Your actions hurt yourself and others
When your emotions get the best of you, it can often end up hurting both yourself and others.
When people are a slave to their emotions they are rarely pleasant to be around – you never quite know what mood they will become engulfed in next (sadness, anger, jealousy, or fear) and you never quite know how they may react to those emotions while around you.
Often an emotional slave ends up acting in ways that spread their negative emotions to others like a virus. They walk into a room feeling gloomy and upset, and before you know it everyone else in the room is feeling the same way.
When someone is a slave to their emotions, even their positive moods can become out-of-hand and destructive. Sometimes they become so caught up in their joy, spontaneity, and elation that they end up acting in risky and careless ways that scare people or turn people off.
Emotional intelligence is just as much about knowing how to manage your emotions around others as it is about managing your emotions in yourself.
You ruminate at night and can’t sleep
Another sign that you’re a slave to your emotions is if you spend a lot of time at night thinking excessively and not being able to get much sleep.
Staying up at night ruminating is often a byproduct of regret. It could be about how we expressed a particular emotion in a particular situation, or even how we didn’t express a particular emotion in a particular situation.
The other side of being an emotional slave is not knowing how to express yourself at all and just suppressing your emotions.
So if you find yourself staying up many nights thinking about how you really need to talk to your boss, coworker, friend, family, or whomever, it could be a sign that you need to learn how to speak your mind more often (in a healthy and polite way).
People who are masters of their emotions aren’t completely stoic or emotionless – they know how to talk about their emotions and express them in a constructive way that’s appropriate.
Without this healthy expression, you’re going to find yourself dealing with a lot of emotional residue at the end of the day.
You keep repeating the cycle
Everything described above happens to everyone to some degree. No one is perfect and we all have moments when our emotions bring out the worst in us.
Mastering your emotions doesn’t necessarily mean you never slip up, but it does mean that you learn from those mistakes and you don’t keep repeating the same cycle over and over again.
When you start making active changes in improving how you respond to your emotions however, those outbursts tend to become less frequent and less intense.
Author and Credits: Steven Handel