(Explore Your Mind) Although it’s unpleasant to experience negative emotions, learning to accept them can be very beneficial to your health and well-being.
Related The Hidden Insidious Effects of Trapped Negative Emotions — How to Heal and Rise Above
by Staff Writer, May 20th, 2019
It isn’t pleasant to experience negative emotions. In fact, it can be downright painful, especially if you consider that your brain is designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. That’s why accepting negative emotions can be so complicated. As difficult as it may be, however, doing so can positively impact your well-being.
People tend to repress negative emotions such as fear, sadness, or anger. The problem is that repressing these emotions can have harmful, long-term physical and mental repercussions. Avoiding or rejecting emotions doesn’t make them go away. In fact, the opposite is true. If you try to ignore them, they tend to build up and cause greater suffering.
Thus, dealing with your negative emotions in a constructive way can help you evolve. This process makes it possible to achieve your goals, form healthier relationships with others, and get to know yourself better. Let’s delve a little deeper into this.
Accept Negative Emotions without Judgment
Anger, fear, and sadness are emotions that most of us experience on a regular basis. Just as they tell you something about yourself and your needs, they also tend to cause stress and anxiety if you don’t manage them properly. This is why people tend to choose to avoid them or ignore them most of the time.
The truth is, negative emotions can be healthy. In fact, dealing with these emotions without denying them or judging them can be far better than ignoring them.
Learning how to deal with negative emotions is difficult. After all, it involves analyzing them and reflecting on what they’re trying to tell you. This doesn’t mean that you have to let them take over. Instead, it means that you have to be aware of them and understand why you feel the way you feel.
Dealing with negative emotions means keeping them under control without denying what you’re feeling.
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The Difference between Acceptance and Suffering
It’s important to be aware of the difference between accepting negative emotions that cause suffering and self-imposed suffering.
Acceptance is closely related to balance. Achieving balance is difficult in the Western world, as there’s a lot of pressure to be happy all the time. This is an unrealistic expectation that can affect your psychological well-being. Thus, the ultimate goal is to strike a balance between positivity and negativity, as it can restore satisfaction in your life.
However, this is a process that takes time and work. It isn’t easy to accept negative emotions. Just like any other cognitive habit, it’s a skill that you can develop and perfect with time and practice.
“Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.”
-Buddha-
Strategies to Manage Negative Emotions
Experts have developed various strategies to accept and process negative emotions. TEARS HOPE is one in particular that Ceri Sims refers to her in her research and has become quite popular.
TEARS
- T – Teach and learn. This strategy involves working on self-awareness and learning about your body and mind and how they respond to different emotional states. This makes it easier to understand when you’re angry and why. It also makes it easier to interpret the signs your body is sending to your brain.
- E – Express and enable sensory and embodied experiences. This technique involves encouraging inner openness and curiosity to increase acceptance of what happens in your day-to-day life.
- A – Accept and befriend. You have to increase your self-compassion and work on being more tolerant of frustration.
- R – Re-appraise and re-frame. This technique consists of learning to see things differently. Cognitive-behavioral exercises are perfect for this strategy.
- S – Social Support. You should work on feeling more connected with other people and more compassionate towards yourself. Investing time and energy in your relationships is also important. Meditation and mindfulness can be very useful here.
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HOPE
- Hedonic well-being/happiness. Research on the subject shows that maintaining a 3:1 ratio of positive to negative emotions can be beneficial. That means that it’s important to have positive experiences every day. You should focus on happy memories and savor your success. That helps increase the amount of time you spend with a positive mental state, which compensates for negative emotions.
- O – Observe and attend to. This technique focuses on practicing mindfulness and not paying so much attention to things that aren’t that important.
- P – Physiology and behavioral changes. It’s productive and beneficial to concentrate on relaxation, breathing exercises, and self-care.
- Eudaimonia. This last element involves feelings of authenticity and fighting for personal goals in your life.
Accepting Negative Emotions Makes You Feel Better
Most health care professionals agree that accepting negative emotions without judgment is one of the best ways to improve your psychological well-being. Consequently, most psychologists recommend learning how to manage them.
Iris Mauss, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, explains that people who accept their negative emotions tend to experience fewer of them. That leads to better psychological health.
In addition, research suggests that people who’re less bothered by their negative emotions tend to report higher levels of happiness and satisfaction than those who make themselves feel bad for feeling bad.
