One way to effectively deal with a breakdown or upset, especially if it is creating the urge to drink or do drugs, is to talk with another human being. Keeping an upset to yourself or keeping it up in your head is a receipt for disaster. Something negative will probably happen to your if you do not share what is going on with you. This is why it is important to create a support network of people you can call, sponsor, therapist or friends in recovery.
The second way to begin to effectively deal with an upset or breakdown is to take a look at what you are not accepting about the situation, people, places or things. Most if not all upsets and breakdowns are about having something happen that we believe should not have happened even though it did. Our work, and it is work, is to accept what happened, to eventually get it that everything happens in the way it is supposed to happen. Our work is to take that on as a possibility and in the work to accept fully what we did not once accept.