What does science say about the best way for you to deal with difficult or negative emotions?

Lesson one, Emotions are unavoidable. They just happen to you, either you want it or not. They are inevitable. You can’t avoid them, so stop trying and accept that they just show up. Optioning to ignore, silence them or distract yourself from them, just make them louder and stronger, and much more powerful. As, Tal Ben Shahar, used to say,” only two types of people never experience negative emotions — psychopaths and dead people.”

Second, emotions are data, not directions.
Negative emotions provide you with relevant information (mostly from past experiences or speculated self constructed futures) but they aren’t necessarily right, neither correct. They are suggestions, not commandments. Listen to their message, question it and decide either to discredit them or use them on your own benefit.

Third lesson, emotional perfectionism is a fallacy. This absurd and overspread idea, that you have to be always in a positive state can

Eric Barker, in his article, reminds us of a straightforward way to refine one's Emotional Intelligence.

Let's start by defining what Emotional Intelligence is -definition taken from Harvard Business Review Guide to Emotional Intelligence-: "From a scientific standpoint, emotional intelligence is the ability to accurately perceive your own and others’ emotions; to understand the signals that emotions send about relationships; and to manage your own and others’ emotions."

How the hell do we do that?

Eric Barker encourages us to follow the 4 R’s rule: Realize, Recognize, Refine, Regulate (and yes, in this case the order is important).

1) Realize: Self-awareness. Having a deep and clear understanding of one’s emotions, strengths, weaknesses, needs, and drives. Developing this ability also helps us to recognize how our feelings affect us and others. Although Introspection seems the best

Actually, it doesn’t really matter that there is no real danger. Most of the things that we fear the most won’t put our life into question. Fear drives our lives, without us being aware of it; quoting Ezra Bayda: “fear motivates how we act and react”.

We can’t deny the feeling of it, we can’t even stop experiencing it, but we can be able to accept that, fear, or at least the the intensity of our fears, it’s mostly a construction in our heads.

And which are the three biggest ones? The fear of losing safety and control, the fear of aloneness and disconnection, and the fear of unworthiness. Ezra Baydastates, in this articlethat, by truly knowing our fears, we can start breaking their spell. More below, as usual, summarised for you.

Mark Manson, Author, Thinker and Life Enthusiast, as he defines himself in his popular blog: markmanson.net, is the writer of the best seller book The Subtle Art of Not giving a F*ck (2017) and he has just released Everything is F*cked. A book about Hope (Spring 2019). He is sharp, funny, edgy and he really knows what he is talking about when he talks about why we can't trust ourselves, and he "carefully" takes the time to explain us why. Just a selection of the fundamental ideas of his article that it’s worth reading.

If you do not, your parents for sure will remember Wayne Dyer, and most probably they have read or at least heard from his first book, Your Erroneous Zones (1976), one of the best-selling books of all time, with an estimated 100 million copies sold to date.