I feel intensely. It’s not just stress or anxiety but all emotions- joy, anger, hurt, sadness, frustration, irritation et al. There is extensive research on emotion regulation in bipolar and anxiety disorders and there seems to be a connection. People with these disorders tend to be poor at regulating emotions. I have spoken to friends who have mental conditions and they too say they feel intensely. 

I used to be much worse at regulating emotions than I am today. The tendency to feel and react intensely and not be aware of it got me into hurtful situations in personal relationships and at work. Awareness and acceptance have helped me to take a step back and reevaluate my feelings in most situations.

Apart from being attuned to my reactions on a day to day basis, I realize now that my emotions have played a big role in how I reacted in stressful circumstances in relationships and professional settings. With awareness and some tools, I have got better at handling these situations.  

Day to day

There is a large range of scenarios that fall under this category. For example, interaction over household chores with your family or interaction over some work task with a co-worker. A flash of irritation is quick to appear and can be very off putting to the person you are interacting with.

In this sort of a scenario, it is best to consciously take a pause, take a mindful breath, give yourself and the situation space and then respond. I find it helpful to then analyze whether my response was a ‘normal reaction’ or an ‘overreaction’. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy or DBT focuses on using tools like this.

Professional setting 

I have a tendency to throw myself 110% into whatever I am doing. This doesn’t always work well in professional settings because 1) it may not be a healthy attitude or approach and 2) most other people are able to treat a job as a job. 

When I complained to my therapist about my work frustrations, he told me it was my problem and I was expecting too much. He said that I only have control over my actions and that I cannot expect the same standards from other people as I set for myself. This is true for personal relationships as well. In a professional setting it would mean a certain way of completing a task or expectation of quality standards etc.

As obvious as it may sound, it was a revelation to me. It helped me to draw boundaries and remind myself that a job is separate from the rest of my life and needs to be treated as such. 

Personal Relationships 

I find that emotion regulation in friendships and other personal relationships is harder because we are more vulnerable, less guarded and more invested in these relationships. I would get very close very quickly to people I got along with and therefore emotionally attached as well. This would end up in my having unrealistic expectations from the person and consequently, in many cases, getting hurt and having an unsatisfactory parting of ways.

For years I thought this is how everybody operated. As it turns out, it is not how everybody operates but rather a function of poor emotion regulation in me. I found it challenging to keep my emotions under control. 

Even today, during arguments or disagreements, I see this lack of regulation clearly. The closer the people, the less the regulation. What does that mean?  I tend to get unreasonably angry or irritated or have an outburst of tears, more so with people I take for granted. 

There is a tendency to take things more personally and inability to look at them rationally. Only now I have learnt to recognize these emotions and physically remove myself from the situation. I either go into another room and calm myself down or tell the person that I need a time out because I’m getting very upset.

Very often once I’m calm, I find myself thinking, “What the hell was that?” Sometimes, it feels like an out of body experience, where the person getting angry and upset is not really me; a dissociative experience. This experience is emotionally draining and upsetting. My friend aptly calls it ‘an emotional hangover’. Honestly, I don’t know how much of this is my personality and how much is the illness. 

Window of rationality

The emotion regulation is further complicated by my mood cycles and where I am in my mood cycle. My ability to react rationally wanes as I start feeling low. Emotion regulation is at its worst when I am depressed. 

This is essential to understand so that I and people around me know when I am capable of making the right decisions or having difficult conversations rationally. In my father’s words, this ‘window of rationality’ is much smaller for me than for people without any mental illness. 

What’s the solution?

As with everything else, we come back to the same solution – awareness. In the past, I have felt wronged and hurt many times. I can compare my reactions only to my own reactions because I don’t know how other people react. Today, I can judge whether my reaction in a certain situation was appropriate or not. 

I won’t lie to you, it is extremely difficult and takes a lot of hard work, all the time. At the end of the day it is worth it because today I am able to have more functional and fruitful relationships, personally and professionally, than I did before. 

I am not a mental health professional. All blog posts are based on my subjective experiences and opinions.