MODULE 4: How to Feel Better
Negative Emotion is Part of the Human Experience
This is such an important point to grasp. We are supposed to have negative emotion. We aren’t taught this. A lot of the reason people feel so unhappy is because they think that they shouldn’t. We are socialized to think this way. We are taught that happiness is the goal. When we don’t feel fully happy or satisfied or peaceful, we make it mean that something is wrong instead of recognizing that negative emotion is a natural part of life.
Life is 50/50
The truth is that a human life is not meant to feel good and positive all the time. Our experience as humans includes 50% negative emotion. This is normal. Life is messy. The world is messy. And half of your experience might suck sometimes. It may be downright painful. It is important to embrace the fact that discomfort is part of the deal.
Negative emotion, including unhappiness, is a necessary and even valuable part of the human experience. I know that this seems counterintuitive, but the contrast is what makes feeling good possible. Without negative emotion, we could not experience or recognize positive emotions. Think about it - if you had never known sorrow, could you fully appreciate happiness? Without anxiety, could you know peace? Without indifference, could you know love? With only positive emotion, we wouldn’t even know we are having positive emotion. What makes abundance feel so amazing is because we know what scarcity feels like. Negative emotion lets us know what we don’t want, and when we know what we don’t want, then we more easily can find out what we do want.
Emotional Balance
In an effort to be happy all the time, we often attempt to avoid discomfort which could help us evolve and motivate us to create what we most want it our lives. To create change, we must be willing to fail and continuously try, with the understanding and acceptance that emotional balance means that 50% of our time here on earth will be spent in negative emotion. This is the normal human experience, as we have discussed.
You must make the choice to be uncomfortable. Consciously and deliberately. Embrace it all. We recognize that although we can select our thought and emotions on purpose, this does not mean that we should always be choosing positive emotions.
Choose Humanness Over Happiness
It is normal and important to allow yourself to be uncomfortable and to experience negative emotion. The goal is to live your human life fully, knowing that this will include a lot of contrast. Choosing to live a human life instead of a happy life will lead to more peace.
This includes choosing discomfort when it is appropriate. For example, when someone we love dies, we want to feel grief, even though we know that death is part of the human experience. When a relationship ends, we want to feel anger and disappointment, even though we know that it is optional to feel this way. When we hear of violence and tragedy, we want to feel negative emotions. We don’t want to feel joy in these circumstances, we want to feel the range of emotions available based on what is happening and how we are thinking about it.
Emotions Are Not Problems to be Solved
Emotions are to be felt. They exist to protect us in the world. To help us connect with others. To take steps towards goals. To make decisions. Most people experience their positive emotions with ease but find painful emotions more difficult to bear. Because they can be so uncomfortable, we may view these emotions as “problems” that need to be solved. We rush to try to solve how we feel with some external change. We don’t want to experience this, so we try to solve the problem of the emotion. This is the exact opposite of what we should do when we are in pain. We need to allow discomfort. We must be present with the emotion and do not be in a rush to fix it or respond to it. When we have allowed ourselves to sit with the emotion, we can then decide how we would like to respond, in a way that is more in line with who we want to be. Remember that emotions cannot harm you.
Resisting uncomfortable feelings pulls us away from our lives, and it pulls us away from the half of life that is joyful and amazing. Because we become so focused on making the negative go away, we make it mean terrible things about us and our life, that we become so much less available to focus on creating the emotions we want most, like happiness and fulfillment.
Exercise: Feelings Audit
Use this worksheet to uncover what feelings you are experiencing on a regular basis and what impact these have in your life.