Your emotions can feel like they hijack you sometimes, but they don’t get to decide what you do next… and in Episode 345 I’ll show you how to take your power back so that your feelings aren’t running the show. So, Let’s Talk About Mental Health!

---

Jump into the episode
(or scroll down for overview and transcript):

Find it on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Other platforms

---

Episode Overview:

A strong feeling can often hijack you and take over in moments… but you can learn how to control your emotions, without shutting them down or pretending they aren’t there. 

In this episode of the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, I’m exploring what really happens when strong emotions hit and the thinking part of your brain seems to disappear, leaving you snapping, shutting down, or saying something you later regret. If you struggle with managing emotions, emotional reactions or wondering why your emotions take over, I’ll show you how to stay calm without fighting your feelings or letting them make your choices. You’ll learn practical emotional regulation tools for how to calm down when upset or dealing with emotional overwhelm, and I’ll also explain how to respond instead of react, as well as why emotional self-control is a skill you build rather than something you either have or don’t and how being kinder to yourself can help you stop overreacting over time… because your feelings deserve to be heard, but they aren’t qualified to be the boss. 

👉 Ready to take back control of your emotions? Then let’s talk!

💡 TL;DR: If you want to learn how to manage your emotions, without suppressing them, then this episode will help you create enough space to stay calm, stop overreacting, and choose how you respond. 🙂

New here? Hi! Let’s Talk About Mental Health is your weekly dose of practical mental health advice for real life. I’m Jeremy Godwin (hello! 👋) and I keep things simple, honest, and doable so you can feel more in control of your life and your mental wellbeing. If you’re not already a free subscriber, sign up below to have episodes and transcripts land in your inbox every Sunday:

---

Episode Transcript:

How do you stay calm when your emotions take over?

Are your emotions running the show?

Because if they are, they’re probably either making a mess or making you feel terrible… or both.

You know how it is: a feeling hits you, and before you can even think you’ve just reacted: you’ve said the thing or sent the message or gone quiet and shut down and shut everyone out… and then comes the regret.

But what no one’s ever told you is this: the part you keep blaming isn’t the problem. And once you understand that, it changes everything.

So let’s talk about… how to stay calm when your emotions take over.

Hello and welcome! I’m Jeremy Godwin and this is the Let’s Talk About Mental Health podcast, full of practical advice to help you understand and improve your mental health.

So if you’ve ever wondered why you can be a perfectly reasonable and calm and capable adult most of the time, and then one feeling shows up and suddenly you’re someone you barely recognise… this one’s for you. And look, it’s not “Why do I feel things?” but “How do I actually handle it in the moment when it’s happening and I can’t think straight?” That’s the real question, and that’s what we’re going to be getting into today.

Because the fact is that most of us were never taught that when a big feeling hits, something genuinely changes inside you for a few seconds… and the part of you that normally weighs things up and makes smart and considered choices just quietly steps out of the room for a bit. You’re not being dramatic, and you’re not being weak; you’re working exactly the way that a human being is built to work… but the trouble is that nobody showed you what to do with that.

And the answer actually starts somewhere that you might not expect: not with your thoughts, but with something far more basic. And that something basic is your breath. Now, stay with me… because I know ‘just breathe’ is probably about the most eye-roll-worthy piece of advice in all of mental health and if that’s all I had for you, I’d be genuinely embarrassed.

But there’s a good reason why ‘breathing’ keeps coming up and why I keep sharing it on this show, and it’s not the reason that you think.

When a feeling takes over, you genuinely lose access to the part of your brain that reasons things out; it’s not just out to lunch, it’s fled the country for the foreseeable future. So what that means is that trying to think your way back to a place of calm in that particular moment is pretty much like trying to read a map in a burning building: it’s not gonna happen!

But your body you can reach.

So the next time you feel that emotional surge building, take a slow breath in and then breathe out even more slowly, longer than you breathe in, and repeat that a couple of times.

Now, I know that sounds almost too simple to matter; we are going to build on it later… but even just that one move quietly tells your nervous system that the danger it perceived is not happening, it has passed, and so it starts to bring the thinking part of your brain back into the room from its self-imposed exile to some exotic island.

Because you can’t think yourself calm… but you can breathe your way there.

That’s the doorway, if you like, to everything else that we’re going to talk about today… and we are going to dig deeper into it shortly. First though, let’s talk about…

What happens when your emotions take the wheel?

So let’s first be very clear about what we’re actually discussing here, because the idea of ‘when my emotions take over’ can sound a bit vague until you see it for what it is.

