I have found meditation helpful. It has enabled me to treat my feelings more like weather, to put some distance between stimulus and response. If you spend enough time sitting quietly while letting your thoughts come and go, you begin to take them less seriously.

For me it's in some ways similar to the part in the debugging or performance tuning cycle where you're just watching things happen, letting logs and metrics scroll by on your screen. Externally, you look like you're not really doing anything. But what you're doing is noticing relationships, reoccurances, rhythms. At some point you say, "That's odd. When X happens, Y follows. I wonder why that is?" And that's where the magic begins.