How Reframing Negative Emotions Allows You To Live A Better Life

Living a good life isn’t just about finding joy and pleasure.

You devote so much of your time and energy to seeking joy and pleasure. Which is normal. After all, who doesn’t want to have more of that in their lives?

But there’s no such thing as a life filled with nothing but joy and pleasure. Without the “downs” of life, there can be no “ups”.

No one wants to experience sadness, grief, pain, or boredom. But the catch is, you can’t have joy, gratitude, satisfaction, and the other positive emotions without experiencing the opposite emotions as well. They are two-sides of the same coin which you can’t separate.

Emotions are always flowing through you, acting as one of the most important inputs that you take in, even though it is a subconscious process. You’re basing our actions on signals from your emotions more often than you realize. Given your tendency to react to emotions you’re feeling, recognizing when you’re feeling an emotion and being able to identify it are key skills that will help you better respond, rather than reacting. That means that if you close yourself off from experiencing grief, sadness, anger, or any other of the “negative” emotions, you are impairing your ability to respond. You’re also closing yourself off to feeling the positive emotions, which is something I doubt you want to do.

A life with neither feeling positive nor negative emotions would be very bland indeed.

A common view is that “good days”, the ones where you experience a lot of positive emotions, are the “right way” to living well, and that “bad days”, where most emotions feel negative, are to be avoided. However, both form an essential part of life. You cannot appreciate a good day without experiencing the occasional bad day. Sadness, grief and frustration are as real of a part of life as joy, contentment, and ease are.

Fully experience your emotions, regardless of their nature. By doing that, you gain the ability to respond rather than react emotionally.

I’m not suggesting you go out and seek negative emotions or experiences, just so that you’ll feel better at other times. Rather, I’m asking you to consider how you might reframe a negative emotion that you feel. These emotions provide you with valuable information if you’re able to sit with them and feel them. They are useful tools for helping you figure out how to navigate in the world.

Stop chasing happiness and instead, accept all the emotions that you’re going to encounter; they are all part of this incredible ride we call life.

Quotation that I have been pondering

There is such an abundance of information available to us. While this is positive, it’s become difficult to know what to pay attention to and how to minimize information overload. That’s why this quote from James Clear resonates.

“The world contains far more information than any single person can learn in their lifetime. The question is not whether you are ignorant, but what you choose to be ignorant about. Few topics are worth your precious time. Choose what you pay attention to with great care.”

It is way too easy to fall deep down into many rabbit holes, and while they may be interesting to you, you must realize they come at a cost. The cost is your time and attention. You have finite amounts of those in your life, so you’d best focus your attention on:

things that matter to you
things that you can do something about

The rest is noise.

What things can you choose to be willfully ignorant about?

Journal Prompt

In line with the above quotation from James Clear, you need to figure out what to pay attention to – and what you are going to ignore. I suggest you focus on areas that are within your control or influence, and that you have a strong interest in. Which leads us to this week’s journal prompt:

“What are the things that I choose to pay more attention to? And what are the things in my life that I am going to ignore?”

Decide and then respect your decision over the next week. And then observe how you feel.

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