Why negative emotions are needed and why they should not be blocked

As a rule, they include anger, anxiety, anger, disgust, sadness, shame, and so on. There is no universal list. However, in general, the division of emotions into positive or negative is not entirely productive, as it causes a desire to get rid of the latter as something unnecessary.

All emotions perform a certain function in the process of regulation of mental activity. And the negative ones are no exception, basically they are given a place to signal that something is going wrong, and protect the psyche from destruction.

Processes in the psyche are aimed at avoiding pain. It is for this that the signal function is needed, which warns of danger - real or imagined. The main negative emotions are anger and fear. The second as a warning and the first as an impulse that speaks of the presence of obstacles on the way to the goal, of frustration that does not allow you to get what you want. That is why they are so important.

The third negative emotion - aggression - is one of the main driving forces in the human psyche. Where the expected satisfaction is not achieved, it arises. Rather, it is a way of perceiving and behaving in order to achieve the desired. As long as there are no obstacles in the way of a person, the search activity of the body is minimal. But at the moment when they arise, tension mobilizes all the available forces of the body.

The ability to be aware of your emotions and manage them is an important factor in improving the quality of life in general. This helps to interact with other people, whether they are household members, colleagues or passers-by on the subway.

It is important to understand that our emotional register functions in this way: either we have access to all emotions at once, or not. That is, our world is either colored or black and white. If we do not want to experience negative emotions, then we automatically begin to filter the emotional flow, and our access to positive ones will also be reduced.

Negativity, of course, is unpleasant to experience, but the experience of conscious work with your emotions, development emotional intelligence, awareness of the reasons why this or that feeling appeared, helps to change the attitude towards this over time. That is, after some time, having experienced anger, disgust and analyzing the situation, we will feel great gratitude, because these emotions protected us from possible troubles.

It is possible to suppress and block strong negative emotions, but it will not work endlessly and without a trace. They will still find a way out, for example, through passive aggression. A vivid example is when you got angry at your boss, but suppressed this feeling. And now, for some reason, they began to constantly be late for work, which annoys him very much, but not so much as to come into open conflict with you.

Suppressed anger can also develop into auto-aggressive behavior—inflicting psychological or physical harm on oneself. For example, self-blame, punishing yourself with overeating to the point of stomach pain or exhausting workouts. By the way, the obsessive squeezing of acne also applies to such actions.

To understand how unlived anger can affect your physical health, it is enough to remember your bodily sensations when you are angry - a huge tension inside, clenched jaws, rapid pulse and heartbeat. But the fight-or-flight survival strategy is not implemented, which means that this energy hits your cardiovascular and immune systems time after time.

Analyze how long this emotion develops? What events contribute to this? Try to focus, for example, on breathing, and then try to look at the situation and yourself from the outside, observe the emotion, mentally move it some distance away.