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Guide to understanding emotions: they are not good or bad, but necessary
Psychology
The team of psychologists from «In Mental Balance», led by Jesús Matos, explains through practical and simple videos what each of the emotions are for and how to manage them
During the last hundreds of years we have considered the human being as the rational animal par excellence, but we have forgotten that it is also the most emotional of the planet. Something that we must bear in mind is that the original environment in which the human being evolved is very different from the current one. At that time the emotions fulfilled a función specific: we were sad when he played, we felt fear when it corresponded or we got angry at specific moments … but now society is completely different, and emotions often appear unnecessarily. That is why we innately tend to avoid feelings. But that’s not a good thing because if we get into the loop of avoiding emotions, we develop strategies to “not feel.”
We live in a very repressive society of emotions in which feeling those emotions sometimes seems like an undesirable thing. But we cannot escape who we are. We are capable of feeling a huge range of emotions. But what are they really and what are they for? Let’s see…
The problem is that on many occasions we are not able to understand what our emotions want to tell us, or we simply ignore them.
The stress response is a very useful and necessary response for people and a great help to solve sporadic threatening situations. It is so important that it is transmitted evolutionarily through genetics. Therefore, this response in itself is not harmful, but adaptive and it is only when it appears in a very frequent, intense or lasting way, causing a waste of resources and the appearance of problems (physical or emotional discomfort, worse performance, diseases …) , when the so-called stress pathologies appear.
Sometimes our body has warned us for a while that something is wrong, but despite this, we still do not meet that demand. What happens when you are not able to stop?
Emotional avoidance
At other times, what we feel is painful and since no one has taught us to manage emotions, we believe that the best solution is to try to “not feel.” The problem is that we get exactly the opposite of what we expect. What happens when you don’t want to feel? This is what happens when we avoid emotions …
However, although we sometimes believe otherwise, human beings have the ability to manage emotions, we just have to learn to do it. For example, when we feel anxiety we can relax. What happens when you relax? This is how we emotionally regulate ourselves in the face of stress.
What’s more, one of the keys to effectively managing our emotional states is learning to question what we think, since when an emotion appears, we tend to think more emotionally and less realistically.
But in addition to working with our way of thinking, it is also important to work with our way of acting. When, for example, we feel sad, it is very common that we do not feel like doing anything, but letting ourselves be carried away by emotion can have negative consequences for us. Let’s see what happens when “we don’t feel like anything” and we get carried away by inactivity.
A good way to start acting is to set goals. It seems like a pretty obvious thing to do, but it seems like a lot of us are constantly forgetting.
It is also true that on many occasions we forget everything we have and everything we have achieved in order to focus “on what we do not have” and “on what we still need to achieve”. For this reason, it is very important to develop an attitude of gratitude towards life.
Control or lack of control?
Another important point to improve our self-esteem and our well-being is learning to set limits for others. On many occasions we do not do it for fear that they will reject us or stop loving us, and we agree to do certain things that we do not like. That is why it is extremely important to “learn to say no.”
And learning to manage emotions has nothing to do with repressing or denying them. It is much more useful if we let them flow. Even crying has benefits. We tell you what the three types of tears are and what is the function of each of them …
And … watch out! You don’t have to face life alone … Being a human is a social animal. And in our genetic code is collaboration. That is why it is vital to learn to ask for help.
Ultimately, there are no “good” emotions or “bad” emotions, nor are there any “negative” or “positive” emotions. All of them are necessary. What we have to learn is to identify, validate and accept.