The advice to watch your emotions as they happen…

The advice to watch your emotions as they happen can increase your EQ because it puts space between the interpreted reaction and the emotion. It also teaches us not to fight or try and suppress our emotions which is always a losing battle. Zen Meditation instructs that when a distracting thought or emotion arises while meditating when notices it and returns to his present moment.

— from The Mind in the Cockpit · No Self No Problem by Chris Niebauer

In the book

Manage the inner voice. When a thought is strangling you, learn to step back and see it as just a thought — a passing appearance of words, not a fact; practice changing your inner dialogue, or stopping it altogether for stretches of the day. Watch your emotions as they rise and name them in the moment, which slips a sliver of space between the feeling and whatever you do about it. Schedule the conditions for insight. Since the best realizations arrive when the mind is relaxed and unhurried, build in the walk, the shower, the daydream; and turn experience into wisdom by actually reflecting on it, rather than just accumulating it. — The Mind in the Cockpit

Psychologists call this reappraisal, and it works like a fresh coat of paint transforming a familiar room. The first tool of reappraisal is to name the feeling. Putting a word on an emotion — this is anger, this is fear — quiets the brain and lowers its arousal; watch your feelings as they rise and name them in the moment, and you slip a sliver of space between the feeling and whatever you might do about it. The richer your vocabulary of feeling — the more finely you can tell apart frustration from disappointment from grief — the better you can manage yourself. — The Heart in the Cockpit (Emotion/Awe/Anxiety/Regret/Empathy)

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