45 Are Your Emotions Hijacking You?

I say this a lot, your emotions are valid.

Why?

Because our emotions are rooted in our subconscious mind, so as long as we are a living breathing being, we’re going to have emotions. 

But in a worst-case scenario, we get emotionally hijacked.

An emotional hijack refers to a personal emotional response that is immediate, overwhelming, and out of measure with the actual stimulus because it has been triggered from a much more significant emotional threat.

This term was first coined by psychologist Daniel Goleman in 1995. Another way to explain this is emotional hijack is a situation in which the part of your brain that serves as your emotional processor, hijacks, or even bypasses your normal reasoning process.

An example of an emotional hijack can be when you suddenly snap at someone when they have only said one word. It isn’t really that word that triggered the anger, it’s the emotions behind what previously happened. You might regret your own reactions and hate yourself for being a slave to your own emotions.

You become programmed to react in a certain way to a specific set of circumstances and might feel out of self-control. If you ever felt this way, then you are being hijacked by your emotions. 

To break away from the hijacking you really only have two choices:

Choice #1 You can forget what happened, move on like any other normal day and react the same way the next time you’re faced with similar circumstances. Or,

Choice #2  you can try to sort through your thoughts and feelings, like pieces of a puzzle. 

You need to do some inner work and dig for the answer to WHY you reacted the way you did, you can alter and train your default reaction so that your response would be different next time. 

Some good self-reflection questions to contemplate your behavior are: 

• What is the real reason I reacted the way I did? 
• Did my reaction help me or harm me? 
• How will I feel about this in an hour? How about In a  month? Or A year later? 
• What would I do differently if I could do it again? 
• What will I say to myself the next time this happens that would help me think more clearly and react differently? 

Get yourself thinking, do these reflections often, recognize your emotional behaviors. Instead of feeling guilty for what you did, turn those emotional hijacks into a catalyst for intentional thoughts and reflection, and of course, the ultimate goal is eventually, to change. 

A lot of people use emotions and feelings interchangeably and I think that’s not very accurate. Feelings are the reactions to circumstances that can come after the emotion. For example, we sometimes would say I’m feeling very stressed out after this happened. But the FEELING can be different for everyone. Someone else might feel excited after the exact circumstances.

So you see, we get to determine our thoughts after the situation, and that in turn determines our feelings towards the situation. So the good news is you can control your thoughts or practice changing negative thoughts into positive thoughts, that is one major way to stop emotional hijack.

Other ways to stop emotional hijacking include focusing on taking longer deeper breaths before reacting or change of scenery. You can literally also get up and walk elsewhere. If you are having a conversation, you can delay the conversation or even come back to it rather than allowing impulsive reactions to cloud your judgment or have a negative impact on your words and behaviors. 

Always always always remember that our goal is to be maintaining a composed state of awareness, and being mindful and very conscious of your reactions.

Choose your thoughts intentionally.

Believe that you are in control and even when you’re being hijacked, you will have the absolute power to stop it right there.

You are the CEO of this organization called YOUR life!