In nature, the more diversity there is in an ecosystem, the stronger, richer and more resilient it will be. The same principle follows democracy. Thus, the more heterogeneous our range of emotions is, the greater our flexibility and strength, because to understand this universe without being at extremes is to invest in health, is to gain intelligence and maturity.
If we think about it well, an idea that society itself promotes, as well as a lot of self-help books, is that to achieve well-being we must experience exclusively positive emotions, something like sadness takes us, almost without realizing it, on an Arturian journey in search of this holy grail of happiness to avoid at all costs colors such as sadness , disappointment, frustration or anger.
- We may forget that there is no better strategy than understanding the enemy itself.
- Escaping negative emotions is putting a blindfold on your eyes.
- Is to veto a life learning experience with which we can manage more resources in any circumstance.
Because life, like emotions, is diverse and very complex, only those who allow the deepening of all feelings and emotions to understand them will adapt better to daily fluctuations.
They have conditioned us to believe that negative feelings are enemies of well-being; Moreover, there is no shortage of people who think that those who go from joy to anger, from disappointment to illusion in the same day are unstable and even fickle. , it is time to clarify the terms, it is time to introduce in our language a fundamental idea for mental health: emodiversity.
“I will not tire of emphasizing the importance of learning to use negative emotions for what they are, calls to action. “Tony Robbins.
Diversity defines our ability to feel and experience a wide range of emotions, and the more emotions there are, the better, this ability, or rather the fact that we allow ourselves to feel each feeling without blocking or denying it, is an adaptive advantage. In other words, not only will we be able to be more authentic, but we will also have more resources to deal with difficulties and achieve mental health.
This idea is not new. In 2012, a study published in the journal Emotion concluded that the University of Queensland has been studying how the classic expectation that happiness equals positive emotions could affect the Australian and Japanese population.
This cultural principle leads people not to know how to deal with negative emotions and avoid them. The pursuit of happiness (fixed on this basis), sooner or later, generates unhappiness.
To learn how to be happy, we need, so to speak, to press the reset button on our mental hard drive. Let’s start over, erasing a lot of what we’ve been told so far (detachment).
A first aspect to consider is this: negative emotions are not harmful, every emotion felt and accepted is a commitment to ourselves, a commitment to understand us, accept realities and be responsible in the search for solutions or in the generation of changes.
A second aspect to integrate into our? Programming – the inner experience is that feeling as many emotions as possible increases emotional endurance, mental health and psychological ability, in this way, anyone who is exclusively at the pole of positive emotions will not have the tools to face difficulties and frustrations.
In addition, those who oscillate only at the pole of negativity and bereavement are at increased risk of developing depression, anxiety disorders, etc.
In 2014, Yale, Pompeu Fabra University and the University of Cambridge conducted an in-depth study to analyze the benefits of diversity; this dimension, understood as the ability to allow us to experience a wide range of emotions, has a direct impact on our physical and physical environment. emotional health.
What the leaders of this study saw was that people who denied their negative emotions or focused their lives on this perpetual state of frustration, discouragement, and moodiness not only developed more psychological disorders, but also had lower immunity, increased organic inflammation, and a tendency to develop more diseases.
As we can see, emotions affect our quality of life and have a direct impact on our health.
An emotional ecosystem rich in sensations, vast in accepted emotions, nourished by deciphered feelings and valued as precious learning, forms a stronger and wiser psychological environment, we must learn to take care of this diversity by being sincere and courageous with ourselves.
Sadness, anger, fear or disappointment are not weeds that we must eliminate, it is not these seeds of baobab that the Little Prince feared because, according to him, they would fly his little planet.
So-called negative emotions, combined with positive emotions, make up who we are; we can’t act as predators, veto or hide what we don’t like.
We must travel with them, manage them, transform them, and understand that all this richness of our psychological and emotional ecosystem gives us valuable tools to build more adversity-resistant and more nurtured scenarios to shape true happiness (not a false substitute).