Bad feelings can be vital clues that a health issue, relationship or other important matter needs attention, Adler points out. Negative emotions also most likely aid in our survival. “Taking the good and the bad together may detoxify the bad experiences, allowing you to make meaning out of them in a way that supports psychological well-being,” the researchers found. As Adler and Hershfield reported in 2012, feeling cheerful and dejected at the same time-for example, “I feel sad at times because of everything I've been through, but I'm also happy and hopeful because I'm working through my issues”-preceded improvements in well-being over the next week or two for subjects, even if the mixed feelings were unpleasant at the time. They also wrote narratives describing their life events and their time in therapy, which were coded for emotional content.
Before each session, participants completed a questionnaire that assessed their psychological well-being.
Hershfield, a professor of marketing at New York University, investigated the link between mixed emotional experience and psychological welfare in a group of people undergoing 12 sessions of psychotherapy. “Remember, one of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences,” Adler says.Īdler and Hal E. Unpleasant feelings are just as crucial as the enjoyable ones in helping you make sense of life's ups and downs. Įudaemonic approaches, on the other hand, emphasize a sense of meaning, personal growth and understanding of the self-goals that require confronting life's adversities. In addition, people's outlook can become so rosy that they ignore dangers or become complacent. Taken to an extreme, however, that definition is not congruent with the messiness of real life. Hedonic theories define well-being as the presence of positive emotion, the relative absence of negative emotion and a sense of life satisfaction. Positive thoughts and emotions can, of course, benefit mental health. “Acknowledging the complexity of life may be an especially fruitful path to psychological well-being,” says psychologist Jonathan M. Attempting to suppress thoughts can backfire and even diminish our sense of contentment. In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental health. Although positive emotions are worth cultivating, problems arise when people start believing they must be upbeat all the time. Such reactions undoubtedly stem from our culture's overriding bias toward positive thinking. In recent years I have noticed an increase in the number of people who also feel guilty or ashamed about what they perceive to be negativity. In my psychotherapy practice, many of my clients struggle with highly distressing emotions, such as extreme anger, or with suicidal thoughts.
#Sad emotion full#
I am a bit unsettled, then, when in the midst of describing his painful experiences, he says, “I'm sorry for being so negative.”Ī crucial goal of therapy is to learn to acknowledge and express a full range of emotions, and here was a client apologizing for doing just that. As a psychotherapist, I strive to be warm, nonjudgmental and encouraging. A client sits before me, seeking help untangling his relationship problems.
0 kommentar(er)
