Why it’s Important to Choose Your Emotions

I was brought up to believe that we get to choose our emotional states. It’s been fundamental in developing my own outlook on mental health, and happiness in general. Believing you have the ability to choose how you feel is incredibly powerful. It’s quite stoic in its philosophical roots. This idea that whatever happens to you, and around you, shouldn’t affect your emotional state isn’t a new one. It can seem a bit notion-y and high-brow, but in practice it gives you the freedom to remain unaffected by the natural ups and downs of life.

Take your Monday morning as a typical example of how you can make a choice for yourself. You’ll probably wake up dreading the day, the beginning of a new week. With the added bleakness of working from home maybe, and the uncertainty of how long more the world will be in turmoil, it’s quite easy to wake up feeling a bit off centre. But you still get to decide whether you continue to feel this way, or move out of that mind frame into a new one. You can choose to succumb to the natural urge to feel bad of a Monday morning, or you can take that emotion by the collar and tell it to jog on. You do have that choice, whether you decide to acknowledge it or not.

Through the course of daily life, we come upon many of these scenarios where we can either allow ourselves to react in automatic, uncontrolled ways, or we can choose our reactions. If we took the time to observe our automatic reactions we’d be much more aware of how and why certain stimuli make us angry, or sad, or anxious. Instead of giving in to the natural urge to be angry at something that has offended us, we can choose to be calm if we’re within the mind frame of not letting external factors affect our internal selves. However, doing this requires a constant awareness of our emotions, and an ability to control how we react, which isn’t easy, and so most people will just succumb to automatic emotional states because it’s the easier option. This doesn’t mean it is better for you though.

I think it’s a bit lazy to believe that feelings and emotions are entirely out of our control. That emotions are just something that happen to us, and that we have no say in the matter. This line of thinking is a slippery slope to leaving yourself off the hook for letting your emotions run out of control. Suggesting that no one can control their emotions gives us the leeway to not take responsibility for our own reactions, and in this way we can justify poorly thought-out behaviour by blaming uncontrollable emotions.

We should allow ourselves to feel emotions, absolutely. We should also learn to understand our emotions, and why certain things make us react certain ways. If we can do that, we can learn to not let our emotions control us. We can choose our reactions more often, and in that way, we can reduce the number of bad days we have by choosing not to have them.

Drink water,