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The Tyranny of Relentless Positivity - Mindful
Tough emotions are essential for living
How we deal with our emotions affects how we love, how we live, how we parent and how we lead.
We should not view our emotions as good or bad, positive or negative. We need our emotions for real resilience.
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False positivity
We are caught up in a rigid culture that values positivity.
However, when we put aside our difficult emotions in order to embrace dishonest positivity, we fail to discover skills that can help us to deal with our problems.
Moving Beyond Emotional Rigidity
When we go through tough situations, we cannot ignore our negative emotions with the hope that they don't matter.
Write down what you are truly feeling in a personal notebook. Move beyond the rigidity of denial.
What to do with emotions
When you feel a strong, tough emotion, don’t run away from it. Understand why you have this emotion and be open to it.
What is the emotion telling you? Notice the emotion for what it is. Be with your emotions with curiosity, compassion and courage.
Embrace emotional agility
Don't consider what you think you should feel. Open your heart to what you do feel, even the difficult emotions. It could involve pain, regret, grief or loss.
When we name our emotions accurately, we are able to find the cause of our feelings. For example, there is a big difference between "I'm stressed", and "I'm in the wrong career."
Emotions are data
Emotions are not directives. We can label our emotions for their values without listening to them.
We own our emotions, they don't own us.
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Forced positivity
Suppressing or avoiding our difficult emotions is not healthy or helpful.
Doing this impairs our capacity to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. And this leads to lower levels of resilience, lower levels of wellbeing, and higher levels of depression and anxiety.
Labeling difficult emotions
An important way of dealing with a difficult emotion is to label it effectively.
Labeling your emotions more accurately helps you understand the cause of those emotions and triggers your ability to set goals and to make real concrete changes.
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Avoiding talking about your feelings
People with very low emotional intelligence will refuse to talk about their feelings because they aren't good at it. They may use vague language to describe how they feel, such as "I'm...
Judging your own feelings
Emotions like fear or sadness feel bad. People with low emotional intelligence criticize themselves, thinking it is wrong to feel afraid. Or shameful to feel sad.
People with high emotional intelligence understand that if something feels bad doesn't mean it is bad. They treat themselves with compassion and kindness when they feel this way.
Trying to control your emotions
People with low emotional intelligence think they have to solve difficult emotions. They try to get rid of any painful feelings.
Emotionally intelligent people see emotions as messengers. They validate them even if they don't like the content of the message.
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Positivity Could be Good for Us
Negative thinking can narrow our thinking and prevent us from moving forward. Positive encouragement can open our minds to alternatives. It fosters creative thinking and opens us up to take on risk...
Forcing positive thinking
Forcing positive thinking puts us under pressure and in an always-on-the-alert mode. We can never relax because a negative thought might pop into our heads when we least expect it.
It can make us feel more negative emotions and we may blame ourselves for not being happy enough.
We need some negative emotions
Emotions like fear and anxiety can help us to act in certain situations, for instance, alerting us to danger. Anxiety should not be avoided. It can point to an underlying issue that needs to be addressed.
Thinking negatively can also help us prepare for worst-case scenarios in advance. However, too much negative thinking is not good for us either.
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