Calming The Emotional Storm—Practical Tips for Emotional Well Being

Are you feeling overwhelmed? Struggling to manage the emotional storm that can often overtake you during the day? It’s common to feel stressed from time to time, but sometimes our stress and anxiety can be a problem all on its own. 

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Theology of The Body reminds us that just like the rest of our bodies, emotions and feelings can only do what they were designed to do–that is, help us recognize what is happening in and around us and respond to it in godly, effective ways–if we learn to bring our emotions and feelings to God and ask him to teach us how to use them. It helps to start with realizing that emotions and feelings are two different but related things.

Brain scientists tell us that emotions are the body’s monitoring station. Emotions represent the primitive brain’s general, collective sense of both our overall state of our well being and the circumstances in our environment. Feelings, on the other hand, are what happens when our cortex, our higher brain, gathers all these general impressions and creates a story about what these impressions mean and how we are to respond to them and that’s where things tend to get complicated. Because of sin, we often do a poor job of evaluating emotional impressions well, understanding what those impressions mean, and developing responses to those impressions that work both for our good and the good of others. When we bring our emotions, the stories they tell us, and the responses we want to make to them to God first, he can teach us how to let our feelings serve our physical, emotional, relational, and spiritual wellbeing and help us work for the ultimate good of the people around us as well.

Here are three practical tips for calming your emotional storm:

Pause and Pray–Get in the habit of briefly pausing and praying before you act on an emotion–especially a negative emotion like anger, sadness, or anxiety. When you notice yourself having a strong emotional reaction, pause–even for a second–and say something like, “Lord, help me correctly identify the specific thing I am reacting to and respond to it in a way that will glorify you.” Brain scientists tell us that pausing even a second or two allows the higher brain to catch up with the emotional reactions generated by our more primitive parts of our brain. This allows us to make better, and more complete, responses to the situations that provoked our emotional reaction in the first place. On top of this, bringing our emotional reactions to God reminds us our feelings aren’t God. God is. And everything we do–including acting on our feelings–has to be motivated by a desire to serve him. If we can get in the habit of doing this, we give both God, and the natural talents for emotional management God built into our body–the opportunity to teach us to handle even the most provocative situations gracefully.

Add Feathers–Do you know how people can be really good at telling others how to manage their emotions but really bad at managing their own? A new study by the University of Waterloo found that practicing one simple habit can allow people to manage their own responses as well as they can help others manage theirs. The trick? Add feathers. Just like an arrow that has feathers flies straighter than an arrow without them, people who ask themselves what virtues they need to express their emotions well are much better at identifying and hitting the right emotional targets than people who just act on feeling. If you want to be as good at taking your own advice as giving it, before you act on an emotion, ask yourself, “What virtue would help me express this emotion well?” The study found that asking simple virtue-based questions like this helps people both avoid the temptation to repress negative emotions and also helps people make better emotional choices by reminding them to keep the big picture in mind. Next time you feel a strong emotional reaction welling up, don’t just let fly with your feelings. Add feathers, and let virtue guide the path toward the right response.

Get a Boost–Sometimes it can be too hard to learn to handle our feelings on our own. If your emotional reactions are consistently complicating your life or relationships, seek professional help. Psychotherapy is like physical therapy for the brain. New research shows that modern therapy techniques help boost the brain’s ability to process emotional reactions more efficiently and identify healthy responses to emotions more effectively. You don’t have to be a victim of your emotional reactions. If you aren’t happy with the way your feelings are causing you to respond to the people or situations in your life, getting professional help sooner than later can help you get the skills you need to have a healthier emotional life.

Explore more resources to overcome the stress and anxiety in your life at CatholicCounselors.com!

Tending The Garden—Practical Tips to Building Healthy Relationships

Do you want more from your relationships? Are you feeling drained in some way by your relationships? It’s easy to fall into patterns that cause us to feel like our relationships are lacking—whether it’s friends, family, or significant others—but thankfully there we don’t have to get stuck in this place. 

