3 Easy Ways to Change Your Emotional State Instantly

The quality of your life is determined in part by the quality of your emotions.  Part of a good life is feeling good most of the time. Unfortunately, many people feel like they are victims of their emotions - that their emotional state is something that is outside of their control.  However, the truth is that there are several simple techniques you can use to instantly change your emotional state from a negative one to a positive one.  In this article I share 3 simple methods: changing your physiology, changing your focus and witnessing your emotions.

Change your physiology

Picture a depressed person. What do they look like? 

• Is their posture straight or are they slouching? Is their head up or down?
• Do they speak loudly and quickly or slowly and quietly?
• Is their voice expressive or monotone? Is their breathing deep or shallow?
• Are their facial muscles tight or slack?

Compare this picture now with a person who is really excited and go through the list of questions again.  It is obvious what the differences in their bodies between the people are.

When I speak of physiology, it includes the following:

• Posture
• Breathing rate and depth
• Gestures
• Facial expressions
• Muscular relaxation or tension
• Movements
• Voice tone, volume, expressiveness, speed

Clearly, when the way you feel changes, your physiology changes. However, most people don't realize that when your physiology changes, the way you feel changes.  This is something I first learned about from Tony Robbins and studied in-depth when learning NLP. Take a depressed person, put a smile on their face, get them to breathe deeply, stand up straight and speak with authority.  While it will feel very forced at first, in a few minutes they will no longer feel depressed.  It's not a permanent solution to depression, but can be quite effective to induce a state change in the moment. Try it out for yourself.

When your physiology changes, your emotional state follows quickly.  In fact, many of the behaviors that people engage in to change their emotional state work because of the change in physiology.  Consider the following examples:

• Smoking - Many people live feeling very stressed. When you are stressed, your muscles are tense and your breathing becomes shallow. Smoking a cigarette forces you to breathe deeply and relax your body which eliminates the stress for a short period of time. A similar effect can be achieved by consciously engaging in some deep breath and, as an added bonus, no lung cancer.
• Eating "comfort foods" - Eating has a more significant effect on the body's biochemistry. Aside from foods such as cookies and ice cream being anchors for pleasure, they change the body's blood sugar and cause more the blood to go to the digestive organs. Again, eating as a response to stress results in deeper breathing and muscle relaxation. You can choose to skip out on the junk food and the accompanied health consequences
• Sports - Playing sports is great because it engages your whole body and radically changes your physiology. For the majority of the day, most people don't move very much. When playing a sport, that changes entirely. You're jumping, running and breathing hard. You feel really alive. Plus, it's good for your long term health.

Think about the physiology of different emotional states you would like to be in more often and try to actively put yourself into your physiology.  If you can do it precisely, you will find yourself in that emotional state in the matter of a few moments.

Here's a simple exercise you can do to develop greater awareness of how your physiology affects your emotional state:

1. Get a partner and pick a short story about your life to tell them.
2. The partner will note your physiology as you tell the story
3. Tell the story like you are bored out of your mind
4. Tell the story like it was the worst thing that ever happened to you
5. Tell the story like it was the best thing that ever happened to you
6. Get feedback from your partner and note how your physiology was different in each case

For an exercise your can engage in yourself over the long term, begin by creating a list of emotional states you would like to feel more often. Here's a sample list:

• Confident
• Passionate
• Curious
• Grateful
• Energized
• Determined
• Happy

Remember times in the past where you felt each of these desired states and take special notice of how you used your body.  Write down your findings.  Next, as you go through your life and naturally go into one of these desired states, notice your physiology and make refinements to what you wrote down. 

By the end of a week or so, you will have a complete personal physiological profile for each of these emotional states. The next step is to practice putting yourself in the physiology corresponding to each of the states deliberately.  Continue the practice until you can put yourself into any one of these emotional states at will.

By the time you have completed your exercise, you will have cultivated the ability to put yourself in any one of a number of resourceful emotional states at will.

Change Your Focus

The second way to change your emotional state quickly is to change your focus.  You can do this by changing what you focus or how you focus on it. This is something that people do naturally when they try to escape or distract themselves.  Once you understand this tool, you will be able to use it in a way that is more empowering.

You can choose to feel bad right now if you wanted to just by shifting your focus. It's easy.  You could choose to think about all the suffering that is going on in the world.  A child dies of starvation every 2.3 seconds.  People are losing their loved ones right now to cancer.  Or you could think about the events in your life that you still feel bad about. The time you felt rejected and alone.  The time you felt like a failure and believed you wouldn't amount to anything. The time you felt not good enough, not smart enough or not attractive enough.

It's pretty easy to get into a negative emotional state.

