In the quiet eye of our inner storms, there lies a gentle whisper of balance and peace, often drowned out by the roaring winds of our inward emotional turbulence. It’s a universal human experience, this inner tumult—a chaotic dance of thoughts, feelings, and sensations that can unsettle the sturdiest of ships on the roughest of seas.
Yet, within this very turbulence, there is a profound opportunity for growth and tranquility. Let us discuss the root cause of such emotional unrest in the first place, and the best ways on how to calm your inward emotional turbulence.
What is Emotional Turbulence?
Emotional turbulence is akin to a sudden storm in the vast skies of our inner world. It is when our emotions become a whirlwind, swirling with the intensity of a tempest, disrupting the harmony of our mental landscape.
This phenomenon can be triggered by life’s unpredictable events or the ebb and flow of our relationships, casting us into a sea of feelings that range from joy to despair, often without warning. Like a ship caught in rough waters, we can feel tossed about, struggling to regain our bearings in life.
Emotional turbulence is not merely a temporary disturbance; it can be a deeply unsettling experience, where our turbulent emotions swing back and forth too frequently that they challenge our ability to stand firm. It is in these moments that our inner resilience is tested, and our capacity for emotional navigation is called to the forefront.
Turbulent Emotions and the Human Mind
Our mind is the storage of all information coming from our profound exposures and wide experiences. Whether this knowledge is useful and beneficial will depend on how all these exposures and experiences impact our thoughts positively or negatively.
Our mind will always be receptive to good and easygoing tasks and never welcome any intriguing or mind-boggling matters as those create a lot of worrisome and wavering thoughts. This is where our human mind is deceptive to the reality of living, where one must learn to understand that there is no smoke without fire and that it takes two to tango.
Similarly, there could never be any emotional turbulence in ourselves when we have undergone all the hardships and suffering when we were young. The combined experiences of the hardships and suffering in our lives serve as useful information that helps to stop the mind from doing anything that will create more crises as we grow older.
No one will fall into the trap of undergoing all sorts of emotional turbulence if one could have learned the inner knowledge of wisdom when we are young at age. How we obtain this kind of inner knowledge of wisdom is done through exposing ourselves to all kinds of suffering as well as painful experiences. This will then become an asset to rely on in the future to avoid any unforeseen circumstances of creating any form of emotional instability in our lives.
Common Causes and How to Calm Your Inward Emotional Turbulence
In contrast, today’s world of living is so hectic and full of vibrant activities and festivals or celebrations that we are on the verge of depression and mental disturbance if one is not careful about managing all these hectic schedules. Furthermore, with all the heavy workload and overtime charts, one is certain to be affected and eventually arouse our mind to become emotionally turbulent and experience mental disturbance.
On top of those events, we also need to cope with our family needs and intercommunication. While what is turbulence on a person may differ from one individual to another, we cannot deny all these predicaments combined will increase the chances for one to be truly upset and emotionally unstable in the long run.
How to Calm Yourself to Avoid Being Emotionally Turbulent?
In order to calm our mind to become emotionally stable and tranquil, one needs to train our simple mind from young. We should always learn to be self-reliant and have the drive to live independently through our parental informal education at home.
Where there is informal education at home, everything is much smoother, lighter and easier to deal with when we are all grown up to face any eventual dilemmas. Informal education is such a great tool to train our younger generation to become well-disciplined, respectful to others, and obedient in law and order.
Eventually, a well-disciplined person will automatically possess self-independence and this kind of mental training will help one to uplift the spirit of self-determination. When we are independent and determined, these traits will help build up the readiness to face any emotional problems and thereby thwart any emotional turbulence coming into the mind.
How to Calm Yourself When You Are Currently Facing Emotional Turbulence?
But what if you are already past the perfect young age to cultivate and train your mind to not be easily upset? Technically, you still can do so as long as you have the will, then there is a way. It may be more difficult the older you get, but we all have to start somewhere to be mentally strong.
One of the best ways to calm yourself when you are experiencing inward emotional turbulence is by listening to soothing instrumental music. Allow yourself some time resting in a comfortable position as you let your mind focus on happy thoughts along with the music. This is a good method to destress.
Another method is to take a nice walk with nature, such as in parks. The calming scenery of flora and fauna also helps to soothe your inner turbulence and make you feel more composed.
Ultimately, we still have to fall back to applying simplicity and moderation in life as the solid way to avoid emotional upsets. The more materialistic things we want or chase after in life, the more greed, dissatisfaction and also issues we will create within ourselves, so much so we end up suffering unnecessarily from emotional instability having to resolve the problems that crop up later.
Caveats to Take Note of When Building Emotional Resilience
It is important that any forms of exposure and wide experiences must be beneficial in nature. Sometimes, wrong exposures and experiences due to wrong influences and bad companionships could cause our lives to become miserable and filled with mental disturbances.
Hence, to achieve good and beneficial exposures and experiences, there must be a prevailing ideal condition available, a suitable environment, and proper timing of our presence.
For instance, when we are growing up in a home where there are frequent gambling sessions going on, one will gradually be borne into an emotional and unsteady mind due to all the noises and arguments from the activity. This is bad environmental exposure.
An example of unfavorable condition is when one is constantly exposed to parental dissension and ultimately to divorce.
Lastly is the timing of our presence on this earth. While reminiscing those golden years of the sixties in which everything was refreshing and tranquil, life was always peaceful and people were calmer in their minds through simple and moderate living. Everyone walked to work or traveled by foot as there were very few cars and motorcycles. The timing of those ancient years made it easy to cope with life, and cases of turbulent people or those having inward emotional turbulence were rare or even remote.
Ideally, we want to have the proper condition, environment and timing or period to cultivate emotional resilience. However, even though it may prove to be more difficult to build up a strong EQ when you do not have the best conditions, it doesn’t mean it is an impossible feat but you will need to be more mindful of these unfavorable situations to prevent them from affecting your emotions too deeply to the point of suffering from turbulent emotions.
Final Thoughts
It is important to note that for any emotional turbulence coming into our mind is usually aroused from our daily predicaments due to our insatiable wants and needs. It is common knowledge that we will always easily entangle ourselves with all kind of debts arising from our house instalments, car hire purchase and lastly investment into shares and commodities market. All these need constant vigilant and observation and sometimes depriving of our sleep due worrisome and anxieties.
It is these constant pressure of debts that need to be rectified often that eventually developed our mental turbulence. Hence in knowing that all these mental turbulence is actually coming from our insatiable wants and needs to fulfill our desirable objectives, we should always give food for thought if we ever want to buy a house or a car as owning any one of them is luxury and expensive.
Life is always uncertain ,so does our career and business. There will always be a time when there is a great depression or recession and everything in this world become topsy turvy and our financial budget become tight and upset. Our mind would then in a stage of mental turbulence. It is best to always live simple and be contented with what we have and this is the only way to help overcome any problem of mental turbulence.