The theology of the body reminds us that building the Kingdom of God is mostly about doing everything we can to make our relationships as healthy, holy, and intimate as possible. That means committing to living out the Christian vision of love in all of our relationships. While the world believes that loving someone means putting up with however they decide they want to treat us, the Christian vision of love insists that we have an obligation to always work for the ultimate good of others and to expect others to work for our ultimate good as well.

Because of sin, we often fail in that mission to work for each other’s good. People who say they love each other hurt each other all the time. When this happens, the loving thing to do is to gently call each other on to do better, to repent of the ways we have betrayed our mission to work for the good of those we love, and support each other in cooperating with God’s grace so we don’t commit that offense again.  When someone refuses to do this, we have a moral obligation–rooted in both our basic right to self-defense and the divine call to work for the ultimate good of others–to set limits and boundaries that make it more difficult (if not impossible) for the person who hurt us to hurt us the same way again. Practicing sacrificial love doesn’t mean being a doormat, or allowing others to treat us in a manner that is beneath our dignity as children of God. It means being willing to make the sacrifices necessary to work for each other’s ultimate good, even when it is hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable, or costly–those are the sacrifices that lead to our sanctification and call others to healthier, holier lives.

 

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Here are three ways to build healthier, holier relationships:

Pull the Relationship Weeds–Healthy relationships allow you to be real and not hide important parts of yourself. Relationships are often a source of stress because we feel like we have to hide important aspects of who we are for the sake of “keeping peace.” That’s backwards. Relationships aren’t an end in themselves, Theology of The Body reminds us that God intends for our relationships to serve the mutual good of the people in those relationships–to help each person in those relationships be more of what God created them to be, not less. To build the kingdom of God in your relationships, be who you are. The people God wants you to create communion with will stick around, support you, and ask for your support. The people that can’t handle the “you” God created you to be will drift away.  Let them go. Pulling the weeds in your relationship garden will allow all your relationships to flourish and bear more fruit as you spend time with the people who are really capable of building you up!

Speak Up Sooner Rather Than Later–When people act in ways we find hurtful or offensive, we often let it go, telling ourselves it isn’t worth the trouble to address these issues and create potential conflict. While there is something to be said for choosing our battles, if you find that an offense continues to gnaw at you, speaking up sooner rather than later is always best. In the words of Pope St Gregory the Great, “Thoughts seethe all the more when corralled by the violent guard of an indiscreet silence.” The best way to address an offense? Don’t assume they intended to offend you and ask a clarifying question. Something simple like, “Hey, when you did thus-and-such, I wasn’t sure what to make of that (or it kind of hurt) what did you mean by that?”  Once the other person explains their intention, you can either decide that it was all just a misunderstanding and let it go, or suggest other, more palatable ways the other person can express themselves in the future. Anyone who is interested in a healthy relationship will not be put off by this at all and, in fact, will be grateful for the opportunity to enjoy smoother sailing in the future!

Good Fences…Good Neighbors–Each person we know is good at offering a different kind of support. The key to less stressful relationships is not trying to make a person give you a kind of support they just aren’t capable of. Some people are great at being kindred spirits. Others are good sources of support or companionship around particular topics or areas of interest. Others still, are fine to hang out with occasionally, but aren’t really capable of offering anything more personal support. Enjoy each relationship for what it is, not for what you think it should be. Base the level of trust and intimacy you expect from a relationship on a person’s behavior, not their title or role in our lives. Sure, we “should” be able to be closer to, and have greater trust in, a parent or sibling or than a friend or a cousin, but in reality people are only capable of giving what they can. Having good relationship fences means knowing what each person in your life is capable of giving–and receiving–from you, and refusing to try to force more than this from them. Focus on enjoying the ways each person can be there for you and you’ll feel less frustrated by the ways they aren’t.

 

For more support and resources for strengthening your relationships, visit us online at CatholicCounselors.com!