Understanding Negative Emotions

Negative emotions can do real damage if you let them run unchecked. The better move is to understand what they are and build enough control over them that they don't start controlling you.

Sadness, anger, jealousy, hate, a heavy dose of anxiety: these are the feelings that can get in the way of handling ordinary situations. They're also a normal part of being alive. Without them, you'd have nothing to measure the good feelings against.

A lot of the time, feeling bad is both natural and fitting for the moment. What actually decides whether an emotion turns constructive or destructive is the way you express it. Resentment toward a friend who shows up very late with no decent excuse makes sense. So does grief when someone you love dies. Act that anger out by screaming at someone, or by freezing them out, and you tend to get a bad result.

So pay attention to the negative feelings you're likely to run into, and work out how to spot them and respond to them.

For children, the skill of telling positive and negative emotions apart matters for survival, and it also feeds emotional intelligence and the ability to bounce back. Most emotional intelligence programs aimed at kids cover how to notice and make sense of different feelings, along with problem solving and handling the hard ones in a healthy way.

There's biology underneath all of this. You feel emotions as physical sensations in the body, and the brain reacts to those sensations by setting off more neural and hormonal activity. On top of that comes higher thinking, which piles extra meaning onto the feeling. The whole chain can end up helping your wellbeing or hurting it.

Plenty of approaches exist for working through negative emotions. A handful worth trying:

Swap out negative thought patterns for ones that are more useful and productive.

Move your body. Get regular exercise, and push yourself to do it even on the days when you'd rather do nothing.

Eat well. Go for a balanced diet, with the occasional small treat and not much more.

Resist the urge to magnify things or fixate only on what's wrong with a situation.

Get curious about your negative emotions and about what sets them off.

Learn to unwind. A yoga or meditation class can help, or just putting on music that calms you down.

Let the past stay where it is. Fretting over what you can't change buys you nothing. As L.P. Hartley put it, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there."

Reach out for professional counselling if you need it, and don't hesitate to switch counsellors if one doesn't feel right to you.

Read up on grief and get a sense of how the grieving process works.

Sleep properly. Build a steady sleep schedule and stick with it, weekends included.

Pick goals that are realistic and reachable, then work toward them.

Notice the small stuff. Stop to smell the roses, chat with a child, pat your pet.

Remember the good things you've managed to do in your life.

Try to find the brighter angle on whatever you're facing.

Life isn't always kind. It's frequently during the rougher stretches that we go looking for answers, and that's where meaning tends to turn up.