What it really means is this: a strong feeling shows up, usually pretty quickly, and you act on it before you’ve had any say. So the feeling and the thing you do next arrive so close together that they almost feel like the same event; they’re not, but in the moment it’s like there’s no daylight between the two of them. The feeling lands and you’re already moving to react. In other words, you react rather than responding thoughtfully.

And here’s where I want you to really just listen to this bit, because this is the part that most people often get wrong about themselves: you probably think that this stuff only applies if you blow up, right? You raise your voice, or there’s a sharp reply out of your mouth before you can catch it, or you slam a door, or you send a message that afterwards you’d give anything to Unsend. And yes, that is one version of it… and we’re not going to pretend that it isn’t.

But it is not the only version. For a lot of you, it’s the complete opposite: you go quiet, you shut down, the wall comes up, you go cold, or you walk off, or you just sit there with tears that you can’t stop and words that won’t come, or you just feel frozen. Right?

And sometimes you might experience the blowup, and other times you might experience that kind of freeze or shutdown response. They’re all the exact same thing; same emotional hijack, just pointed inward instead of out. So if you’ve ever let yourself off the hook with, “Well, at least I don’t blow up and lose my temper!”, I’m very sorry to have to break this to you but you don’t get out of it that easily! Going silent and disappearing is just as much your emotions running the show as shouting is.

You can sometimes even watch yourself doing it. You know, some quiet part of you going, “Oh, don’t! Don’t say that! Don’t send that!”… while the rest of you goes ahead and does it anyway. There’s a kind of heat to it, if you know what I mean, or sometimes a kind of cold flood, and your whole world narrows down to this one feeling and what it’s demanding right now; everything else, the bigger picture, the person in front of you, the consequences, everything else just vanishes… And then, the emotion eventually passes and you come back to yourself and then you have to look around and start surveying the damage.

The thing here is that the feeling itself was never and is never the problem. We’ve all been sold this idea that the goal is to stop feeling so much in order to control it, right? To not be so sensitive, to somehow switch our emotions off, or, you know, manage them or put them in a box. So a lot of people spend years and years and years either trying to white-knuckle their way through their emotions, or trying to clamp those feelings down and bottle them up and stuff them away… or they just end up handing the keys to their emotions, and obey whatever they say. It’s all different strategies, but all of those strategies fail because they’re both fighting the wrong fight and they’re setting you up for more issues.

You cannot stop yourself from feeling things. You are a human being, not a kettle that you can switch off at the wall! Trying to shut the feeling down doesn’t make it smaller. It doesn’t make it go away; It just makes it leak out sideways!

So if the feeling is not the enemy, then what is? Well, it’s definitely not the feeling; it’s what you do in that tiny gap between feeling it and acting on it. And to understand why that gap matters so much, let’s talk about…

Why a feeling can hijack you in moments

OK, so let’s discuss what’s actually going on in there when you’re having an emotional reaction… because once you see it, you can stop taking it as proof that there’s something wrong with you.

Think about a smoke alarm for a moment. A smoke alarm has one job, and one job only: to get your attention fast… and it does not care whether you’ve just burnt some toast or if the house is genuinely on fire. It’s not designed to be calm, or balanced, or proportionate. It’s designed to be loud enough that you cannot possibly ignore it.

And your emotions work pretty much the same way. A feeling is an alarm. It goes off to tell you that something matters. That’s it. That’s its whole job. And it’s a good job, an important job.

But here’s the thing we tend to forget: an alarm is brilliant at getting your attention, and absolutely hopeless at deciding what you should do next. You wouldn’t let a smoke alarm choose whether you call the fire brigade or just open a window… and yet when a feeling goes off, that’s exactly what most of us do: we let the alarm make the decision. The feeling controls what we do.

There’s a real reason why it’s so hard to do anything else in that moment, and it’s the bit that I most want you to take on board today; if you don’t take anything else away from this episode, please listen to this part! When a strong feeling spikes, the thinking, reasoning, weighing-it-all-up part of your brain genuinely powers down for a bit, and the fast reflexive alarm part takes over the controls. That is not a metaphor, and it’s not an excuse for just reacting… it is just a simple fact about how your wiring works, how mine works, how all of us work.

So in those few seconds, you literally have less access to good judgement than you normally would. That’s not a theory. That is a fact.

And so it means that when you snapped, or when you shut down, or when you sent that highly emotional message, you weren’t failing at being calm; you were trying to make a careful decision with the part of your brain that handles careful decisions being temporarily offline. And so, of course it went sideways. Of course it created a mess, or felt like you were out of control.

Now here’s why working through this matters so much, much more than most of us realise. It’s not really about the one bad moment, it’s about what it does to you over time.

