Regulating our negative emotions can create better opportunities to live our life happily.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

In general, we plan many things in order to achieve the desirables and to avoid the undesirables. When we start executing our plans and go ahead in life, naturally we will start experiencing an array of different feelings and emotions which can be either positive or negative. 

Often, we are so much focused on the end-results that we tend to ignore the subtle gains and losses that we incur during the process. We might be well aware of the gains and losses which are gross, such as money and various possessions, but the subtle gains or losses are about the impressions that we are imprinting on our mind through different emotions. 

It is important to achieve tangible assets in our life; but, at the same time, it is important to protect and nourish the intangible assets such as our mind.

We see the world through our mind. It is one of our primary instruments to experience the world. Unlike any other material instrument, our mind is very subtle in how it receives things and expresses its response. We, as its possessors, have a responsibility to use and nourish it constructively well enough so that it will work for us and never against us. The positive emotions like joy, gratitude, satisfaction, optimism, and confidence, etc., nourishes our mind; and the negative ones such as anger, hatred, fear, despair, and disappointment, etc., degrade our mind. 

It is impractical to expect life to give us only good things. But we can prepare our minds to choose better options and give responses to all the good and bad things in our life. If we really want to make real progress in our lives, then we must be wary of what we feed our minds on a regular basis. Thus, there is a great need to regulate our emotions; especially the negative ones.

Let us briefly explore how negative emotions can harm us, and how we can benefit by regulating them.

How negative emotions can harm us?

• Negative emotions can deviate us from our purpose.
• They drain our vital energy by forcing us to repeat the mistakes.
• They impel us to waste our time in unnecessary repentance.
• They feed unhealthy energies that can degrade our physical health. 
• They can deprive us of discovering the higher truths.

The benefits of regulating our negative emotions. 

1. Focus on our goals: If we keep a check on our worries and fears, we can focus on our goals and try to put all our energy to give our best shot at everything we do.

2. Learning and development: When we are depressed, we either waste our time in thinking about something we cannot change, or waste others’ time by relating to them how unfair or cruel life is. The same time, instead, can be utilized in learning new things that can empower us to do well in the future.

3. Quantity and quality in relationships: Negative emotions make our life vibrate at low frequencies, besides impeding our capability or intent to strike good conversations with people. Further, we tend to get into the same lowly moods, or interact with similar (negative) people, only to talk about all unworthy things. When we focus on operating our life more on positive emotions, we possibly meet many high energy people and that helps us to instill more positive emotions which can reform and rejuvenate all our relationships.

4. Improvement in health: We all know that prevention is better than cure. So, restricting the unhealthy energy feed from negative emotions in to our system can give our body and mind a better chance to remain happy and healthy.

5. Time for higher dimension: Though we long for the various riches of the world that we think can make us happy, some part of our being knows that life is beyond all that we can see and experience with our senses. A deep desire to pursue a reality that is beyond everything that we know exists in us but we don’t find enough time to dwell on it. When try to keep ourselves aloof from the noise of negative emotions we can gradually walk on the path of discovering the higher dimensions of life.

Would it not be wonderful if we can get back all the time and energy that we had spent in being angry, depressed, or worried, etc.? But we all know time spent cannot be gotten back. However, we can at least try to not waste our time and energy any further. 

The unpredictability of the behavior of people around us and the various circumstances in life could lead to undesirable reversals for our attempts towards leading a happy life. But, we have to be cautious, and not let negative emotions --resulting from life's reversals-- obstruct our journey. It may seem tough to walk on the path of regulating and driving the negative emotions out, but by constantly reminding ourselves about the various opportunities that we can pursue by regulating them, we will get the required strength to do so.

Thank you.

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