Learn How to Leave and Return with More Strength

When you’re faced with a difficult situation, it takes a lot of bravery to retreat at the right time, reflect, think about what happened, understand how you feel, and return and try again once you’ve regained your strength.

Choosing the right moment to withdraw from a relationship, from an argument with another person, or from an unsatisfying job requires you to have strength of will and overcome your fear of the consequences. Sometimes, we go through situations that wear us out, and we’re not capable of leaving them in order to regain strength.

The search for happiness

In some circumstances, it’s necessary to think about your own personal happiness and find inner peace to regain strength. In these situations, it’s essential to be consistent in what you think, feel, say, and do.

Happiness is a term that seems utopian, and we tend to refer to it in the past, i.e. “in the summer of 2000, I was happy.” Researchers in the field of positive psychology agree on a definition of the concept of happiness based on three components:

• Frequent experiences of positive affect (joy, pleasure, love, affection)
• Infrequent experiences of negative affect (sadness, stress, anxiety, fear, pain)
• High levels of satisfaction in life

That is, a happy person is someone who feels many positive emotions, few negative emotions, and satisfaction with their life. However, don’t forget that there is no such thing as objective happiness. Rather, there is a subjective state of happiness in each one of us.

The search for this subjective state of happiness is what pushes us to remove ourselves from situations that make us uncomfortable or unhappy, and to return once we’ve recuperated the necessary energy.

Emotional intelligence and its value for regaining strength

Human happiness is directly related to certain emotions and moods. This is where emotional intelligence comes into play, as it is the ability to understand your emotions and those of others.

With regards to emotions, there are specialists who think that you can completely control them, and others who believe that there’s nothing you can do to keep them under control. However, there are also studies that conclude that the way you interpret your emotions can change the way you experience them.

For example, if you’re afraid of speaking in public, you’ll think of those nerves as negative, but if you interpret them as the desire to do it well, it’s more likely that you’ll be successful. You just have to understand how you feel and manage those emotions in your favor.

You’re not escaping, you’re reflecting to return stronger

Solitude often gives you time to learn about yourself and reflect on your life. It gives you space and a place to identify your strengths and weaknesses and work on what you should improve.

For this reason, you shouldn’t view solitude as something negative, but rather as a collaborator in the process of self-knowledge, which you’ll need in various moments of your existence. Sometimes you need to regain strength and energy, to return to your origin, and peace and solitude will help you do this.

How to manage your emotions and regain your energy

The use of emotional intelligence involves identifying your emotions and moods; for example, recognizing when you’re angry, nervous, or sad, so that you can act on the origin of the emotion and the emotion itself. Below, we provide you with some tools to manage your negative emotions.

Think about your virtues, not your weaknesses

If you stop for a minute and think about everything you tell yourself when something negative happens, you’ll realize that you’re the one  who is feeding into this emotion and causing it to grow bigger, little by little. If it was easy to manage at first, it can start to present a great challenge when it’s been contaminated.

If you make a mistake at work, you don’t have to torture yourself. Just learn from it so that you don’t let the discouragement grow. Remember all the times you did things well. In this way, you can manage your negative emotions, and return to your inner peace.

Direct your attention elsewhere

Just like what happens with little children when they cry and you try to distract them with a toy, if a negative emotion starts to invade you, you could concentrate on another task to divert your attention and return to an inner state of tranquility. Attention control plays a direct role in stopping the negative emotional cycles that feed back into themselves.

Try meditating

Different scientific studies have demonstrated that meditation helps to prevent negative thoughts and emotions. Meditating can help you manage your fears and reduce anxiety, since it works on breathing and concentration.

Find a quiet place, breathe slowly, and feel the air gently enter and leave your lungs, while your mind and muscles start to relax. Practice meditation every day and you’ll gradually achieve good results.