The Key To Balancing Out Your Emotions When You’re Feeling Down

Feeling down? The reason you are is because of a biased perception. You have conditioned your mind to focus on the things that cause those emotions.

How we think, we feel. How we feel, we think. It’s a cycle that is constantly in motion. The easier of the two to control is our thoughts so it’s a good place to begin making changes.

Before we begin a transformation, take a moment to be honest with yourself. Do you end up feeling down quite often? Do you feel down more often than you feel good? Do you often find yourself sitting around feeling depressed or sorry for yourself?

If you do then the reason is quite simple; it’s because you’ve conditioned your mind to look at all the things that are missing in your life. It’s become your main habitual pattern of thinking.

If you could snap out of that habit and initiate the realisation that you are then you can being to break that habit and start feeling better.

When people begin the conversation by asking what you do, do you often reply with “it’s quite boring actually”? Is that how you perceive your life and all the things you do?

You may now have built up this idea in your head that it’s boring but the truth is, it could be very interesting to the person you’re speaking too. Maybe you’re just putting it across in a mundane way.

This first step will provide a clue as to the way you perceive your your own value.

The second step can be quite tough to initiate the process. It involves waking up and having a the courage to look at the real reason you might be feeling down.

It involves analysing not why, but what it is that you’ve been focussing on that is causing you to feel down.

Are you thinking about what is missing in your life? Perhaps you feel lonely and lost? In that moment, can you switch it around and start to look at what you do have?

Maybe you’re thinking about what you’re owed or what life owes you. All of these are you thinking about the lack of something in your life.

Perception has flexible traits. That means it can be moulded according to what you choose. If you’re overpowered by habitual thinking, you can feel better right now by knowing that changing those habits is within your power.

Sometimes, when you’re feeling down, the emotions can be too strong to force them to change there and then. It’s worth letting them take their natural course. When you start to feel better then you can use the powers of your perspective to return to balance.

Before I go further there’s something I need to make clear. There are times when you’re going to feel elated and equally there are times when you are going to feel down.

The objective here is not to never feel down, because that is unrealistic. It’s to minimise the time in those down periods and to prevent them from happening too often.

I like to think of emotions in a simplistic format of 3 levels. Think of a scale; on side you have negative emotions, on the other, you have positive emotions.

The middle is place of the neutral. It’s where you are in flow. In that place I am not actually emotionally aware, I am just in action. A place of unconscious competence where my natural abilities emerge.

The positive side of the emotions might occur when I first hold a baby in my arms or get my dream job. The negative might occur when I’ve been hurt or someone close to me gets hurt.

The neutral flow is where I am at right now while writing this article. I am neither happy nor sad and yet just very content and grateful in allowing these words to emerge from me with fluidity.

When I’m stuck in the place of feeling down it’s very hard for me to get to the neutral place or to the positive side. Especially when it’s become a habit to think and feel that way that it happens frequently.

The solution here is training. It takes time to train the mind to move away from the habit of focussing on the lack to it’s opposite; asking where do I have abundance.

Just like the way you would give up smoking you can break the habit and get from a place where you’re always feeling down to where you’re in the neutral and positive ends of the emotional scale.

Let me offer some keys that can aid you to return your biased perception to a balanced perception.

1. Be honest with yourself about your emotional state and how often you feel down. If that’s the case every other day then your perception is very biased towards the things missing in your life.

Only when you redress that balance will you stop feeling down on such a regular basis

2. Feeling down is always the result of focussing on lack or what is missing. Know that there is nothing missing, it is just in a form that you do not recognise. When you choose to find and see that which you think you lack it will put the brakes on you feeling down.

3. Look carefully at the way you respond to personal questions that people ask you such as, what you do. This will offer a clue to the way you value yourself and the way your perception is currently balanced.

4. Know that your perception is flexible and perhaps ask the opinion of others with regards to their perception of events you may be facing. That could also trigger change.

5. Feeling down is a part of life and you cannot eliminate it totally. Know that it will happen sometimes and then just go with it.

6. Whatever you’re feeling like right now, it doesn’t matter. Absorb this information and understand it. So that in the future, when you’re feeling down, you can use this information to trigger a new paradigm in your thinking.

When was the last time you were feeling down, was it because you were focussing on lack? Or do you think it was because of something else?