Positive Emotions Are The Best Weapon Against Adversity
We teach children to read, write, dress or ride a bike, etc. But what about your emotions? Educating in positive emotions can become the key to happiness. Positive emotions help make people more resistant to adversity. People who in the face of adversity bend but do not break, are capable of experiencing positive emotions even in stressful situations.
Many mental health problems have an emotional origin, misunderstood and repressed emotions damage our body and mind. Emotions are always “educated”, the difference is that they can educate themselves, for better or for worse, or you can consciously influence them, helping us to understand, transform and regulate our emotions.
Educate the emotions
Educating in emotions is educating for life. Emotional intelligence consists of having a series of skills to recognize our own emotions and those of others and also to be able to manage them properly.
A few years ago, emotional education consisted of learning to repress certain emotions and not allow them to surface in public. However, fortunately little by little we are beginning to discover emotional intelligence, to give it the importance it deserves and that includes the proper expression of emotions and not their repression.
The ideal way to reduce future levels of violence and increase altruism is through early social and emotional learning. If a child is able to identify what his feelings and those of his classmates are, he will know how to react appropriately to them and will serve as a basis for improving his social skills: to know what to do at what moment.
The integration of children with sociability problems happens here, because he understands how others feel and because others understand how he feels. In addition, knowing how to express emotions will make them not a child without a voice, but a child who asks for help if they feel in danger or threatened.
How do positive emotions help us?
Positive emotions facilitate the start-up of receptive, flexible and integrative thought patterns, favoring the appearance of novel situations and behaviors. This way of thinking may well have preceded the great discoveries and achievements in human history.
It is difficult to imagine Michelangelo getting pissed off while painting the Sistine Chapel, Newton angry under the apple tree, Edison, Marie Curie, depressed in their laboratories. On the contrary, it is easy to imagine them thinking possibilities and alternatives, combining elements that were impossible a priori, absorbed in their task, excited as they contemplated their progress towards a desired goal and full of meaning for them.
Along the same lines, it has been proven that diagnoses of liver diseases were more accurate when doctors were made to feel good (Fredrickson, 2003). By “more accurate” they meant in this study that physicians took less time to integrate case information as they were less likely to rely on initial thoughts and, therefore, to make less premature diagnoses.
Positive emotions help us not only to feel better about ourselves but also to enhance our personal skills and competencies. Experiencing positive emotions every day helps us to feel more and more a state of global happiness.