As you can see, accepting your negative emotions and working on them is crucial for your mental health and well-being.
Stillness in the Storm Editor: Why did we post this?
Psychology is the study of the nature of mind. Philosophy is the use of that mind in life. Both are critically important to gain an understanding of as they are aspects of the self. All you do and experience will pass through these gateways of being. The preceding information provides an overview of this self-knowledge, offering points to consider that people often don’t take the time to contemplate. With the choice to gain self-awareness, one can begin to see how their being works. With the wisdom of self-awareness, one has the tools to master their being and life in general, bringing order to chaos through navigating the challenges with the capacity for right action.
– Justin
Not sure how to make sense of this? Want to learn how to discern like a pro? Read this essential guide to discernment, analysis of claims, and understanding the truth in a world of deception: 4 Key Steps of Discernment – Advanced Truth-Seeking Tools.
Stillness in the Storm Editor’s note: Did you find a spelling error or grammar mistake? Send an email to [email protected], with the error and suggested correction, along with the headline and url. Do you think this article needs an update? Or do you just have some feedback? Send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you for reading.
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https://exploringyourmind.com/does-accepting-negative-emotions-make-you-happier/
What I have come to see our complex multidimensional reality to be as a healer, is a spectrum of exclusive yet overlaying vibrational gradients that allow for us to grow and attain higher states of alignment with Source, while at the same time they perform an almost extraction-like process of those impurities within us (lower vibrational constructs) to be left behind in their proper environment to be worked out. The differential between our higher and lower vibrations allows for our consciousness to gain perspective for self-examination and thus opportunity for transformation into greater cohesion at a higher level. It can go the other way too, be a mixed bag, or stay stagnant for a while, of course.
In other words, I believe the lower dimensions that contain our misaligned mental constructs (where we still feel discomfort and pain) are active depositories for the impurities extracted from us during the growth process of reaching higher levels of consciousness. They are proverbial cutting room floors of misaligned aspects of ourselves (our triggers or blind spots) that must be cleaned up by properly processing them into enlightened understanding so they can be joined in alignment with our higher aspects.
This means that any and all pain and discomfort we perceive from our ancient past into present day must be accepted and examined in order to be transformed from the lower vibrational misperceptions of those experiences into their higher vibrational significance towards our growth and evolvement.
It is necessary to stretch and grow our consciousness where we can through healthy means, but the permanent benefit that is cultivated from doing this comes from its investment in transforming our lower mental constructs into higher ones to attain wisdom and greater overall coherency in our being. If the second step is not taken, then we must question our integrity in the spiritual ascension process in the first place, and whether we are using it more for escapism rather than any real fundamental growth and change.
As we begin to transform and fold our misperceived realities into higher vision, we bring ourselves into greater individual coherency, and with that, greater alignment with Source.
To put this whole multidimensional playing field upon which our consciousness learns and grows into perspective, it is our striving towards greater alignment with Source that creates a differential between our higher vibrational frequencies and our lower ones, and it is this differential that gets projected and played upon the multidimensional movie screen we view as life, composed of a masterfully integrated cast of characters and scenarios that enable the expression of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to play out before our eyes.
It is up to us to engage the higher range of our consciousness to appreciate the growth potential such an opportunity has to serve our inner coherence with Source. To bring us into alignment with the Tao.
It takes a deep sense of detachment from the movie and allegiance to our internal alliance with Source or the Tao, in order to have the objectivity and receptivity to see the truth it is depicting. Once we can see what the experience is teaching us about our own misalignments, then we can begin to transform those into enlightened understanding and greater coherence with the universe.
Our ascension cannot come from anywhere else but by cultivating the behaviors and tools that enable us to do our own internal work of transforming lower vibrational mental constructs into alignment with higher ones, and away from any blame and shame involved with the trauma drama among the cast of characters. This can only be done in an environment of humility and gratitude towards the unconditional love, compassion, and wisdom that the life experience serves to teach.
This is the great alchemical process of dark into light, ignorance into wisdom, part into whole, misalignment into greater alignment, entrapment into liberation.
The greatest demonstration of love, and thus one’s devotion and dedication to alignment with Source/the Tao, is by serving self and others in a way that fosters and supports this transformative process. Love is in the truth and honesty in which we interact, and if one has the courage to view the movie in such a way, one will find only the seeds of love at the root of all its manifestation.