CHAPTER
4

Understanding and Measuring Your Emotions

In This Chapter

• Identifying your emotions
• Recognizing helpful and unhelpful emotions
• Measuring the intensity of your emotions
• Feeling and managing your emotions

When you experience surges of emotion, you feel them not only in your brain but also in your body. These emotions connect to your thoughts and behaviors.

For example, imagine you have a test coming up. Whenever you think about the upcoming exam you start to feel nervous. Your brain feels overwhelmed, you cannot concentrate on studying, and you are distracted by a many other thoughts. Your body feels tense, your breathing is little faster than usual, and your hands become clammy.

In this chapter, we’ll explore a variety of emotions and how they manifest in your thoughts and behaviors. We’ll introduce methods to help you become more aware of your emotions and techniques for managing your emotions when they become overwhelming.

Naming Your Emotions

How are you feeling today? Are you angry? Annoyed? Anxious? Happy? Embarrassed? Sad? Do you have mixed feelings? Although it is sometimes hard to identify exactly what you are feeling, understanding your feelings helps you manage the reactions to your emotions. This is important because extreme emotions can be harmful to your health and cause you to react in negative ways. Intense negative emotions have been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, immune system deficiencies, high blood pressure, and chronic pain. When you don’t understand and manage your emotions, health, self-image, and relationships suffer.

When you are able to identify both the emotion and its intensity, you have a road map to managing the negative thought process behind the emotion. You can then start your ABCD process by evaluating the negative thoughts for errors and challenging irrational points of view. Then you can change the unhelpful thoughts in order to change how you feel.

STOP AND THINK

Your emotions are your own. They reflect your perspective and past experiences. No one can make you feel anything. When you communicate your feelings, it is more helpful to say, “I am feeling frustrated and angry right now,” instead of “You make me angry.” Approaching a discussion like this helps to lead to dialogue rather than defensiveness.

Helpful vs. Unhelpful Emotions

All negative emotions are not bad. For example, when someone close to you dies, you feel sadness; your emotion signals “I am experiencing a loss.” Depression, however, is an unhelpful reaction because it signals “I cannot cope with this loss.”

Unhelpful negative emotions usually signal that you believe you are not able to cope with the problem at hand. You see something in your situation as a threat to your safety or security. When you are experiencing these types of emotions, you usually lack compassion for yourself or for others.

We often use alternate words to express our feelings. These terms might relate to the intensity of the basic emotion, they might be an expression or style of speaking, or they may be a way of more accurately describing how you experience the basic emotion. For example, if you are feeling “nervous” about a job interview, you may not necessarily associate this will feeling scared or in danger. A better description for you might be “I feel jittery” or “I have some concerns.” Finding the right term can help others understand you better and build empathy.

Managing your emotions includes the following:

• Determining how you are feeling
• Measuring the intensity of the feeling and describing it accurately
• Deciding if the feeling is helpful or unhelpful

Your thoughts, actions, and physical sensations all give you clues. Look over the following descriptions of emotions. Note the differences between healthy and unhealthy forms of the emotions, the physical sensations you may feel, and alternate words used to describe the emotion. This should help you narrow down your emotion and determine if it is helpful or unhelpful.

Nervousness vs. Anxiety

Nervousness and anxiety are both related to a sense of not being in control. You may feel powerless.

Nervousness (healthy): A situation in the present or the future threatens your sense of safety or security. You feel vulnerable. Low and moderate feelings of nervousness often activate your need to get something done.

Anxiety or Panic (unhealthy): Anxiety or panic is the less healthy counterpart to nervousness. You perceive you cannot cope with the threat. Your fight-or-flight response is triggered.

Alternate words: worry, concern, apprehension, fear, agitation, tense, edgy, jitters, panic, uncertainty

Physical sensations: rapid heartbeat, shaking, sweating, stomachache and anxiety, dizziness

DEFINITION

The fight-or-flight response is a physiological reaction to stress that results in an increase in heart rate, blood pressure, and glucose levels. Adrenalin levels go up, preparing you to either fight the threat or flee the situation.

Irritation and Frustration vs. Anger and Rage

These and anxiety emotions are based on a sense of unfairness. You feel something must be changed.

Irritation and frustration (healthy): There is some obstacle standing in the way of your perception of fairness and righteousness. This may be something that occurred in your past, is now occurring, or you fear will happen in the future. The larger you perceive the obstacle to be, the higher your level of frustration.

