How To Regulate Emotions

In order to calm yourself down and ease these emotions–particularly if they’ve lasted for a while–you can’t just try and force the original incident out of your mind and hope you’ll eventually stop being mad. You need to look back at what the person did to you. Does it still seem as important now as it did when it first happened? If not, then you might want to try forgiving the person for their action. If what they did seems unforgivable, though, then you’ll need another strategy.
WHY FORGIVE AND FORGET, ANYWAY? But first, consider forgiveness. There’s growing evidence that forgiveness benefits the forgiver, not just the forgiven. One of the things reasons we stay angry at people is because we’re reminded continuously of the details of what they did to us. Those details make the transgression feel fresh. Remembering them reignites activity in the motivational system, which causes the original anger to flame up all over again.
Anger tends to lock us into a single way of thinking about what happened. That interpretation becomes a sore that won’t heal. Often, when you’re angry with somebody, you tend to think repeatedly about the thing they did to you, which keeps you emotionally engaged with the way you were wronged. Psychologists call this repetitious thought pattern “rumination”. To avoid ruminating, give yourself some psychological distance from the situation. Focus on other aspects of your life.
It’s never easy to stop being mad at someone. And you may even feel like their behavior fully warrants staying mad at them. But the emotion of anger can be powerful and it rarely leads us to make productive decisions–especially at work. If you can’t find a way to get past it, you won’t just be punishing the other person with your disdain, you may be hurting yourself, too.
== Part 2 ==
We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it’s practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organizations, dinner parties, and more are filled with regulations and red tape that are always there to dictate our every move. We rail against rules being an affront to our freedom, and argue that they’re "there to be broken".
Waiting can be excruciating. Waiting for slow food at a restaurant when we’re hungry is painful. Waiting for the light to turn green when running late is frustrating. But, waiting on God can be faith shaking.
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