentful that “bad luck seems to follow us around”.

Being above or below the line

Observing your self awareness kick in.

To maintain high levels of self awareness it’s important that we continually check-in on how our behaviours are playing out. To help us do this the author draws on the work of Jim Dethmer and Diana Chapman and the above the line/below the line model.

The idea is that when we’re above the line we are behaving consciously and productively. Typical behaviours may include:

• Showing curiosity

• Listening without interruption

• Discussing without being argumentative

When we fall below the line we are are behaving unconsciously and unproductively. Typical behaviours may include:

• Quickly finding fault with another opinion

• Listening selectively

• Arguing

If you are able to acknowledge when you start falling below the line by sensing yourself shift into one those behaviours, this is likely to be your self awareness acting as a type of safety rope. Noticing that shift gives you brain a chance to recognise what’s happening and to start making behavioural adjustments to prevent yourself from getting stuck below the line.

Limiting your concerns about what other people think

Letting go of unproductive rumination.

It’s easy to get caught up in other people think of us - but our only responsibility is to be the best version of ourselves. People will interpret our actions and judge our behaviours through their own filters - much as we do theirs. It’s also useful to remember that we tend to overestimate how frequently other people are thinking about us. In reality - people aren’t dwelling on us as much as we might think , nor are we dwelling on other people as much as we might think.

This can sound a bit uncaring, but the author shares a couple of simple exercises to help us acknowledge why this is ultimately true.

Exercise 1: People aren’t that concerned about us…

• Choose one person (e.g. friend or colleague).

• Put yourself in their shows. How much do you imagine they think about you during an average day? How much do they keep track of what you do or say? What do you think they are worrying about right now?

• Repeat this exercise with at least two more people.

Doing this exercise makes us realise that other people are often simply too busy to think of us that often. They are focussed on themselves.

Exercise 2: We’re not that concerned about other people either…

• Go through your day and try to remember all the people you met or interacted with.

• Ask yourself how many of these people (if any!) you have thought about during the day prior to doing this exercise.

This makes us realise we don’t have enough time in our day to worry that much about other people. We are focussed on ourselves.

Remember, it’s not a question of having no compassion or being a selfish jerk - instead it’s the nature of being human. Worrying less about what other people think also stop us wasting energy from over-analysing something that is ultimately beyond our control.

Your thoughts:

Have you read Master Your Emotions: A Practical Guide to Overcome Negativity and Better Manage Your Feelings already?

Do you think these ideas are useful?

Please feel free to leave a comment below.