You now understand the brain’s role in managing emotions and have understood the importance of self-awareness in becoming more emotionally skilled. The following summarises the key points on how to deal with Emotional Hijacking:

• Calm your emotions down and beware of overflow.
• Emotions accumulate. The only way to get back to a normal state is to get your mind off the topic by actively calming yourself.
• De-risk the event by thinking of the best and worst case scenarios.  Use realistic evaluations for worst case scenarios.
• Sometimes you need to trust your feelings. After all there is a good evolutionary reason for the existence of amygdala and you should make the best of it.
  • Listen to your emotions as when you are aligned with yourself you know what you want and feel the same way. Psychologists call this congruency. On the other hand when you feel you want something, while you think you need something else, that congruency has been broken.
  • When your congruency is broken, it suggests that there must be an underlying goal or issue that prevents you from being happy about the overall activity both logically and emotionally. In other words, your logical mind may not have had enough time to work out the details. Sometimes, you could be better off trusting your emotions, since that’s exactly why they are there for.
• Believe in what you want to do. Enthusiasm in a task means you are comfortable with it and really want to do it. When you are not very enthusiastic, maybe there is some underlying problem that you need to work out which prevents you from being in congruency.
• You can become better at self-awareness by self-analysis. Always look back and examine how and why you got emotional in a given situation. You need to recognise the potential triggers and record them so you know how to respond to them next time. When in the heat of the moment, you may not realise what is happening to you. By looking back and analyzing, you can see where a hot button was pressed and how you responded to it. A proactive approach can greatly help you understand why others reacted in a certain way to you or your actions. Always be proactive, don’t blame others or the environment when things go wrong. This way you get to improve yourself constantly.