Every single time a feeling makes a choice for you, and you watch yourself do the thing that you swore you wouldn’t do or don’t want to do, you end up losing a little tiny bit of trust in yourself… and that adds up. Over time you start to believe that you’re just a reactive person, or too sensitive, or someone who can’t handle things, and so you brace for the next time… which keeps you wound tightly, which then makes the next hijack even more likely.

That’s the trap. The reacting damages your self respect, and the damaged self-respect makes you react… and round and round and round it goes. And unfortunately, the cost isn’t just your peace of mind. It’s the people on the receiving end of it. It’s the relationships that get worn thin, one outburst at a time or one cold shoulder at a time.

This stuff is, hands down, one of the most common things a lot of us deal with, myself included. I am emotionally reactive by default, and I have had to work so hard to find a healthier way to navigate that. And what I’ve discovered over time is that it’s not about learning how to stop the feeling or how to even stop feeling, period, but it’s about how to stop the feeling from running the show.

And we’re going to talk about how to do that right after this quick break.

[AD BREAK]

And welcome back! Now let’s get into how to tackle the emotional hijack when it happens, and let’s talk about…

How to stop your emotions running the show

Alright, so how do you actually take back control when a feeling has taken over? Well, here’s what works, and just notice that none of it is about feeling less; it’s about what you do in that gap between the feeling and the reaction. First…

Change your approach.

So the first thing is to stop doing what you’ve probably been doing for years, what we all tend to do, which is treating the feeling as an enemy to be crushed and vanquished.

When the emotional wave hits, you don’t have to shove it down… and you don’t have to obey it either. Both of those just hand it more power.

You are allowed to just let it be there. Acknowledge it: “OK, I’m furious right now,” or “I’m feeling really hurt.” And you can do that without that meaning that you have to do anything about it immediately. The feeling is allowed in the room. It’s valid. It just doesn’t get to drive the bus. Shifting from resisting the feeling to simply allowing it takes a surprising amount of heat out of the feeling on its own. Next…

Physically come down.

OK… so since your thinking brain will be offline for a moment or two, don’t start there. Start with the body, because that’s the part of you that you can still reach. This is where that long, slow exhale from earlier earns its keep: breathe out slowly, longer than the in breath, a few times… and while you do it, feel your feet on the floor and let your shoulders drop. You’re not trying to feel happy, or calm down completely. You’re just reducing the volume on the alarm from a 10 down to maybe a seven… enough that the thinking part of you can slowly start coming back into the room. Next…

Name it, out loud if you can.

This is another one that sounds really simple but it’s one of the most reliable tools that there is, and it’s actually naming the feeling; so, for example: “I’m angry,” “I’m anxious,” “I feel rejected.”

When you put a feeling into words, something genuinely shifts. You create a tiny bit of distance between you and it, and that distance is everything… because suddenly you’re the person observing the feeling rather than the feeling itself. You’ve gone from, “I’m furious!” to, “I notice I’m feeling furious.” And in that small gap, you get a piece of yourself back. Next…

Ask the feeling what it actually wants.

This is the thing I come back to more than anything else in my own life, and it’s incredibly simple: pause, breathe, then ask yourself, “What am I feeling?” and then, “Why?”

So the ‘what’ you’ve just done in the previous step by naming it, the ‘why’ is where it gets even more useful… because the alarm is always going off about something. Maybe you’re not actually angry at your partner though; you’re scared because what they said poked at an old wound. Maybe you didn’t go quiet because you don’t care, but because you felt small and it was the only way that you knew to protect yourself. When you ask why you feel something, you stop treating the feeling as an order and start treating it as information. Next…

Protect the gap.

Here is your one job this week, the single thing that I want you to actually practice above all else: do not act in the first hot moment of an emotional reaction. Instead, buy yourself 30 seconds.

That’s it.

Almost every reaction that you regret happens in the first 30 seconds, when the alarm is loudest and your judgement is weakest. So, buy some time. Say, “let me come back to you on that,” then either put the phone down or walk away and then go fill the kettle or step outside for a minute. You’re not avoiding the issue. You’re just refusing to let the most emotional version of you make the decision. Nothing that truly matters is going to fall apart because you took a few moments instead of just reacting… but plenty has fallen apart because someone didn’t take those few moments. Next…

Choose your response instead of just reacting.

So this is the difference between reacting and responding, and it’s the point of the entire episode: reacting is when the feeling is choosing for you, responding is you choosing on purpose with the thinking part of you back online. So… once you’ve come down from the emotion, and you’ve brought yourself that little gap, ask yourself one question: what would the person I actually want to be do next?

