Again in prehistoric occasions, our ancestors wanted to rapidly react to their environment. They’d hear a noise, concern that it was a harmful animal, and put together to struggle or flee.
Quick ahead to right now, and this trait continues to be current regardless of the absence of on a regular basis hazard. Emotional reactivity resides on the mercy of your ideas, feelings, and exterior circumstances.
The good information is that you could practice your responses with consistency and persistence. Let’s discover how:
Because the celebrated psychiatrist Viktor Frankl as soon as mentioned, “Between stimulus and response there’s a area. In that area is our energy to decide on our response. In our response lies our progress and our freedom.”
So by making the most of the ability of selection, you’ll be able to invite emotional freedom into your life.
What Is Emotional Reactivity?
Emotional reactivity is the tendency to commonly expertise highly effective emotional triggers activated by outdoors circumstances, individuals, or occasions. These triggers might immediate you to lash out and specific your feelings in an aggressive, dramatic, or impulsive method.
Nevertheless, it’s necessary to notice that these feelings received’t all the time be launched in an exaggerated method. For some individuals, excessive ranges of emotional reactivity may be expressed by feeling disconnected or by attempting to suppress their intense emotional experiences by different means like meals or alcohol.
Consider it this manner: On the one hand, you have got the feelings you’re experiencing. However, you have got your ideas and actions. Emotional reactivity happens when there’s no filter between the 2.
When somebody is emotionally reactive, they’re typically on the whim of their feelings. They go the place their anger or concern takes them, even when it’s in a route they’ll later remorse.
What Causes Emotional Reactivity?
Being emotionally dysregulated and processing feelings in a dysfunctional method can have root causes in numerous elements of life.
- Childhood trauma. Studies have proven that kids who skilled trauma throughout their upbringing usually tend to specific their feelings aggressively. What’s extra, they have been noticed to really feel extra destructive feelings that they don’t know methods to deal with.
- Genetics. A 2014 study means that “the flexibility to control feelings is influenced by genetic legal responsibility.” Moreover, trauma has been proven to change the mechanism by which the genes are expressed. Subsequently if mother and father or grandparents went by traumatic experiences, they’d go on genes that make a person extra emotionally reactive.
- Setting and way of life selections. As a result of your emotional regulating skills are strongly linked to the well being of your nervous system, way of life selections impression the way in which you react to nerve-racking conditions. So lack of sleep, poor vitamin, and a sedentary routine might have an effect on the way in which you management your feelings.
When you can’t pinpoint precisely what’s inflicting your sample of feelings to get you overwhelmed, it’s all the time advisable to hunt a licensed skilled for assist.
With that being mentioned, it’s nonetheless useful to determine a couple of indicators that you simply’re coping with to create extra self-awareness and speed up your therapeutic journey.
Indicators of Emotional Reactivity
Listed here are some indicators that you simply’re coping with a excessive degree of emotional reactivity:
- The feeling of missing management over your reactions
- Your anger is overwhelming and makes you say hurtful issues
- You might have temper swings typically and may’t actually predict the way you’re going to really feel
- Could have skilled melancholy or nervousness
- Feeling such as you’re not adequate
- Your feelings are likely to overwhelm you
- Lack of feeling grounded and supported
- Suppressing feelings by self-sabotaging behaviors
- Emotionally disconnecting when feelings get intense
Creating consciousness takes you one step nearer to mastering your emotional freedom. However there are a couple of extra methods that will help you dive deeper into the world of your feelings.

Methods to Lower Emotional Reactivity: 4 Suggestions From Mindvalley Specialists
Regulating your feelings is a ability that each one people have naturally inside them. However resulting from unhealthy coping mechanisms, we unconsciously be taught that it’s higher to run away, repress, or vent out our feelings.
Nevertheless, there may be one other method.
Because the saying goes, the one method out is thru. Connecting again to your feelings means accessing a deeper knowledge that has all the time been inside.
Listed here are a couple of methods to take action, defined by Mindvalley trainers.
1. Come again to your physique | Jennifer Partridge
In trendy society, the idea of “feeling” has been changed into a rational, intellectualized, overcomplicated factor.
However how does one really feel something? By means of your senses. And the way do you return to your senses? By connecting to your physique.
Jennifer Partridge, coach of Mindvalley’s Tapping Into Emotional Mastery Quest, explains how all emotions might be felt in and thru your physique. And one solution to make it simpler is by training EFT tapping remedy.
