Emotional reactions can feel very complex and lead one to believe that we are not truly in control of our emotional responses. While it seems as though emotional responses just sneak up on us and surprise us, that isnt exactly the case. Emotional surprises happen when we react strongly to something that we didnt expect to happen, or when we are affects by something more than we thought we would.



The trading world has a lot of excitement to offer anyone who wishes to become involved. With excitement comes stress and emotional turmoil that can crop up under significant stress. Trading will offer you a chance to make significant profits, often in a short period of time (a couple of years) but it will also offer you ample opportunity to get stressed out and emotionally drained if you allow it to happen.

If you want to succeed, you have to learn to take the good days with the bad days, the good new with the bad news, and the flow of events in stride. Of course, this is an easy goal for me to place upon you, but not necessarily an easy goal for you to reach. Money by itself brings up emotional reactions. Losing money brings up other emotional reactions.

You know your emotional make up better than anyone else. That is why you are the only one who can come with a stress relief plan that can help you out during on the spot emotional reactions that you werent expecting to face. Whether you need to keep a stress ball by your computer, you set up a little office basketball net, or you find that a brief meditation can help re-center you after an emotional surprise, you need to have a workable strategy in place. There are bound to be moments that you find yourself a little caught off guard, suddenly anxious, or a nervous nail biting reaction to a sudden change in the market. Most traders cant rely on just self talk to get you through every moment.

When you are faced with a suddenly stressful situation you are probably bound to handle it in one of three ways. You might just need to come as close to fixing it as possible, you might be an intense reactor who deals well with stress after about three minutes of screaming or beating on something, or you might be an ostrich who sticks your head in the sand and pretends that it didnt happen until you absolutely have to deal with it. No matter how you handle sudden stress, know yourself well enough to use your own methods of handling situations in the most productive way possible for you.

The way you react to any stressful situation is going to have a direct impact on the outcome of the situation. If you are burying your head in the sand, are you preventing further loss or are you just waiting for the other shoe to drop? If you need to spend three minutes ranting and yelling, are you using up time that you could be salvaging at least part of the situation? Or does your need to fix things create so much tension in the situation that you cant clearly see an alternative option? Even when you are reacting the way that you feel is best for you, there can be pitfalls, as we just illustrated. So often psychologists find that our coping skills are not all that honed, especially considering that we are usually told how we cope with stress at an early age and then accept the information as part of our make up. When dealing with stress and surprise emotional situations, you might find that you are more competent than you think. Maybe you still need to yell and rant for a few minutes, but you might also find that you can accurately deal with situation first and then deal with your emotional responses.