4 Truths About Emotions

Emotions can be as colorful as a color palette and as high and low as the craziest rollercoaster ride. However, they all have the same patterns.

We mustn't ignore how we feel. We can discern emotions and find the root cause of them. We can choose how we think and what we do with the way how we feel.

Here are four truths about emotions that I have found to be true in my life.

1. Emotions Are Good

Who said that negative emotions are always bad?

In reality, even bad and negative emotions can be beneficial. They are signals that let us know: "Hey, something is not ok! Let's solve it! You need some healing!". What is important is that we don't keep on living out these negative emotions for a more extended time – that we don't form a behavior based on these emotions.

I had an example just the other day when I was continuing to work on my website. (It's the first time in life when I create a website. And I am not a techie person.)

I need to improve my website's speed for it to rank better in search engines. The tool that I used for analysis gave me many errors I need to fix on my website to improve the speed. For most of the errors, I had no clue what they mean. I got frustrated, trying to follow different videos and guidelines online on how to fix such errors. Nothing gave me the right solution!

They were all full of information I could not understand where, how, what, why. I was trying to ask some people for help; they also did not understand. Eventually, I got so angry that I started to cry.

The reality was that I had spent all day in front of the laptop. And I had woken up at 4 am that morning. I hadn't taken appropriate breaks throughout the day.

My anger, crying, screaming, and feeling that I "almost would throw laptop away" was just a sign – "hey, you need some rest!" "You need to take breaks if you plan to spend all day at a laptop!"

“Negative emotions often are signals that you must take care of yourself.”

So, whenever you start to burst out in anger – see where you could have stopped yourself earlier. Before, emotions are piling up so much that you lose temper. And then next time you can stop on time.

The same is true if we have experienced some kind of trauma in childhood or relationship previously. Somebody in a random conversation, meaning nothing terrible, often may spark up some past hurts. That can throw us again into self-blame, self-criticizing, self-rejection, and self-pity games. If we continue experiencing the same emotions long after the traumatic events, that means we have not yet healed from the past.

Unless we heal, we may view the words and actions of others inadequately.

2. Emotions Aren't Always Reliable

Although we need to pay attention to our emotions and fix whatever is causing negative emotions, we need to keep in mind that emotions are not reliable.

Way too often, we believe that how we feel about the situation is the ultimate reality of how things are.

We need to remember that emotions usually don't project an objective view of reality.

An example of this would be dealing with shame due to low self-esteem. Maybe, you have experienced childhood trauma. These traumatic experiences have written in your subconscious mind the feeling that "you are not good enough." Long after the events, you can still feel that you are not good enough even if you are in entirely different circumstances and social settings.

“We don’t need to believe every thought that comes into our minds, especially when experiencing emotional rollercoasters.”

In reality, no one else had the thought that you are not good enough. But because you have experienced these feelings before, you project them onto new situations.

The truth is that we have a past hurt inside of us that dates way back. A present event is just a trigger that pulls it up. We probably have been hurt through some childhood events, or in previous relationships, etc. And we have not yet healed from that!

Do you see how, in this situation, your emotions are not reliable?

Emotions are based on stories we tell ourselves. If we think that the world is in green color, then our emotions will be green too. If we think that we are not worthy, then our emotions will be shame and fear.

How to change that? Start with noticing your thoughts. Be very conscious of what thoughts you are having during the day. Imagine if everything that you think gets transcripted. What thoughts would be transcripted?

Once you notice those thoughts, the next step is to change them. Write out, cross over negative thoughts, and re-write the exact positive opposite.

Use these positive phrases as often as possible. Read them aloud every morning, looking at the mirror.

Put a reminder for yourself that you need to read aloud the positives sentences you have written every time you think that negative thought about yourself again.

3. You Can Choose Your Emotions

The same as we can learn how to control our thoughts, we can control our emotions. Thoughts stir up emotions.

Denying reality does not help us. If we have been suppressing emotions for a long time, we live in an unhealthy denial. Those emotions stay unless we focus on fixing the problem that is causing them.

Like I wrote earlier, emotions are useful because they signal us what is wrong. And then we can fix it!

None of us are robots when it comes to emotions. Even the most senseless people in the world (murderers etc.) are driven by emotion (anger, fear, rage, hatred).

Whenever we are exposed to adverse events or our expectations are not met, it is COMPLETELY normal to feel emotions: sadness, anger, fear, shame, envy…

For example, if we experience a break-up, we feel sadness. If we lose in a competition we have been preparing for for many years, we experience frustration.

Suppose we meet a person that is a lot more confident than we are, and we need to leave a good impression on this person. In that case, we experience nervousness, fear, maybe even shame. We are afraid that we would make mistakes and present ourselves inadequately.

“You can’t deny how you feel, but you can choose what you will do with it.”

We can't deny that. The only way how to heal negative emotions is to get to the root of the issue. To see why we feel the way how we feel.

When we look more in-depth at why we feel the way we feel, we can see more objective reality.

We can choose how we will react.

What often helps is hearing other people's stories—learning that we are not the only ones who feel that way. Hearing that other people also have gone through difficult circumstances helps. And that they have experienced failures.

Your decision – how you will decide to react will determine how long you will stay on the emotional rollercoaster. How long you will feel bad, upset, anger, keep in self-pity, etc.

It's ok to be sad for some time, but we can't stay there too long.

4. Whatever You Think About Is How You Feel

This is related to the second truth of emotions that every thought is based on emotion.

But this time, I want to give you more tools to use for your future.

I want to give you tools that you can use to create some positive momentum in your life.

Let's start with this: we can only think either positive thought or negative thought simultaneously. We can't think both positively and negatively at the same time.

Suppose we continue repeating in our mind the same story of how other people have hurt us and playing out different scenarios of how people could hurt us in the future. In that case, we live in an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, worry, shame, low self-esteem.

These kinds of emotions produce more such emotions and situations.

If we tell ourselves negative stories and these negative stories bring negative results, why couldn't we tell ourselves positive stories?

What kind of emotions do you want to experience?

Joy, excitement, confidence, love? Now, think about the last time you have felt these emotions? Last time you felt joy? Last time you felt confident? How good you felt?

Now imagine yourself in new future situations, where you experience joy, love, confidence.

How do you feel?

If you are like me, then your sadness, frustration, anger disappears, and you start to smile and anticipate the upcoming events. Or whatever you would like to happen in my life.

“If we tell ourselves negative stories and these negative stories bring negative results, why couldn’t we tell ourselves positive stories?”

Vision board and visualization exercise can be a very powerful tool. Take only 5-10 minutes each evening, visualizing the events and things you would like to happen. You will experience a lot of positive emotions.

The more positive emotions you experience, the more they are overriding the past negative emotions.

The more you visualize what you would like to happen and live in the environment of these positive emotions, the more likely you will act positively. And the more you act in that way with positive expectation, the more likely you will experience all that as reality.

Read here more about the vision board.

Conclusion

Often when negative emotions overtake us, we want to suppress them. However, that is not the road to freedom and a healthy lifestyle. Whatever negative emotions we have, are signals of a problem that we need to solve. We can learn to identify these problems (based on negative beliefs) and override them with positive truths. That can significantly change the quality of our lives.