Positive Emotions Are The Best Weapon Against Adversity

We teach children to read, write, dress or ride a bicycle, etc. But what about their emotions?

Educating through positive emotions may well be the key to happiness. Positive emotions help people feel stronger in the face of adversity.

People who bend in the face of adversity, but don’t break up, are able to feel positive emotions even in stressful situations.

Many mental health problems have an emotional origin, because misunderstood and contained emotions harm our body and mind.

Emotions are always “educated”, with the difference that they can be educated on their own, for good or bad, and that you can also consciously influence them, helping you to understand, transform and regulate. your emotions.

A few years ago, emotional education was about learning how to suppress certain emotions and not let them show in public.

Yet, little by little, we begin to discover emotional intelligence, to give it the importance it deserves, and this includes the adequate expression of emotions, not suppressing them.

The ideal way to reduce future displays of violence and increase selflessness is through social and emotional learning from an early age.

If a child is able to recognize his feelings and those of his peers, he will know how to react appropriately to them  and this will serve as a basis for improving his social faculties: to know what to do when.

By knowing how to express his emotions, the child acquires a voice of his own. The child thus knows how to ask for help if he feels in danger or threatened.

How do positive emotions help us?

Positive emotions facilitate the activation of receptive, flexible and integrating thought models,  favoring the emergence of innovative situations and behaviors.

It is quite possible that this way of thinking preceded the great discoveries and the most important achievements in the history of mankind.

It’s hard to imagine Michelangelo angry while painting the Sistine Chapel, Newton angry under the apple tree, Edison, Marie Curie, depressed in their labs.

On the contrary, it is easy to imagine them thinking about possibilities and alternatives, by combining elements a priori impossible, immersed in their work, moved, contemplating their progress towards a desired objective and carrying meaning to them.

In the same vein, it has been found that diagnoses of liver disease are more accurate when the doctors are placed in the right conditions (Fredrickson, 2003).

By “fairer”, we mean that in this study, the doctors took less time to integrate information about the presented case and that they were less inclined to rely on their initial thoughts and, therefore, to do so. less premature diagnoses.

Positive emotions not only help us feel better about ourselves, but also boost our personal faculties and skills.

Feeling positive emotions day by day helps us to feel happier and happier overall.