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In The Sedona Method, Hale Dwoskin talks about 3 questions we can ask ourselves to release negative emotions on-the-spot instead of letting them stir up inside and remain with us for hours.

Hale Dwoskin founder of The Sedona Method

These three simple questions — "could I let this go?" "would I?" and "when?" bring the mind back to a state of balance and stops us falling into a specific emotion.

I wrote a few months ago on how in CBT we recognize that we all have 'automatic thoughts' that we don't even control. One moment someone will do something to upset us and then 2 hours have passed and we are still thinking about that same event. Is this conscious? Often it's not a conscious decision at all. In fact a lot of our emotion and thinking takes on a subconscious process of its own.

It mightn't occur to us that we can choose what emotions we take on and which ones we can let go of. Instead we take them all on and then let the mind deal with them. This process of taking on all of that emotional processing can overwhelm and drain us when that processing ends up becoming our the center of awareness.

The trick to letting go of unwanted emotions lies in catching them as soon as each one comes up rather than letting those emotions turn into a snowball of concerns. This 3 question approach is at the core of The Sedona Method.

Often our emotional responses are at the core of a number of problems in our lives. However if we catch unwanted emotions before letting them snowball into problems the problem itself can be avoided.

Thousands of people begin a search for the cause of anger after struggling with controlling excessive feelings of frustration and rage. Like most emotions anger become stronger when we attempt to control it or remove it with force. So if we can't remove it then it makes sense to ask — how come it's here in the first place?

The experience of anger has a number of branches that extend from the tree of being ignored and disregarded. If this happens to us the roots of anger are planted and begin to grow. The fact is that we are ignored and disregarded at one point or another in life. The experience that I had was growing up to find that I had been lied to about the nature of the world and people. This is a raw and immediate response of anger that is the same for a number of different situations.

For instance — a husband who ignores his wife in the long term. The roots of the wife's anger become planted just the same in this situation.

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Emotions can seem to cause us a lot of problems. People often search for justification for their anger. People search for reasons to support their fears. People search for explanations about what it is that makes them so undeserving of receiving love and happiness from others.

It is no coincidence that a lot of the time we don't allow ourselves to be happier because of the emotions themselves rather than external circumstances.

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