How To Deal With Being Overly Emotional: 7 Strategies To Control Hyperemotionality

Being overly emotional can feel overwhelming, can compromise thinking and can cause reactions that are not in a person’s best interest.

Emotions are great. They serve as alarms, alerting people of what’s going on in their environment and how they should feel about it.

At the same time, emotions should also be used with a healthy mix of logic and restraint. Don’t allow your emotions to have complete control over you. You must maintain control over them and guide yourself logically.

What to do if you are overly emotional

Here are some ways to deal with being too emotional.

1. Ignore emotions (sometimes)

This isn’t the only technique because emotions need to be acknowledged, too (more on that later). But at the same time you don’t need to always live your life around your emotions.

If you feel that emotions burden you too often, try to leave them be once in a while. Treat them as though they were an unwanted guest in your mind. Try to live your best life despite them.

This doesn’t mean you should never acknowledge them or fight them. But sometimes there’s no need to give them time and mental energy. Once in a while, just leave them be and enjoy life as best you can.

2. Acknowledge and feel emotions

This kind of contradicts the last point but we need a healthy balance of living with emotions and acknowledging them.

Remember, emotions usually function as an alarm. You can ignore the alarm sometimes, but other times you need to acknowledge it calmly.

Feeling emotions and letting them run their course is important for processing them.

A helpful technique for moving on from emotions is giving the mind an avenue to get over them. Think of it like crying. Crying is a form of letting emotions run their course.

Let them come to you and feel them. Process them and come to terms with them. Let your mind feel what it needs to. Don’t act on them in an extreme manner, just feel.

3. Use calming techniques

Calming strategies can help maintain sound thinking and keep you grounded. When you’re feeling overly emotional, if you’re feeling emotions rushing through your mind, it’s important to keep yourself calm as best you can.

Don’t resist emotions. Acknowledge them, let them flow, but maintain calmness as best you can. Try to relax your face muscles. Relax your eyes (they can play a huge role in how you feel). Relax all of your muscles.

Something that helps a lot of people is looking at the hands. If they’re shivering or shaking, just watch them do so.

Remind yourself that emotions are just thoughts in your mind. You can dismiss them. Tell yourself that you’ll get better and this emotional state is just your experience in this moment.

4. Understand the reasons behind your emotions

Don’t treat emotions as empty thoughts. A lot of times they have meaning and purpose. They are alarms usually trying to tell you something.

Ignoring them is not only more likely to make them stronger, it could also be dismissive of legitimate thoughts.

Are you sad? Why? Where do you feel the sadness and what exactly causes this feeling? What is the driving force behind your emotions?

This doesn’t mean the cause of your emotion needs an immediate fix (sometimes there’s a solution and other times there may not be). But by acknowledging the underlying cause and bringing it to consciousness you can help yourself process it emotionally.

5. Don’t make everything a big deal

Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill. Some things aren’t important – they don’t need a reaction.

You aren’t obligated to dedicate time and mental/emotional energy to everything. Sometimes we make things big deals even though they really aren’t.

Take on a dismissive attitude towards some issues in life. Learn to let things go when you deem it best to do so.

Not everything is worth the trouble you take on when you burden yourself with it. Ask yourself how much something truly matters in the grand scheme of things. Ask yourself if you have anything more worthwhile and joyful to dedicate your mind to.

6. Fake it till you make it

Just pretend you’re not overly emotional. Pretend you’re an emotionally regulated machine that can’t be shaken.

Do you actually have to be? Well, you should try but the reality is you may not be. The idea is to take on the role of someone who is.

This can help in two ways. One, it can help you learn how to think in a more emotionally regulated manner by putting you in that role. Second, it can actually make you genuinely more emotionally regulated because it could be a valuable lesson in how you should think.

Whenever you find yourself in an emotionally charged situation, ask yourself how you would handle this situation if you had complete control over your emotions.

7. Separate emotion from action

One of the biggest issues with emotions comes from the way we act when they take over our thinking and dictate our behavior. Many times when this happens, people behave in ways that are unsuitable and unfavorable.

It’s crucial that you create a barrier between feeling and doing. Just because you feel a certain way does not mean your actions have to correspond with that. You may not always choose how you feel but you must choose how you act.