Negative Emotions are Key to Well-Being
Feeling sad, mad, critical or otherwise awful? Surprise: negative emotions are essential for mental health.
Anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment.
Instead of backing away from negative emotions, accept them. Acknowledge how you are feeling without rushing to change your emotional state. Many people find it helpful to breathe slowly and deeply while learning to tolerate strong feelings or to imagine the feelings as floating clouds, as a reminder that they will pass. I often tell my clients that a thought is just a thought and a feeling just a feeling, nothing more.
Via
Pamir Kiciman
Your new post is loading...
Scoop.it!
When I look back at own life and mark the heights of personal growth, I notice a pattern of growth being accompanied by challenges, failure, or loss. Of course there are those struggles that have not yet produced the fruit of growth. I’m curious about how these particular difficulties that did produce growth differ from those that have not yet yielded growth. It turns out that this phenomenon (growth through how one responds to difficulty) is identified as a key component to long-range happiness in a longitudinal study of 268 men who were at Harvard together in the 1940s.