Mental health ≠ feeling good

How the mental health awareness movement is making us feel worse and what to do about it

Over the past few decades, awareness around mental health issues has increased enormously, and that's largely a good thing. But there are hidden dangers, too.

One of the main problems is due to the emergence of a misleading perception: that negative feelings are bad for our mental health, and should be avoided, reframed, or let go of as quickly as possible.

Negative emotions are not wrong

Most of us know this, intellectually. We know that negative emotions are signals that carry important information about what we need to pay attention to, what we need to change, and where there might be conflicts between our inner and outer worlds.

But even though we know this, we still demonize inevitable emotions like fear, shame and anger, and we try to push them away, or at least reduce them, instead of listening to them and using them productively.

For example, clinical psychologist Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary argues that anxiety is often a signal that you deeply care about something and you perceive it as being threatened. When you choose to see anxiety this way, its message can lead you to anticipate the possible ways things can go wrong and prepare for them ahead of time. Alternatively, if the situation is out of your control, you can instead focus on the deeper, positive reasons behind your anxiety. And when you shift your attention to the thing you value instead of the threat that you can’t control, you can come up with more and better ways to nurture, protect or advance it. 

Again, intellectually, that makes great sense. The challenge is that thinking in this way requires full acceptance of difficult emotions, and the ability to take an objective perspective when they occur – and most of us don't have those skills, largely because we've been conditioned to see experiences like anxiety as the opposition.

So, instead, we become anxious about our anxiety, and these second-order emotions only compound the original feelings, doing ever greater damage.

New belief: negative emotions are healthy and productive

So, how can we train ourselves to respond adaptively to negative feelings? 

We need to flip the script and start patterning in the perspective that negative emotions are healthy, productive and can even be positive experiences, even if they don't feel positive at the time. 

To do this, next time you're in the grip of a negative emotion, try asking yourself these questions:

1. What, exactly, am I feeling?
Start with bringing awareness to the precise emotions you’re experiencing, paying attention to their nuances, intensity and frequency.

2. Is this emotion appropriate to my current situation? 
First, is this emotion appropriate to my current situation? If not, take a step back. It's easy to bring old feelings into experiences that don't necessarily warrant them, but it's rarely helpful. Take some time or create the space you need to calm down, so you can react to what's actually going on. 

3. What's the message? 
Second, if your emotional reaction is appropriate to the current situation, ask yourself: what is this feeling telling me? Focus on the positive reasons for your experiences – the things you care deeply about, and the values involved. It can be tempting to label your emotions as good or bad, but it’s important to be able to hold contradictions and acknowledge that two opposing feelings can be true at the same time.  

4. What can I do about this? 
And then, finally, turn your attention towards the potential actions you can take to process, cope, make sense of or move on from your experience. 

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Thank you for reading! We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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