The covid-19 pandemic has led many of us to feel overwhelmed and stressed. In general, the covid-19 panic, and countless situations could led us to these unwanted situations which fortunately we can avoid with just our attention, the attention we give to our ambience, people and things. Accompany me to discover how your attention can help you out in ways you would never have imagined.
Learn how to regulate your emotions
(2:36 min)
How to relieve stress and depression
The Covid-19 pandemic, a bad day at work, a breakup, a loss. There are many things that can make you feel stress and beyond that make you fall in depression.
I dare to say, it has become something we have to deal every day. That is why I want to share with you how to deal with these emotions and how not to.
To fight against unwanted feelings, we have a powerful weapon at our disposal, and they are called emotional regulators which can help us fight the way we feel and most important, help us avoid those feeling we definitely don’t want to experiment such as stress and depression.
Emotional regulation is the ability to be aware of the attention we give to our feelings and emotions. In order, to handle them appropriately.
Learn what you should stop doing and what you should start doing, like gratefulness and the science behind.
To regulate your emotions, we have to focus on our attention, in this case our responsive attention. Bearing this in mind, you have two ways in which your brain responses differently depending on what master plan you choose to put our attention into:
1. Response Focus:
If you take this way. You get more stress, basically trying to solve the problem over which you have no power
Some examples of this are:
- Try to analyze all the economic consequences of what the depression scenarios are coming out
- Issues you are trying to solve in your head
- Ask “if” questions. Doubts that you are over planning
Even sitting down, relax and try to breathe is going to spark the amygdala in your brain which is the responsible for creating more responses of stress, anxiety and even depression. So taking this way won´t help you regulate your emotions.
Instead, we have the correct way to do it, and it is called
2. Antecedent Strategy
Basically, what you do here is to focus on positive psychology instead of looking at the problem. To do that, there are so many ways to do it.
Some positive psychology tricks you can apply to your life are:
- At the end of the day, right down three things you are grateful
- Remember something you were happy with
- Learn something new everyday
- Read. Fiction books are perfect to get you into another wall and story and experience those feelings
All these things are going to inhibit your amygdala and what happens is that prefrontal cortex in the brain which is an analytical part sends a signal to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is our emotional decision-making that shuts down the amygdala. So in that way, you can fight stress and depression.
If you want to know more about attention and how It reframes our lives. Get the first chapter of my book for free.
Learn About the Science and Principles Behind Our Relationships with Attention Reframed
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