By Dr Attia Anwar
Negative emotions are feelings that make you miserable and sad. These emotions reduce your confidence and self-esteem. They reduce general life satisfaction and make you dislike yourself and others. Emotions that can be considered negative are hate, anger, jealousy, and sadness. In the right context, they are completely normal. How we let them affect our behavior and how long we express them is important. Every time we feel a negative emotion, it does not mean that there is a mental disorder. We cannot pathologize normal life.
Mental health is not a static concept wearing a big smile all the time. There are good days and there are bad days, good weeks and bad weeks. We are still mentally healthy despite having bad feelings or emotions. Some studies have proved that instead of applying critical thinking to reports of bad emotions by students and youngsters, instead of understanding the new language of youth immediately a label of mental disorders like depression is given. Self-reported cases of negative emotions should be calibrated and generational changes in language use should be considered. Results should be validated by applying clinically valid diagnostic criteria expert clinicians apply. If we open a magazine or newspaper, it shows there is a mental health crisis, particularly in colleges and university campuses. The increased public perception that being well means only having positive feelings all the time is taking over the social discourse on mental health. When the measure of health is simply feeling good, negative emotions become markers of being sick.
As far as biology is concerned negative emotions are essential for human development. They promote our growth and increase our ability to adapt. We cannot develop resilience and address life challenges and opportunities if we do not acknowledge genuine negative emotions and feel them as legitimate for some time.
Negative emotions are part of the human experience. They lead to bad feelings and stress so there is the urge to avoid them and think that, there is something wrong with us. A better approach is to manage them without denying them. We should not use avoidance coping nor we should let emotion wreak havoc our whole life. There should be a balanced approach. Bad emotions keep us safe and motivate us to improve our lives. Unacknowledged emotions increase stress and thinking every bad emotion is a disorder or something is wrong with us is also not a good approach. Embracing the fact we are feeling them and then determining why we are feeling them. Identifying the message, taking action, and then moving forward is a good idea. Anger and anxiety show something should needs to be changed. Fear shows that we should increase our safety. Frustration is a sign that something regarding relationships needs to be changed. These emotions are not in itself bad but they have a realm of negativity as compared to positive emotions. So negative emotions make us uncomfortable. Natural people want to escape them. But the dangers of unmanaged stress are real. We should embrace our positive as well as negative emotions. Research shows that a ratio of 3 to 1 for positive vs. negative emotion is beneficial. So we should strengthen our positive emotions through gratitude and other strategies that can authentically counterbalance uncomfortable emotions. There are harms of false positivity. Where we shame ourselves for feeling these natural states and try to deny them or force ourselves to pretend to feel more positive than we are.
A healthy lifestyle helps us to deal with negative emotions and setbacks which are part of normal life. Regular exercise, healthy eating, good sleep, and meditation are important and they make you physically and emotionally healthy and you do not run away from bad feelings or stick to them forever. Strategies to deal with bad emotions are not to blow things out of proportion, accepting that bad feelings are occasionally unavoidable, relaxing techniques, and learning to prepare by finding out what triggers them.
So it is the challenge of the present that we should think critically. We should monitor our languages and our emotional expectations. We should develop mental health literacy. We can do this by understanding how to maintain good mental health. Educating ourselves is important, about mental disorders and their treatments, decreasing stigma, and increasing our capacity to appropriately seek help for mental illness not for everyday unhappiness, and to clarify the confusion.
The author Dr. Attia Anwar is a consultant family physician with a postgraduate degree from the Royal College of GP UK. She is a strong advocate of health and well-being and wants patient participation in decision-making regarding health.
