Handling negative emotions (I)

“A man’s cheerful heart gives him strength when he is sick. You can’t keep going if you have a broken spirit.” Proverbs 18.14.

“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted; he rescues those whose spirits are crushed.” Psalm 34.18

The mind is a very powerful machine that you must know how to handle as it has the potential to be your advantage or your disadvantage. It can work either in your favour or it can work against you.

“A positive mind finds a way it can be done; a negative mind looks for all the ways it can’t be done.” Apoleo Hill

Your mind has the capacity to receive, process, store and retrieve information which I turn will control you.

“Your genes don’t control your life as much as your mind and thoughts do.” Carmen Jacob

Proverbs 23.7 says as a man thinks in his heart so is he.

Extreme care and caution must therefore be taken to safeguard your mind in view of the dangers of negative emotions. Negative emotions can be described as any feeling which causes you to be miserable and sad. These emotions make you dislike yourself and others, and reduce your confidence and self-esteem, and general life satisfaction.

You must, therefore, not be ignorant, careless, negligent, and nonchalant about negative emotions because they are real and dangerous.

Dangers of negative emotions

1) They steal your joy—you lose enthusiasm and happiness. People, situation and circumstances can make you have good or bad emotions which in turn will have a knock-on effect on you. The memories can provoke negative or positive emotions which will erode your joy.

2) Negative emotions, if not properly handled, usually results in the loss of peace which manifest in anxiety, worry, nervousness and mental stress. It makes you get overwhelmed, you longer become calm. You become nervous, worried and stressed out.

3) It lowers and eventually destroys your morale and of those around you. It lowers and destroys the satisfaction you used to feel around people or around the place that triggered the negative emotions—your enthusiasm and confidence dips.

4)  Creates disinterest in your job/the people and you begin to hate your job, people and yourself.

5) Mental health issues. “Negative emotions are a healthy part of life and are important (for instance, they let you know if you are in danger), but there is a downside to giving them too much free rein. If you spend too much time dwelling on negative emotions and the situations that might have caused them, you could go into a spiral of rumination. Rumination is the tendency to keep thinking, replaying, or obsessing over negative emotional situations and experiences.

In this spiral of negative thinking, you can end up feeling worse and worse about the situation and yourself, possibly resulting in a number of detrimental effects on your mental and physical well-being. The problem with rumination is that it increases your brain’s stress response, meaning your body gets unnecessarily flooded with the stress hormone cortisol. Rumination could lead to a number of harmful coping behaviors, such as overeating, smoking, and alcohol consumption, alongside physical health consequences, including insomnia, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and clinical anxiety and depression. ppccfl.com

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