We all have emotions. Many emotions are great. Many emotions are bad. Many emotions allow us to feel completely elated, and joyous no matter where we’re at. There are also other emotions that do just the opposite. What are the differences between positive emotions and negative emotions?
This may seem like such a strange question yet today’s society struggles with emotions. You hear everybody running around we need to have more emotional IQ and need to know how our emotions work. You have people running around saying, we men need to express our emotions more. However, when we do, we become more emotionally unrecognizable.
How am I supposed to tell my emotions apart so that I can tell my wife what I’m feeling? This is what we’re gonna dive into.
First things first
The most important thing to do right now is explain what an emotion is. Many people sadly believe that emotions are just these little blobs of energy that randomly run into us. We don’t know why we all of a sudden got really mad. I don’t know why I’m crying out of nowhere. I don’t know why but I’m just horny right now.
The How We Feel app has 144 different types of emotions. These range from low energy negative to high energy positive.
Wow, other sites claim that a doctor named Robert Plutchick cited 34,000 different emotions that we can feel in a day
That’s a lot of emotions.
Yet no one really talks about what an emotion really is. My mentor, Brooke Castillo describes it best and makes the most sense. Any emotion is a vibration that originates in the brain and is felt throughout the body.
These emotions often resonate more in particular body parts. This is why we may ache in our hearts. When we’re sad we feel the stress on our shoulders. We have that sinking feeling in the pit of our stomachs. These are all feelings that we have about a particular emotion.
What are negative emotions?
Now I’m really wanting to talk about what a negative emotion is however, for you to know what a negative emotion is you have to also know and understand positive emotions. Now Dr. Plutchick. Says that there are eight basic emotions. Those emotions are.
- Joy
- Sadness
- Fear
- Anger
- Surprise
- Anticipation
- Acceptance
- Disgust
And each of these emotions, Dr. Plutchick says that they are opposite of each other so joy is the opposite of sadness. Fear is the opposite of anger. Surprise, opposite anticipation acceptance is obviously going to be the opposite of disgust.
This year I completely disagree with the good doctor. I actually believe they’re only two basic emotions. These two emotions are opposite of each other. The two emotions that people feel at their base are love and fear.
Many people, struggle with this line of thinking, wanting to say that hate is the opposite of love, and I would disagree, because hate gets its power from fear so fear is the more basic emotion.
Positive
Positive emotions are often viewed as being lighter as being a feeling of happiness, joy, fulfillment, and accomplishment emotions like this. However, when I say positive emotions, I’m referring to emotions based in love, which also include sadness and grieving when you break up from your girlfriend or wife, you feel sadness, your grandmother dies you’re going to feel grief you’re gonna feel sadness. These are signs of love And they are appropriate emotions to be feeling at that particular time.
Negative
For a long time, I struggled with negative emotions, and what they actually meant. I figured emotions like anger were completely useless and we don’t need them yet these days I would actually disagree. We need anger in our lives. Even frustration and jealousy are just emotions. The problem is that most of the time us humans when we feel negative emotions try to shy away from what we are feeling.
So negative emotions are actually fear based on emotions. Anger, jealousy, indignation, frustration all these are based on fear we’re afraid that we were going to be hurt. We were afraid that our loved one was going to choose somebody else. We are afraid that somebody’s getting more than we are.We’re afraid that we don’t have any power over our circumstances.
You might be able to start seeing where fear originates in all these perceived negative emotions
Negative emotions are not bad
Not the least negative emotions are just emotions. Your thought is what makes them positive or negative. Like I said, your grandmother died and you feel sad. You can look at that as being bad being negative or you can look at that as a means of your feeling the love you have for your grandmother.
Even, anger has its place. Somebody is trying to hurt your family. If you want anger to be expressed your child was missing four hours you would want to express the worry you had for them. Negative emotions are neither good nor bad. They just are emotions.
Are you responding or Reacting?
One of the big problems that many people today have is whether they are responding or reacting to a circumstance. Zig Zigglar explains the difference perfectly. If you go to a doctor because you’re sick and he gives you a shot and tells you to come back tomorrow that following day you show up and you have a rash. The doctor is going to say you had a reaction to the treatment. However, if you show up and you are better, then you’re gonna be told that you are responding to treatment.
We do the same thing with emotions and our circumstances. however, the big difference is, are you intentionally applying a thought to the circumstance? Many people are not being intentional, nor mindful of what they are thinking. This is why they think emotions just out of the blue hit them upside their head.
Our emotions work like this, we have a circumstance like a man pulls out in front of us in the road. We slam on the break we lay on the horn we shake our fist we yell at the guy through our window. It may even give him a couple of Hand gestures for good measure.
So what are we mad about?
We’re mad because we thought our life was gonna be full of pain. We were afraid that we were going to wreck our car. And we saw the guy who pulled out in front of us as the source of our fear. And we had the thought that we were going to get hurt and wreck our car. That’s what created the fear, this is why some people will get mad when you pull out in front of them, and others will make goofy faces when they realize they messed up. Our emotions are based entirely on our thoughts.
when we are responding to a circumstance, we think, and we pay attention to what we think. We have a conscious effort to shape our emotions to what the circumstance is. This is why we choose to get angry, or we choose to be sad or we choose to be happy or we choose to be friendly. All of our motions are actually choices.
in all reality, we are not worried about what our thoughts are. And when we act out on our emotions, this is us actually resisting the bad feeling. So when a guy is angry, and he jumps out and starts yelling and trying to swing at the other guy, the angry guy is just trying to stop the feeling of being helpless by using a more powerful emotion like anger. He is resisting feeling the fear of almost running into Another car
Our avoidance of negative emotions is the reason why we get into alcohol abuse, start self-medicating with drugs, overeat, watch porn, and many other types of buffering. We get ourselves into so much trouble because we don’t want to feel what we perceive to be a negative emotion.
The good news is, it’s just a feeling a vibration felt throughout our body so we can just allow the fear to be felt. We can allow the anger to just be felt. These emotions only last a minute to a minute and a half and then they’re gone.