Throughout the Quest, Jennifer guides you thru every day practices that assist you entry your physique’s knowledge and make area in your feelings to return and go. So you’ll be able to really feel your emotions, so simple as it sounds.
Create your individual tapping apply: 5 Methods to Heal Your Ache and Traumas With EFT Tapping.
2. Inform your thoughts what you need it to do | Marisa Peer
Marisa Peer, coach of Mindvalley’s Fast Transformational Hypnotherapy for Abundance Quest, highlights the significance of telling your thoughts what you need it to do. This implies observing your internal narrative.
What do you often inform your thoughts? “I’m so anxious”? Or possibly “I don’t know methods to deal with overwhelming conditions”? So ask your self: How do your beliefs concerning the world sound?
Whenever you’re consistently reiterating a story that’s self-deprecating, your thoughts will comply with and provide you with what you need. Chances are you’ll find yourself consistently figuring out your self as somebody who can’t management their anger. Then, it’ll come as no shock that you simply’ll end up consistently lashing out on the individuals round you.
You may rewire your thought processes by listening to the free guided meditations Marisa provides on the Mindvalley app.

3. Join deeply to the current second | Juan Pablo Barahona
Juan Pablo Barahona (JuanPa for brief), coach of Mindvalley’s Extremely Presence Quest teaches you ways to return to residing within the current second.
In response to him, residing within the second means aligning your physique, feelings, thoughts, and spirit with the current, the place lies the best potential you’ll be able to obtain.
Whenever you create this sort of connection, your potential to control your feelings expands, making it simpler so that you can lengthen the area between set off and response. There’s nothing extra highly effective than figuring out methods to stay so presently that your instinct is aligning to information you thru something you’re experiencing.
Follow being within the current second: Methods to Dwell within the Second, In response to Quantum Stream Healer.
4. Study to be proactive as a substitute of reactive | Jon & Missy Butcher
Jon and Missy Butcher, creators of Lifebook and trainers of Mindvalley’s Lifebook On-line Quest, underline the ability that you simply maintain inside to take management over your life.
And relating to your feelings, as a substitute of a direct response, create a response that’s consistent with your core values. It doesn’t imply it’s a must to be impassive; it means you’re answerable for your self and your responses.
You might have the liberty to function the way in which you need, however you could take accountability for the alternatives you make and the actions you’re taking.
— Jon Butcher, coach of Mindvalley’s Lifebook On-line Quest
It additionally means you don’t shift blame or accountability. Another person might have angered you, nevertheless it’s your accountability to decide on the suitable response.
Your feelings, exterior occasions, and different individuals will all the time affect you. However it’s as much as you to resolve whether or not to easily react to them or provide you with a considerate response.
The extra management you’re taking over your reactions and feelings, the extra you’ll be able to steer your life within the route you need it to go.
Get impressed by Mindvalley college students’ tales of transformation within the Lifebook Evaluations.
Go Again to Your Essence
The gorgeous factor about studying to beat emotional reactivity is that you simply slowly connect with who you might be authentically. Going additional on this journey will reveal that you’re neither your feelings nor your reactions.
Your essence goes past the indignant conflicts or the hurtful feedback which may come out. Slowly however absolutely, by connecting to that peace inside, you uncover how superbly humane your feelings make you.
After which you’ll be able to see how they act as highly effective guides by your transformation. When you want some steerage alongside the way in which, Mindvalley can step in for you. With quests packed filled with knowledge and highly effective insights, you’ll be able to discover:
- Methods to use EFT tapping to launch emotional blockages within the Tapping Into Emotional Mastery Quest with Jennifer Partridge
- The best way you possibly can wire your thoughts to obtain abundance within the Fast Transformational Hypnotherapy for Abundance Quest with Marisa Peer
- Methods to rework your actuality through the use of the ability of the current second within the Extremely Presence Quest with JuanPa
- Designing the lifetime of your goals by addressing all of its elements within the Lifebook On-line Quest with Jon and Missy Butcher.
When you’re curious to get a peek into the knowledge of the packages right now, you’ll be able to both claim your free access or join the Lifebook Online Masterclass.
Chances are you’ll typically be afraid to leap into the pool of your feelings. However with the fitting steerage alongside the way in which, you’ll simply discover ways to move with all of them.
It solely takes the braveness to start. Now you can take step one.