Frustration can be healthy because it signals that something is wrong and needs to be solved. It prevents you from ignoring an issue until it builds and you explode with anger or ignore it, allowing anger and resentment to simmer inside.

Anger and rage (unhealthy): Anger is the unhealthy manifestation of frustration. When you are angry, you don’t believe you can handle the obstacle. Anger can lead to rage and hostility.

Alternate words: annoyed, irritated, bad-tempered, enraged, fuming, furious, hostile, livid, miffed, testy, touchy, displeased, cross, outrage, in a huff, hissy fit, mad

Physical sensations: grinding your teeth, clenching your fists, flushing, numbness, sweating, muscle tension

GIVE IT A TRY

Once you have given your emotion a name, look through the other emotions and decide what healthy negative emotions you would like to feel. List what thoughts and behaviors you think would change your emotion to the desired one. Act on those behaviors.

Sadness vs. Depression

Sadness and depression are passive emotions and are a reaction to a sense of loss.

Sadness (healthy): A feeling based on the loss of something valuable and important. Feelings of sadness are temporary. You know eventually you will feel better.

Reactionary depression (unhealthy): An unhealthy form of sadness that occurs after a loss that signals “I cannot cope with this loss.” When you are depressed, you stop trying to improve your life situation. You feel a sense of hopelessness. Depression prevents you from accepting and mourning the loss and dealing with your problems.

Reactionary depressions is different from biological forms of depression. When you suffer from biological depression, you have a chemical imbalance that causes you to feel depressed and think of the world as a painful place. In reactionary forms of depression, you are reacting to a particular incident that colors your judgment.

Major depression (unhealthy): A medical condition that affects thoughts, feelings, behavior, and physical health. Depression is a lifelong condition that is much more than a temporary sadness. While some people have only one episode of depression, for many it recurs throughout their lives.

Alternate words: disappointed, hurt, blue, distraught, down, heartbroken, melancholy, sorrowful, deflated, dejected, discouraged, dismayed, let down, grief, lonely, hopelessness, misery, dejection, despondency, gloomy, mopey, in a funk, dismal

Physical sensations: fatigue, crying, body aches and pains, stomachache, headache, changes in appetite

Embarrassment vs. Guilt and Shame

When you feel embarrassment, guilt, or shame, you believe you have not lived up to self-imposed expectations.

Embarrassment (healthy): You feel somewhat responsible for something that has gone wrong. You assume others are judging you and your actions.

Guilt and shame (unhealthy): This is a more extreme and unhealthy version of embarrassment. You believe you should have had control over the situation and you are entirely responsible for the bad outcome. You do not think others will have any empathy for your situation.

Alternate words: humiliated, degraded, discredited, disgraced, dishonored, self-conscious, uncomfortable, condemned, culpable, at fault, inexcusable, reprehensible, unforgivable, remorse, sorry, abashed, contrite, mortified, self-disgust

Physical sensations: blushing, feeling uncomfortable in social situations, insomnia, upset stomach, inability to look someone in the eye

Disgust vs. Contempt

Disgust and contempt are forceful emotions, similar to anger and rage. They result from a disapproval of something you find unpleasant or offensive.

Disgust (healthy): A feeling of revulsion, aversion, or distaste to something that might cause you to withdraw from the object or person.

Contempt (unhealthy): A less healthy form of disgust. You believe you are morally superior of another person; you believe that the person is unworthy of your consideration.

Alternate words: revulsion, dislike, distaste, hatred, abhorrence, objection, loathing, disregard, scorn, aversion

Physical sensations: withdrawal from the object or person, nausea, facial expressions that include narrowing eyebrows, curled upper lip, and wrinkling nose

Stress vs. Shock and Feeling Overwhelmed

Stress, shock, and feeling overwhelmed are all connected to agitation, either from an external event or from an internal struggle.

Stress (healthy): Emotional or mental strain when you are faced with demanding circumstances. The more things you need to deal with, the more stressed you are likely to feel. High levels of stress can lead to feeling overwhelmed. Stress can develop from both good and bad experiences.

Shock and feeling overwhelmed (unhealthy): More intense and negative versions of stress. These signal that you are exhausted and exasperated; you are ready to shut down rather than continue to function.

