Get older.
Oh yeah, for sure, my emotions have all gotten less. Less high, less low, I’ve just chilled out in every direction
To you and @Dr. Wesker , how old are we talking about? Roughly after how many decades this becomes something you notice- and does it keep building up?
I’m in my mid 30s and I can agree I don’t feel anywhere as intensely as I did ten years ago, but for me this is a bug, not a feature. So I’m really curious about how others have fared in this regard
It sounds like a BS answer, but it’s true. My personal experience is that the older I’ve gotten, the less I’m affected by the world around me. My best guess is the experience of time can lend coping mechanisms, under the proper circumstances I’m sure.
Acknowledge them. Allow yourself to feel them, knowing they are only temporary. The more you try to suppress them, the longer it will take to work through them.
Exercise
I used to be very empathic, I cared so much about the world and everyone in it. Making sure people were taken care of, and hoping for the best for everything. I would get depressed when bad things happened and I couldn’t do anything about it. But as I’ve gotten older and the world has gotten so much worse and it keeps getting worse and worse. I find I’ve adopted an “It is what it is” attitude about nearly everything. I have zero faith in humanity and it’s ability to over come the downward spiral we are in, and doubt we will still be here in 100 years, and frankly have gotten to the point were I feel that might be for the best. Time for the universe to hit reset and start again.
It’s less about the intensity of your emotions and more about how you deal with them.
Let’s say you got really angry in public. It’s fine to get angry, sometimes there are good reasons for that. But there are multiple ways to deal with that anger. An unhealthy way would be to run amok and harm innocent people in order to vent. A healthy way would be to calm down, reflect on what makes you angry, and then either make an effort to improve your situation or remove yourself from it.
You can’t help feeling a certain way, but you can choose how you react to your emotions. Try to pick the option that is the least destructive to yourself and those around you. If emotional regulation is hard for you, you can learn coping skills from a therapist.
Techniques to manage the intensity of emotions sit between the parts you’re describing.
I agree that Inbetween the feeling rising up and our reaction there’s a choice to be made. Highly intense feelings overwhelm and reduce our choices in the moment.
Understanding what’s underneath or behind our feelings is one excellent way to do this which sadly doesn’t work for everything, especially the most intense feelings
This is why I recommend dialectical behavioral therapy. It teaches mindfulness and radical acceptance to reframe your relationship with your emotions in a more healthy light, and also solid techniques for emotion regulation and distress tolerance. It helped me soooo much.
Edit to add: there is a lot of free DBT material on the internet that you can pursue without a therapist, if there are none available to you at the moment.
