Emotional Detective

Negative Emotions: Give Them Space and Expression

This is part three in a four-part series on Flourishing

Managing negative emotions properly can help you flourish.  The key is to acknowledge -- or make room for -- negative emotions soon after they occur. Accepting and expressing your reactions helps them to be both appropriate to the circumstances and time-limited.   Personally, I find it reassuring that there are healthy, safe ways to manage negative reactions -- it makes me feel less guilty and anxious about having them.

Four out of five of our basic (or primitive) emotions are negative: disgust, fear, anger, sorrow (the fifth is joy).  Each negative emotion has a predictable trigger; and each in turn generates a specific, predictable physical response: 

• When something or someone is unhealthy, we feel disgust and recoil
• When something or someone is dangerous, we feel fear and retreat
• When something or someone is thwarting us, we feel anger and attack
• When something or someone important is gone, we feel sorrow and weep

How can you learn from and use your negative emotions more effectively?

 

Negative emotions alert you to undesirable changes – physical and emotional threats.   Each time you have a negative emotion you must, consciously or unconsciously, make a judgment call about whether to conceal or express your feelings. In a perfect world, expressing negative emotions protects you from threats, but in the real world, expressing negative emotions in the moment sometimes make a bad situation worse. Whether you decide to share your emotions with others or not, acknowledging and expressing your own negative emotions helps you rebound quickly and move on with greater resilience and calm.   

 

To manage negative emotions in healthy ways, give them time, thought and free expression. 

 

Make time to routinely experience and vent your negative emotions.  Choose whether to do this alone or with someone else, but search for ways to safely express yourself. 

For example:

• Primal Expression: Reveal yourself physically, in private (scream in the shower, punch the bed, watch a sad movie and let yourself cry).

• Social Expression: Before deciding to share your emotions, consider (or imagine) how the recipient is likely to respond.  If it seems safe, talk to the person who triggered your emotions.   Otherwise, pick someone (a friend, a family member, or a counselor) who is psychologically minded and open to an honest expression of your feelings and talk with them.

• Reasonable Expression: Notice what triggers your emotions and notice your responses – are they appropriate?  Think about your negative emotions, feelings and expressions; do they send you in good directions with positive outcomes?  If not, consider what is going wrong.

Try to accept negative emotions as a healthy part of yourself.  Finding ways to express them, even privately, can help you flourish. 

Positive Emotions: May The Good Outweigh The Bad

This is part two of a four part series on Flourishing

Flourishing involves the ability to bounce back to normal after stress.  By “normal” I mean a state in which we can function optimally; a calm state that scientists refer to as “homeostasis.”  Becoming calm after having a negative reaction, or returning rapidly to homeostasis, signifies resilience.  It helps you flourish when you can right yourself quickly.

What helps you return to a calm state and flourish more easily?  One thing that helps is having lots of positive emotions.  In fact, according to recent research we need on average three times more positive emotions than negative emotions to truly flourish.

Positive emotions make you more creative, tolerant and flexible; they literally improve your mindset, enhancing attention, intuition and resilience.  They also lead to happier relationships and more professional success.   Incredibly, they also make your health better by decreasing inflammation and boosting your immune system, thereby lessening pain and illness. 

To get more positive emotions, make some plans to trigger them.

Each of your three aspects has particular circumstances that reliably elicit positive emotions.   Here are some of my ideas to start with, but please feel free to create your own lists.

Your Primitive Aspect triggers joy when you satisfy the needs of your body

 

 

• Eat (healthy, delicious, consume with awareness)
• Rest (arrange to care for yourself when you are likely to be most tired)
• Exercise (with a friend, in nature, fun sports)
• Touch (Back rub, foot rub, give a massage, bath)
• Have Sex (with a partner, alone, fantiasize, experiment)
• Satisfy curiosity (a new route home, explore a new area of interest)
• Enjoy natural beauty (a walk in the woods, stargazing)
• Express yourself creatively (dance, paint, sing, play music, cook, move)

 

 

Your Social Aspect creates positive emotions when you connect to others:

 

 

• Spend time with people (who feel good, make you laugh, or bring peace)
• Be kind, generous, or giving (read with your child, volunteer with a charity )   
• Connect to feelings of gratitude (thank those who have helped you)
• Do things that give you a “sense of belonging” to something you value
• Forgive yourself and others more readily

 

 

 Your Reasonable Aspect generates positive feelings when you learn something new, make plans, and find meaning:

 

• Learn (take up bridge, join a book group, read online)
• Read (try a new genre)
• Solve a puzzle (crossword, jigsaw, Sudoko)
• Take a class (something you’re been interested in knowing more about)
• Go to a cultural event (a concert, museum, art gallery)
• Write something (journal, op-ed, article, letter, email, poem)

 

Each of our aspects offers a multitude of opportunities to experience positive emotions; creating more of these opportunities helps steer you towards resiliency, calm and flourishing.