Alternate words: distress, exasperation, frantic, unease, dismay, dread, strain, tension

Physical sensations: The fight-or flight-response is triggered, causing rapid heartbeat and an increase in adrenalin. When you feel overwhelmed, symptoms increase and can include chest pain, nausea, and dizziness.

IMAGINE THAT

Stress can lead to unhealthy eating habits. According to a survey completed in 2012 by the American Psychiatric Association, almost 30 percent of people skip meals and almost 40 percent overeat or eat unhealthy food as a way to combat stress.

Envy vs. Jealousy

Both envy and jealousy involve believing you deserve something.

Envy (healthy): You want something that someone else has although you don’t necessarily want the other person to not have it. With envy, you may be motivated to obtain this thing or something similar for yourself.

Jealousy (unhealthy): The fear that someone else will take something (or someone) you perceive as yours. It is the fear of losing something.

Alternate words: covet, green-eyed monster, resentment, rivalry, lusting

Physical sensations: feelings of unhappiness, tightening of jaw and mouth, pain the pit of the stomach. Feelings of jealousy can include those of anxiety, such as racing heart. You may also feel a lump in your throat and breathlessness.

Your Turn: Discover Underlying Attitudes

Over the next three days, write down four events of the day. They can be as simple as going to work, cooking dinner, calling your mother, interacting with friends or co-workers, studying for an exam, or going on a trip.

Complete this exercise as soon after the event as possible. If you don’t have time and are completing it at the end of the day, visualize what happened and replay the details of the event in your mind. Think about and feel the emotion that you felt as the situation happened. Imagine how your body felt and what you were thinking for clues to help the process.

Next to each event, write your emotion, using the descriptive words on the list of emotions to guide you. Rate the intensity of the emotion on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most intense and 1 being the least. After three days, go back and see if there are one or two emotions you are experiencing more often than others.

You may be surprised at the results. For example, you may not think of yourself as an angry person, but after looking over your list, you realize that nearly half of the emotions you felt were related to anger or frustration. While this doesn’t mean you are an angry person or that you spend most of your day feeling angry, you can now address that you are feeling this emotion so often. The evidence shows your underlying attitude is to feel anger when things don’t go your way.

If you are having difficulty completing this exercise, you can also track your emotions the opposite way. Divide a paper into seven columns. Write down the main categories:

• Anxiety/Nervousness
• Anger
• Sadness/Depression
• Embarrassment/Guilt
• Disgust/Contempt
• Stress
• Envy/Jealousy

Each time you notice an emotion over the next several days, write down a brief description of the situation and a word that best describes how you are feeling.

As you continue, you may notice that you are experiencing certain emotions more than others.

STOP AND THINK

If you rate your emotions higher than a five, you may be too worked up to manage your emotions in a healthy way. If so, complete an ABCD worksheet to challenge your perspective and come up with coping thoughts. If you still can’t calm down, try talking to a close friend, relative, or therapist to help you cool off.

Rating your emotions helps sort out what areas you should focus on. This might not be the area you originally thought needed the most work. For example, you may begin CBT wanting to work on anger, but after tracking your emotions and giving each a rating, you may find that you are experiencing sadness more often. This would be your primary issue and as you change your thinking process behind your depression or sadness, the anger issues may disappear as well.

Mixed Emotions

Emotions are not always straightforward. Sometimes you have mixed emotions: two competing sets of thoughts and emotions about the same situation. Let’s say you have been dating someone for a few months. Despite the fact that the two of you get along well and have fun together, you each want different things out of the relationship. While you want to get married, the other person is looking for a more casual relationship. After spending time together, you feel attached, accepted, and perhaps loved, but at the same time you feel rejected, sad, and frustrated that this person does not want the same things. You end the relationship, knowing it’s the best thing for you in the long run. However, you still feel upset and lonely. You miss spending time with a person who had become important to you. In this situation, you have mixed emotions: sadness and love.

Behind the emotions, you also have mixed thoughts. You might be thinking:

• This relationship will never be what I want it to be, but I miss him.
• There is someone else I find attractive, but I still want to be with my ex.

These mixed thoughts can be confusing, but they are not unhealthy.

An unhealthy reaction would be to intertwine thoughts and emotions. For example, you might think:

• This person doesn’t care about me. (overgeneralization, mind reading)
• This person is an uncaring jerk. (personalization)
• This is evidence that I will never get married. (overgeneralization)
• Things will never work out for me. (black-and-white thinking)

The next time you feel mixed up and confused about a problem, stop and write all the emotions you are feeling and the thoughts connected to each one. This will help you reflect on all your emotions and gain a reasonable perspective that encourages acceptance, plus provide the ability to cope with reality, and allows you to move on.

