How to deal with your emotions and take control of your life

Mark Manson, the author of 'The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," explains how to better handle our emotions. Following is a transcript of the video.

Mark Manson: My name is Mark Manson. I am the New York Times best-selling author of "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck."

How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there's a really important distinction to understand is that you can't completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don't ever make that separation for what goes on with them.

Somebody in their family does something. They get really pissed off, and then they react very poorly. And instead of blaming their own behavior, they blame the emotion itself.

And what's interesting about emotions is that the more you try to control them or to bottle them up, the stronger they get. So, the more I try to stop being sad the sadder I'm going to get. The more I try to stop being anxious the more I'm going to freak out over a bunch of little things.

So, it's very paradoxical, but the key is to actually just let go of trying to control the emotions. Just let them - it sounds super cliche - but flow through you. And then actually focus more on "What are the behaviors that you're doing to react to however you feel?"

When you're able to do that the result is that things actually become much simpler. Your emotions - they actually … they don't go away, they don't change. It's just that they're not as important as they used to be. It's like "Oh, I'm angry right now. But I'm still doing the thing I want to do." or "I'm sad right now. But I'm still living my life. I'm still accomplishing the things that I want to accomplish. It's getting this separation between your emotions and how you identify or justify you the things that you do in your life.