How Negative Emotions Can Help You (We’ll Explain With the Help of Science)

There are emotions that are not well seen. We often hear that feelings like fear, annoyance, disagreement and anger play against us. There are even several self-help books that recommend getting them out of our way. We are advised, then, to think positively and prioritize at all costs only the “good emotions”, such as joy, courage and confidence. But do both types of feelings really exist?

O awesome.club would like to share with you an analysis on whether it really is convenient to banish emotions that are usually classified as “negative” from our lives.

Let’s think about the fever. When we suffer from it, we usually consider it something negative and therefore needs to be eliminated as soon as possible. However, most doctors guarantee that, in reality, fever is our body’s defense mechanism. It’s our body’s way of telling us that something isn’t right. Without fever, it would not be possible, for example, to detect infections. Therefore, we would do nothing to cure them.

Something similar happens with emotions considered “negative”. As much as they bother us, they help us to stay alert, to preserve ourselves, to know that something is wrong and that something needs to be changed. Feelings such as fear, pain and anger have been essential for human beings to survive and progress since cave times.

Many people link fear to cowardice. If you are afraid, you are a coward. However, things are not like that. A brave person is not someone who does not know fear, but someone who, even feeling it, decides to face it, but taking the necessary precautions.

A fearless boxer, for example, would give his opponent many advantages. He would become his own enemy by opening his guard.

Therefore, it is always necessary to remember that fear preserves us and helps us to measure risks, taking care of our weaknesses and further strengthening those that are already strong. Being afraid has nothing to do with taking precautions, but with having the dimension of what we are facing.

Imagine for a moment our life without feeling angry. It would be the same as living indifferent to injustices, our mistakes or others and wrong decisions… Do you believe that, with all this indifference, we would be good people?

Good people also feel anger. The important thing is to have the discernment that there are situations in which anger is not, in fact, a positive emotion. It’s not the same thing to be angry with someone because they pulled the rug out from under you as it is to be angry at the success of someone who got to the top by sweating and working hard. The “good” anger is the one that makes us fight against the wrong things in the world.

A popular saying recommends not wanting what you don’t have, but loving what you have. Sounds like good advice, but is it really true? What would become of humans if they were content with what they have? Maybe he was living in caves and hadn’t even discovered fire.

Dissatisfaction, therefore, drives us to seek new paths when we don’t feel comfortable where we are. She invites us to move, because when we stand still, we harm ourselves. It helps us reach goals that seem beyond our reach. Therefore, dissatisfaction does not make us ungrateful, but motivates us.

The examples above refer to just a few emotions that are generally taken as negative, but that can help us. But there are others. And the way to deal with it is the same; the secret is not in fighting them, but in paying attention to them, in channeling them so that they play in our favor. We must bear in mind that these emotions have been developed over thousands of years of human evolution and that, at some point, they were decisive for our survival and for the development of our abilities. So find the best of them.

Do you feel that it is sometimes difficult to manage your emotions? Did you try to work on this issue? What are the most important feelings in your life? Tell us in the comments section.