GIVE IT A TRY

When dealing with an array of negative emotions, take a few minutes to bring yourself back to the present moment. Many negative emotions deal with the past or the future. Dealing with the present moment only makes managing your mixture of emotions easier.

Managing Feelings about Feelings

Sometimes you have feelings about feelings, called meta-emotions. For example, you may be angry at your child for breaking curfew. At the same time, you feel guilty for being angry. You think being angry is wrong. This guilt is a secondary, or meta, feeling. At times the secondary emotion can be so strong it masks the original emotion and makes it more difficult to sort out how you are feeling. It stops you from actively dealing with the primary, or first, emotion you felt.

Meta-emotions are like a “double whammy.” Not only do you put off dealing with the primary emotion, you now must deal with the secondary emotion—your feeling about your feeling. Some people grew up believing they should hide their emotions, that large displays of emotion were wrong. If this is the case, when you have strong emotions, you tell yourself it is wrong and try to squelch the emotion. Or, you may be afraid of the primary emotion, worried that you just can’t deal with it. When naming and evaluating your emotions, it is important to first identify any meta-emotions and correctly deal with that first.

Your Turn: Create an Emotion Contract

Write down three situations that recently happened where you felt emotional. Write down the emotion you felt and rate each one on a scale of 0 to 100. Include any actions you wanted to take because of your emotions. For example:

Situation 1: My husband forgot to make the mortgage payment. Anger (70/100). I want to yell at him and tell him how stupid and careless he is.

Situation 2: My sister called to tell me that she can’t go on vacation with me. Annoyance (50/100). I want to disinvite her to my birthday dinner to show her how it feels to be unreliable.

Does the incident or situation coincide with your level of emotion? Did the intensity of your emotion or what you wanted to do signal that you overreacted? If so, you may be feeling your emotions without thinking about and challenging the negative thought processes behind your feelings.

Create an emotion contract that states for the next week, you will not give in to emotions without thinking about the thoughts behind the emotion. You will keep a thought log and complete an ABCD chart before letting the emotion fester. Sign and date your contract.

As you complete your ABCD log, come up with a new and healthier way of coping. Using the previous examples, you might come up with the following:

Situation 1: Frustration (40/100). Maybe my husband is feeling overwhelmed. Instead of yelling at him, perhaps I should approach him about working together on the household bills.

Situation 2: Stress and Annoyance (30/100). I now have to plan another trip or find someone else to go with me. I will still invite her to my party, but in the future, I won’t plan activities that rely on her solely.

The Emotional Process

Your emotions affect you in many different ways. The emotional process involves cognitive, physical, and behavioral reactions. When you understand how these reactions interact, it becomes easy to break the cycle.

You can make changes anywhere in the cycle in order to create positive change. For example, if you are dealing with sadness and mild depression, you may have the following reactions.

Cognitive: You have difficulty focusing or paying attention.

Physical: You have difficulty sleeping or sleep too much.

Behavioral: You avoid going out with friends or stay in bed all day.

Suppose you wake up thinking, “My life isn’t any good. I don’t even want to get out of bed today.” Staying in bed will probably make you feel worse. You might lie in bed, thinking about all the reasons you shouldn’t get up and go to work. You may ruminate about everything bad in your life. Later, you feel guilty for not going to work and feel even worse. By the end of the day, your depression has deepened.

Now, suppose that you wake up thinking, “My life isn’t any good. I don’t even want to get out of bed today, but I know it is best to get up and do something.” And so, you do. You get up, you shower, get dressed, have breakfast, and go for a walk. You start to feel better. By changing your behavior you have changed your emotional state. You broke the cycle by changing one area of reactions. Once you did that, it became much easier to change your thoughts and look at the positive in your life.

Cognitive Reactions

In Chapter 2, you learned about the different problematic thinking processes. When you have an unhelpful emotional reaction, it may be because you’re using one of these thinking processes.

Black-and-white thinking commonly leads to depression and anger.

• You think, “If this person was my friend, he or she would not treat me this way.”
• You believe that you are either a failure or success.

Personalization commonly leads to guilt and anxiety.

