# 4. They process painful emotions.

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Do you ever wish you could be more emotionally strong?

. Do you ever feel like your emotions are all over the place?

. Or like your moods ping-pong around erratically and unpredictably?

. Do you ever wish you could feel a little less at the mercy of external events—able to stay cool and keep your calm no matter what was happening?

While there’s nothing wrong with feeling any emotion, some people control their emotional reactions better than others. I’ve worked hard over the years to become emotionally strong. To be clear: I’m not perfect and I’m not always strong emotionally. This isn’t about perfection, but about practicing to be emotionally strong every day – including on days when you’ve fallen short of being emotionally strong.

Here are 10 things emotionally strong people do:

1.They adapt to any given situation.

Life is like a roller-coaster.

It has many ups and downs. You can’t expect to always stay on top of the ride. You have to be able to adjust to your given situation. Bad days and difficult times are part of our lives. We need to learn to adapt.

When change barges in through my door, instead of assuming the end of the world as I know it, an apocalypse, an armagedon, I instead conclude that maybe when everything shakes out things will turn out ok for me. One thing I do in times of difficulties is to remember a past difficulty I overcame. Doing this gives me strength and hope to overcome my present difficulty.

When you’re flexible, you navigate life through an open door, instead of banging your head against a wall.

Emotionally strong people are flexible.

2. They react less.

How do you react to this situation?

Someone says something awful to you and you stand there, powerless and hurt. Do you come up with the just-right cocktail of words to deliver? The perfect knock-out verbal punch?

It’s easy to react.

Except…

That lethal slingshot retort you hurl in time feels terrible afterwards.

Sometimes the most powerful thing to say is nothing. Sometimes the most powerful thing is to react less.

In life we come across multiple situations where someone provokes us. You may not be able to control what life throws at you, but you always have a choice on how you react. People react better to kind words and gentleness. Learning to manage your emotions is an important part of becoming emotionally strong.

For example, if at the end of a long, difficult day someone on the train pushes you with his backpack, brush it off instead of flying off the handle and wondering why you are so often treated disrespectfully. If you’re sensitive to the small annoyances and verbal barbs we all encounter daily, you end up devoting time and energy to things that, ultimately, don’t matter.

3. They get on with life despite feeling terrible.

The sun does not stop revolving around earth when we feel terrible.

Even in our darkest moments, life continues.

You need to be able to live your life despite feeling difficult emotions. Because really, what’s the alternative?

You can’t wait to do important things with your life until you feel perfect.

4. They process painful emotions.

On some days, mood swings darken my days. I get times when I’m not okay. I feel low sometimes. I find myself a victim to my circumstances. I’ve learned I must process these uncomfortable emotions to heal and move on. When you sit with what you feel (which, I won’t lie to you, is uncomfortable as hell), you heal.

We rarely get to move on from painful emotions when we refuse to process them. As much as we wish we can leave them behind, can find separation, painful emotions are part of us and we must move forward with them.

In her article, Bad Days Are Good for You, Jessica Wildfire writes,

“When you try to get out of a bad day by shopping, going out drinking, or Netflix binging, you’re cheating. Retail therapy isn’t the answer to life’s big problems. That doesn’t mean you have to cancel your entire day, but it means accepting that buying things and watching one more episode of that show won’t make us feel better — just numb us.”

Painful emotions are another flavor in life’s feast, another instrument in the symphony we live. Even though the solo they play feel like they last forever, eventually a different instrument will replace them.

Emotionally strong people process their painful emotions, without judging themselves. To participate fully in the emotional grandeur and poignancy of life. To lend their hearts to their loved ones. To face and take on the intensity of love, loss, and the whole glorious gamut of human emotions in between.

5. They don’t take things personally.

I can’t tell you how many times I have experienced an emotional reaction to something that leaves me feeling like I am coming undone. A person makes a thoughtless comment and I cry for days. Someone in the office puts down my work and I spend nights awake questioning my competence.

But…

Once I’ve had time to gain perspective, I arrive at a place where I have to admit to myself something horrifying: my reaction to what happened was out of proportion in relation to what took place.

Emotionally strong people don’t take things personally.

Taking things personally means interpreting the actions of another are in relation to you when most of the time things that hurt you, insult you or worry you have nothing to do with you.

Not taking things personally means you make room for the possibility that not everything is about you. This does not mean things that aren’t personal don’t affect you, because they do. It means you take the blow differently because your emotions are not all wrapped up in what happened.

By setting their ego aside, emotionally strong people fight less, get angry less, feel offended less, and suffer less.

6. They choose their battles.

Fighting every battle exhausts you.

I used to fight every battle, even the ones that weren’t mine to fight. It’s not that I had boundless energy. It’s that not fighting made me feel like I wasn’t standing up to myself, like I wasn’t doing my feelings justice, or like I wasn’t being loyal enough to a friend. Like I had to make things right for everybody.

In learning to be emotionally strong, I learned to relinquish battles that took too much energy. Now, few battles strike me as worth a fight.

Emotionally strong people choose their battles.

If, for example, someone makes a nasty comment to them, they just shrug their shoulders letting the snarky comments right off them.

Emotionally strong people understand we have limitations.

7. They un-learn a worry practice.

If you want to be emotionally strong, you need to worry less.

I used to worry all the time. I worried something would happen to someone I loved, or that something would happen to me. I worried if a friend expressed anything less than ecstatic joy. I worried I had forgotten to close the garage door.

Worry drains us.

I believed if I worried about something, I could prevent it. Yup. I believed most things I worried about wouldn’t happen precisely because I worried about them. I saw my worry as a protective shield, an undetectable force that swirled around the people I loved and accompanied them wherever they went like an aura, like a halo on an angel’s head.

I explained this to a friend who looked at me before asking, “Nice. How is that working for you?”

I was stumped. I was stunned.

I realized I had been practicing being a worrier for years, and that, as such, I could un-learn it. Worry loses its power when you get busy doing something about what worries you.

To un-learn a worry practice, do something, anything about what worries you.

8. They don’t do things they don’t want to do.

I have a limited amount of time and so do you.

Time you spend doing something not worthwhile costs you. You could spend that same amount of time doing something of consequence.

To emotionally strong people, it’s less about how much they should consider tolerating toxic people and more about the possibility of spending that same amount of time with people they love and who loves them.

If you want to keep your emotional balance and sanity intact, get rid of baggage and commitments that make you miserable.

9. They choose to be vulnerable.

Emotionally strong people have experienced heartbreak, but it doesn’t hold them back; it makes them stronger. They are not afraid to love. Just because you’ve been hurt doesn’t mean you should shut love out of your life.

Open up your heart and embrace vulnerability. The love you find will be worth everything you go through to get it.

10. They don’t pretend.

On some days there’s a twinkle in their eyes and on other days, a rock weighing on their soul. Sometimes they are a complete mess. And you know what? Emotionally strong people are fine with that. They are far from perfect.

They’re human.

Like the rest of us.

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No one is born with emotional strength. It comes from years of struggle and working through difficult moments and emotions. People who have learned to be strong emotionally didn’t get there because life was easy.

We develop emotional strength over the course of our lives. It’s important to know how to be emotionally strong to take life’s knocks and keep going. After all, we are humans. We inflict and bear. And through it all, we learn.

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