Get Rid of Your Emotional Garbage
When you clean up your home, you organize, sort, and throw things away. When you’re making dinner, the scraps go into the garbage. When you’ve accumulated too many papers and files in your office, you start to get rid of them. And what about feelings and emotions? Is there a “trash can” for them?
Emotional garbage builds up if we don’t know how to get rid of it as time goes by. Until one day, you won’t have any room for anything else. The problem is that you won’t be able to fit in any positive feelings, because you’re up to the brim with negative ones.
If you’ve ever gotten out of bed completely demotivated, not wanting to do anything, if you have the awful feeling that giving in is better than fighting, then, maybe your threshold of stress and toxic emotions has exceeded its limit.
This is more common than you think and it can happen many times in one lifetime. When precisely? When we can’t get rid of pain, resentment, frustration, stress, anger, vengeance, envy, and other difficult emotions they start building up until our “hard drive” no longer has room for anything else.
Your emotional garbage may not occupy any physical space. You won’t be any thinner when you throw it away. But you’ll be ridding yourself of a great psychological, mental and spiritual burden.
You must purge those bad feelings that do you no good and, on the contrary, can actually make you feel lousy. If you don’t, you can slowly start feeling more and more dissatisfied with the life you’re living. And you’ll also have less energy to face your daily tasks.
If you’re ready to start throwing away your emotional garbage, you should pay attention to these efficient and interesting techniques.
How to get rid of emotional garbage
First of all, it’s good to adjust your expectations. This doesn’t mean you have to stop dreaming, projecting and striving for excellence. You should just reduce some of the pressure and adjust what you expect from yourself as well as others. When our expectations are too high and these are not met, the sadness and frustration generated will also be high. This applies whether it’s in our jobs, marriage, studies, or future plans.
So, the first thing you should do to throw away your emotional garbage is adjust your goals to your current possibilities. Maybe you could set goals for yourself in the short term, which, if added up, could turn into something much bigger. For example, instead of wanting to be the manager of your company, you could shoot for supervisor first. Later, you could try going up the ranks further.
Second, always keep a positive attitude. If you’re constantly thinking about bad things, it’s more likely you’ll fail. Get into the habit of keeping a “positivity diary.” Every day write down at least three good things that happened to you, even if they seem small or insignificant.
From getting a seat on the subway to finding some cash in your old jeans, to more pleasant news like getting a new job, having a good conversation with someone you love, etc. You’ll start to feel happier with what you have and more grateful for what happens to you. You won’t have room for negative emotions.
The third step to throwing away your toxic feelings and being happier is to be proactive. What does this mean? Well, that it’s not enough to just look inside ourselves and say “yes, I have bad emotions.“ You also need to do something about it. Act on it as soon as possible, always at your own pace, and get rid of everything that weighs you down.
Rather than just watching your emotional garbage pile up, start to clean. You can do it slowly by gathering up what’s closest to you. Or you can devote a whole day to removing all of the garbage once and for all.
No need to buy any cleaning products. You can implement certain techniques to do it, such as meditation, relaxation, conscious breathing, an anger management course, etc.
You’ll begin to notice that “life smiles at you and you smile back,” and that will affect everything around you.