• You feel guilty about forgetting to meet your husband for lunch and leaving him sitting alone in the restaurant.
• You forget about plans you made with a friend and spend the afternoon worried that she will be upset with you.

Overgeneralizing leads to depression and anger.

• You think, “Nothing works out for me. This mistake is going to follow me for the rest of my life.”
• You think, “He is always treating me this way.”

Ignoring the positive can lead to stress and worry.

• You think, “I have so much to do. I will never get it done.”
• You think, “I am having a bad day today. I am going to get fired.”

Mind reading leads to anxiety and embarrassment.

• You think, “This person does not like me.”
• You think, “I can’t believe I did that. Everyone will think I am stupid.”

Catastrophizing and fortune-telling lead to anxiety, worry, and depression.

• You think, “I know this situation will end badly.”
• You feel there is nothing you can do to change the outcome of events.

CBTIDBIT

People who focus on the actions of others often feel angry. Those who focus on their own actions may feel anxious or guilty. If you do one more than the other, it is helpful to stop and focus on the opposite point of view.

Physical Reactions

Emotions don’t just live in your mind. Research has shown that people feel emotions in their body, too. For example when you feel nervous, you feel “butterflies in your stomach.” The basic emotions—anger, fear, disgust, happiness, sadness, and surprise—are associated with bodily sensations and reactions in the upper chest, such as heart rate and breathing. Other physical manifestations of emotions include specific facial expressions and changes in the brain triggered by emotional reactions.

More complex emotions include anxiety, love, depression, contempt, pride, and shame. These are often felt more deeply in the body. The sensations include regions such as the legs, hands, heart, and head.

Review the list of emotions and the corresponding physical sensations at the start of the chapter and take note of the ones you feel regularly. Paying attention to your physical reactions and sensations helps you consciously connect to your emotions and sort out whether your reactions and associated thought processes are helpful or unhelpful. When you experience helpful and healthy emotions, the associated physical reactions help you react swiftly to dangers and take advantage of important opportunities. Consider the following scenarios.

Scenario 1: You’re walking along a city street alone in an unfamiliar area and your directions take you down an alley. Your muscles tense, your heartbeat speeds up; your body is on high alert. This is your body’s way of telling you to be careful.

Scenario 2: You are asked to give a presentation at work. You feel nervous, your mind feels more focused, and your adrenaline helps you prepare for the presentation and remain focused during the talk.

CBTIDBIT

When writing in your emotional chart, include information on your body’s reaction. This helps you in the future to use your body language as clues to what you are feeling and thinking.

While mild physical sensations of your emotions can be helpful, more pronounced physical sensations might interfere with healthy behaviors and reactions. Think back to giving a presentation at work. Instead of feeling mildly nervous, you feel very anxious. Your heart is beating rapidly and your breathing becomes fast and shallow. You feel tightness in your chest, shakiness in your hands, and pins and needles in your legs. The more intense your physical reaction, the more you tell yourself the presentation is going to be terrible and the more you want to avoid it. In a nutshell, the emotions and physical sensation are too intense. Rather than helping you take advantage of the opportunity, they end up contributing to your failure.

By paying attention to physical sensations in your body, you are better able to connect to your emotions and thoughts. For example, you if you pay attention to the butterflies in your stomach as soon as they happen, you are able to recognize that you’re nervous and accept it. You can look at your thought processes, which might include, “I am going to bomb this presentation.” Instead of giving in to the thoughts and building body sensations, you can use the ABC technique to challenge your thinking.

Your Turn: Where Do You Feel the Emotion?

Use colored pencils or markers to fill the body to show where you feel physical sensations during emotions.

• Yellow: Highest level of sensation
• Blue: Lowest level of sensation
• Green: Mild level of sensation
• Leave areas of no sensation blank.

We store emotions in our body. The more you understand how your emotions feel in your body, the better you become at reading your body language and interpreting your emotions. This exercise also helps you to release the intense emotions through physical exercise or relaxation techniques. For example, anger in the body usually shows up in your hands and you unconsciously make a fist. Recognizing this can help you to counteract the anger by relaxing your hands.