Now… I don’t mean the perfect saint, but just the version of you that you respect. Whatever it is, then do that. Sometimes, it means saying the hard thing calmly instead of cruelly. Sometimes, it’s saying nothing at all. Sometimes, it’s not shutting down, and actually saying how you feel or being direct. Sometimes it’s coming back an hour later and going, “Hey, look, I overreacted before. Can we try that again?” None of that is weakness. That is you finally refusing to let your emotions run the show… and good on you!

Now, if you do tend to struggle with being reactive, go and check out Episode 323 after this one where I dig a lot deeper into that and I’ll link it in the description.

And look, let me be really honest with you: you’re not going to get this stuff right every single time, and you’re not supposed to. Some days the emotions are just bigger than your intentions, and you’re going to react anyway. Every single time that you manage to put even a sliver of a gap between the feeling and the action, you’re building something that will compound over time; it’ll grow and grow and grow. You’re slowly teaching yourself that you can be trusted, and that quiet self-trust is worth way more than any one calm moment.

Conclusion

So here’s what I want you to take away from this episode. Your emotions are not the enemy. They’re an alarm, and the alarm is doing its job. Your job is to stop letting that alarm make your decisions for you. Every feeling is real and worth listening to, but none of them are qualified to be the boss. And look… I’m still practicing this one myself, same as you. But that’s not a flaw in the plan. It is the plan. Because it’s about being more intentional, rather than trying to be perfect… because perfect doesn’t exist.

So, what would change for you if the next time a big feeling hit you just gave yourself 30 seconds before you did a single thing about it?

Because when you boil it all down, you can’t always choose what you feel… but with a bit of practice, you can almost always choose what you do next.

Each week, I like to finish up by sharing a quote about the topic and I encourage you to take a few moments to really reflect on it and consider what it means to you. This week’s quote is by an unknown author, and it is:

If you can’t control your emotions, they’ll control your actions.

Unknown

Let me repeat that:

If you can’t control your emotions, they’ll control your actions.

Alright, that’s it for this week. If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might need to hear it and leave a rating or review on your favourite platform because it really helps more people discover the show and the advice I share. And join my Patreon if you’d like to support my work. It’s linked in the description below.

Thank you very much for joining me today. Look after yourself and make a conscious effort to share positivity and kindness out into the world… because you get back what you put out. Take care and talk to you next time!

Join me next week when I talk about finding your way when you feel lost, and check out my episode on why you don’t have to believe everything you think next. It’s linked in the description. I release new episodes every Sunday, so follow or subscribe to never miss an episode.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program. Discover more at ltamh.com.

---

SUPPORT MY SHOW ON PATREON

Let’s Talk About Mental Health is an independent program written and created by me (Jeremy Godwin… hi! 👋), and I rely on people like you to help with the costs of producing my show each week. If you’d like to show your support for what I do (which I’d really appreciate), you can become a paid subscriber on Patreon for early access to ad-free episodes. Thank you!

Huge thanks to my wonderful Patreon supporters (in alphabetical order): Amanda K., Ashley, Brittnee, Carol B, Charlie, Elizabeth, Janis & Steve, Kaiulani, Karen, Lenka, Lylii, Monte, Patricia, Paula, Rachel, Roxanne, Susan, Tatiana, Taylor.

Click here to become a Patreon supporter:

---

TOOLS & RESOURCES FOR BETTER MENTAL HEALTH

I offer simple digital products that will help you improve and look after your mental health.

• Start your day with focus and intention with my Daily Affirmations
• Transform your mental health in less than 15 minutes a day using my Daily Reflection Tool
• Get the most out of the Daily Reflection Tool with my Reflection Masterclass video (also available as a bundle with the tool itself, saving you 20%)

Click the links below for your chosen product(s):

---

DONATE

Feeling generous? Would you like to help me do the work I do on this show? Make a one-off or recurring donation below (payments securely processed by Stripe). Thank you!

---

Click here for details of mental health resources in most countries.

---

SUBSCRIBE

Sign up here to have episode transcripts and video/audio land in your inbox each week:

(I hate spam, so your information stays private. I may send you the odd email to update you about something new I’m working on, but other than that you’ll be receiving show notes/episode transcripts with embedded video/audio).

---

---

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Find more content at www.ltamh.com

Let’s Talk About Mental Health.
Making Mental Health Simple.

Let’s Talk About Mental Health. © 2026 Jeremy Godwin.

The information provided in this episode is for general awareness on the topic and does not constitute advice. You should consult a doctor and/or mental health professional if you’re struggling with your mental health and wellbeing. You’ll find additional information on the Resources page of this website.