What Your Negative Emotions Are Trying to Tell You
5/25/202646 min
Negative emotions like sadness, anger, guilt, and anxiety can feel overwhelming. But what if those uncomfortable feelings aren’t problems to fix, but signals worth listening to?
As part of our series on how to spring clean your wellbeing, Dr. Laurie revisits a conversation with Harvard Medical School psychologist Susan David, author of Emotional Agility. Together, they discuss why bottling up difficult feelings doesn’t work, why brooding can keep us stuck, and what our individual emotions are actually trying to tell us about our lives and relationships.
If you’ve ever tried to bury a bad feeling, this episode offers a more effective approach to emotional healing.
Experts Mentioned:
- Susan David, Harvard Medical School psychologist a
- Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist, neurologist, and founder of logotherapy
Resources Mentioned:
- Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life, by Susan David (2016)
Related Episodes:
- "How to Identify Your Negative Emotions"
- "Stepping Off the Path of Anxiety"
- "How to be Angry Better"
- "When Guilt is Good... and When it's Not"
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsLaurie Santos· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Pushkin. [upbeat music] Hey, Happiness Lab listeners. Welcome back to our special series on spring cleaning your happiness. Today we're doing another trip into our back catalog to find some of my favorite past episodes, and today's choice is a conversation I still come back to whenever I'm facing a tough emotion. This episode is all about how to clean up the way you manage negative feelings. And as happiness spring-cleaning hacks go, the ones you're about to hear today are going to be super important, because negative emotions, feelings like sadness, anger, fear, overwhelm, they tend to come up on the regular these days, and we don't often deal with these emotions all that well. Sometimes we try to avoid difficult feelings by distracting ourselves or trying to suppress what we're feeling. Other times, we get very caught up in our negative emotions, keeping them alive through rumination and worry. But what if we used a healthier strategy? What if we instead got curious about what our tough emotions were trying to tell us? What if we looked more carefully at the solutions they might be suggesting? These are the questions I'll be diving into in this episode. I'll chat with Harvard psychologist Susan David about strategies we can use to get more agile with our tough emotions. And Susan will share lots of tips we can use not to sweep our negative emotions away, but to embrace them as healthy data points. That's all coming up