Behavioral Reactions

Your behavior also gives clues as to whether what you are feeling and thinking is helpful or unhelpful. In general, helpful behaviors are those that are constructive and unhelpful behaviors are those that are self-destructive. Obvious self-destructive behaviors include substance abuse and self-harming behaviors, but there are other non-helpful behaviors, too. These include the following:

• Telling someone off or confronting someone without learning the facts of a situation.
• Avoiding a situation or escaping from a situation, such as running out of a meeting or not getting on a plane.
• Not doing anything—not taking care of hygiene, not doing pleasurable things, and withholding self-rewards.

Instead of giving in to these behaviors, use your emotion contract and add a new, positive action you will perform over the next month. For example:

• Before you confront someone you will go for a 10-minute walk. Then you will ask for information and start a discussion rather than jumping to conclusions and reacting angrily.
• If you anticipate a stressful situation, you will give yourself 20 minutes to relax and prepare. For situations that are prolonged, you will participate for just 20 minutes at first and then add 10 minutes at a time until you are comfortable.
• Instead of giving in to your depression, you will create a schedule that includes activities you enjoy. Sign up for an activity that you can’t miss.

Changing your behavior, even slightly, can change your perspective and reduce the negative emotion.

Learning Emotions

Emotions are sometimes triggered through associations and learned reactions known as conditioning. For example, suppose you always took your exams in school in a blue room. During the exams, you often felt nervous. Perhaps you had a negative experience, such as failing an oral exam in front of your classmates. Now, as an adult, whenever you sit in a blue room for a meeting, you automatically feel a change in your heart rate, breathing, and muscle tension. Initially, you might connect this with being scared. But the longer you remain in the situation, the more your emotions build. You have fearful thoughts about the meeting and a strong desire to get out of the meeting as soon as possible. The longer you stay in meeting, the more noticeable your thoughts might become. You might think “I don’t want to attend those meetings; I always feel uncomfortable. I’m always waiting for something bad to happen.” You may or may not be aware that the meetings have anything to do with the room being blue.

DEFINITION

Conditioning happens when your brain and body learn to associate an emotion with a set of situations or stimuli. The body sensations become connected to the stimuli or situation, which then triggers the emotion.

Because you may not remember or be aware of the association between your feelings and certain situations, it is sometimes hard to know whether the emotion was learned. Some fears that are frequently a result of conditioning include the following:

• Phobias such claustrophobia, travel anxiety, heights, needles
• Social anxiety
• Depression associated with traumas
• Public speaking

If you are experiencing feelings due to conditioning from past experience, this statement might apply to you “I often feel this way when I’m in in this type of setting. I know I’m not in danger, but I cannot help but feel this way.” To determine if your emotions are associated with past experiences, complete the emotion chart from the previous exercises. Write down the date, time, and what you felt. Add facts about your situation, such as where you are, what you are doing, and who is with you. These variables help you find common situations or variables to give you clues about past experiences.

You might write down:

Monday, December 16, 2013. Conference room meeting. I felt very nervous, my hands were shaking and I had an urge to escape. I became sensitive to any critique of my work. Ten people were present; one person in charge who was doing the most talking. The chairs were comfortable; there were windows in the room and blue paint on walls.

Once you write down the details, ask yourself…

1. What was I thinking once the emotion started?
2. Are these thoughts relevant here?
3. Are there negative thoughts about the present situation I can challenge?

Your answers to these questions might give you clues to where your nervousness and fear came from. For example, you might have answered…

1. “When I am in the conference room, I think my boss is going to yell at me and give me a bad report. I don’t want to ask any questions or offer any advice.”
2. “I know this is not really going to happen and that I am reacting emotionally because I feel anxious. My boss has not yelled at me during a conference before and I have no reason to think he is going to this time.”
3. “I can calm down in the conferences because I know that I have been asked to join the meeting. I am a valuable member of the team and have information to share.”

You can now look back to see if there were similar situations in your past. What does this situation remind you of? “When I was in junior high, I remember that I took my exams in a small blue room. The teachers walked around the room making me nervous. They openly criticized me. I remember feeling like I wanted to run away and I skipped school sometimes on those days.”

If you think you may be dealing with a conditioned emotional response, one way to handle it is through exposure techniques. This method slowly introduces you to a fearful situation until you no longer feel nervousness or anxiety and is covered in detail in Chapter 17.

The Least You Need to Know

• To help manage your emotions, identify and challenge the negative thoughts behind them.
• You can experience more than one emotion at a time.
• Changing your behavior may change how you feel about a situation.
• Paying attention physical sensations can help you identify your feelings.