But you can choose to feel good right now just as easily. Once again, it's a matter of shifting your focus.  What about all the wonderful things going on in the world right at this moment?  Two people falling in love or getting married.  A child being born.  A baby's first steps or first words.  What about the great things that have happened in your life? The time where you felt completely loved.  Your accomplishment that you feel most proud of.  The times where you felt an inner sense that everything would be alright.

It's easy to get into a positive emotional state too.

So what exactly is going on here?  Each thought you have has an associated emotion.  For many thoughts, the emotion is very weak while for other thoughts, the emotion is strong, either positively or negatively. 

You can take advantage of this by consciously directing your focus towards thoughts that have a strong, positive emotion associated with them.  The easiest way to do this is with questions.  By asking and answering, you can shift your focus very quickly.  In his audio program, Personal Power II, Tony Robbins spends one CD outlining the power of questions to shift your focus.  It is something to check out if you want more detail.  Here's a sample list that will get you started:

• What's good in my life?
• What's good in the world?
• What am I grateful for?
• How am I blessed?
• What am I excited about?
• What are some of my best memories?
• What am I looking forward to?
• What am I proud of?
• Who do I love?
• Who loves me?

Now if you are in a very negative emotional state, the tendency might be to answer each question by saying "nothing:" and perpetuating the negative state.  The solution to this is to make a promise to yourself now (while you are in a good state) that you will not accept "nothing" as an answer and make it a personal standard.  You will continue to ask yourself the question until you get a genuine response. Alternatively, you could choose to use one the two other methods mentioned in this article.

Change How You Focus

Sometimes it is not advisable to change your state by changing what you focus on.  You might have a situation that needs to be dealt with immediately and choosing to ignore it would be irresponsible. In these cases, you can still switch from a negative state to a positive state by changing how you focus on the situation.

Typically, when focusing on an event in a negative way, there are several common elements that describe the focus:

1. Pessimistic - Your judgment about the situation in the present and how it will turn out in the future is overly negative. You assume the worst possible scenario and your negative feelings are a consequence of that. For example, you might lose your job and automatically start thinking about the possibility that you might lose your home.
2. Resisting reality - You refuse to accept reality as it is. Your refusal to accept the situation limits your ability to take action. Instead of accepting getting fired and looking for a new job, your inner dialogue goes on and on about how it's unfair, it can't be happening etc.
3. Problem-centered - By putting your focus on the problem, you are unable to think of solution. This would be similar to losing your job and incessantly complaining instead of thinking of how to get a new income stream and/or reduce expenses.
4. Lasting - You think that the current situation and your present emotional state are permanent. You feel as if because you lost your job now, you will never feel secure in a workplace.
5. Personal - You make the problem situation about you and who you are. The situation attacks your sense of identity. You make losing your job about you and your self-worth.

To solve this problem of focus, redirect yourself with some of the following questions:

• What`s good about this?
• How could this turn out for the best?
• How can I make the best out of this situation?
• What do I want?
• How can I create the situation I desire?
• What resources do I have available to me?
• How can I learn from this situation?

Become the Witness

The last way to change your emotional state is to simply witness it.  Just watch the emotion and allow it to be there.  Don't identify with it.  Just allow it to be.  I first read about this in Eckhart Tolle's book, The Power of Now (highly recommended). 

This is the subtlest and simplest technique of the three.  It isn't really about changing a negative emotion into a positive emotion.  Instead, it is about allowing the negative emotion to be there without any resistance to it.  When you do that, the negative emotion naturally dissipates on its own.

Another way to look at it is being present to your emotional state. Instead of being in your head, identifying with the emotion, your awareness is in your body, feeling the emotion as a physical sensation free from interpretation or judgment.

This technique is best explained through an example.  Let's say you are intensely angry about something.  In your mind, you are replaying all the images that make you angry and having internal dialogue along the lines of "How could he do this to me. This is totally unfair. How could someone be so inconsiderate."  Basically, your physiology and focus is totally engaged in your anger.  We could say that "you are angry".

From this place, if you have enough awareness, you can choose to watch your anger instead.  You stop the mental movies and inner chatter and move your awareness into your body.  You watch the sensations in your body.  Now we could say that "there is anger in you."  You are no longer identified with the anger; you are the witness.

As you are present with the emotion, it naturally dissipates.  Within 5-10 minutes, the anger is completely gone and you are calm and composed.  Now, from this resourceful state, you can take effective action.

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The key to all of these techniques, but especially the third one, is emotional awareness.  If you don't know that you are feeling angry, depressed or frustrated (because you are identified with the emotion), you can't change the feeling.  So the key to cultivating your skill with three techniques is being consistently aware of the feelings that are going through your body.  This may be a challenge for you if you are stuck in your head most of the time (this was certainly true for me) but stick with it and you will have a level of emotional mastery that will make life a lot more fun.