The Good News About Negative Emotions

Every day there is another leader here talking about going through a tough time recently, and we're all starting to see how it's perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of.

The time has come for us to start asking the deeper questions such as: why do we even have negative emotions? Why can't we be happy all the time? First, we need to understand that negative emotions come up to change us and nudge us to advance to a more positive state. Just like health issues, they're trying to signal that something is wrong. When we don't pick up the signals right away things start to deteriorate until we really pay attention. We have so many distractions in our modern world that we often get caught up in a lifestyle that doesn't suit us. So when we're not feeling ourselves, we become aware there's a problem we need to take care of. That's when we focus more on the problem to solve it. We're seeing this a lot lately right here on LinkedIn - people taking a long break from the world of work for a variety of personal reasons. Something that was literally unheard of before Covid.

Negative emotions tell us when there's something wrong with us, in our daily work environment, society, and mainly in our relationships. It's so easy to cover up our negative emotions with all kinds of pastimes. It can be travel, sports, entertainment, substance abuse and clubbing. There is such an escalation of negative emotions that people are looking for ways to block them out and suppress them. This is why leisure activities are in such great demand now. People are feeling a bit overwhelmed with parts of their life that didn't use to overwhelm them.

The fact that we go to such lengths to suppress our negative emotions so much shows how much we've failed to understand the root of the problem. Maybe we don't really want to know. But for anyone who does want answers, negative emotions are symptoms of a much deeper problem that we need to accurately diagnose to fix.

The root cause of our negative emotions is in fact the root cause of all the problems we're currently experiencing on individual, social and global scales. Many of these challenges are between us and the other layers of nature. From the tiniest problem to the worst possible disaster, every challenge can be traced back to our egoistic inclinations, where we want to upgrade ourselves at the expense of others and nature.

The more we evolve, the more our egos grow, and thus the more we experience outbursts of all kinds of problems. This is why we feel much more negative emotions today than in the past, and we can see this in the stats: the rising cases of depression, loneliness, anxiety, stress, drug abuse and suicide worldwide. Eventually, we'll reach a state where the increasing negative emotions we experience will make us ask about their deeper cause, and we will increasingly recognize our very egoistic human nature as their base cause.

The problem with our egoistic nature is not that we want to enjoy ourselves. It's that we want to enjoy ourselves at the expense of others. By doing this we not only harm others, and sadly it's only then that will we feel that we've gained something.

Until we correct our egoism, switching our wanting to enjoy at the expense of others to a experiencing joy from benefiting others—we'll continue to experience more negative emotions and other challenges to show us that we need to change. It's not that there's anything wrong with us as individuals - this time it's about us changing together. It's about us changing our attitude to everyone around us.

The bottom line is that at any given moment any human in the world can benefit from being uplifted and feeling supported. We don't need to wait to become overwhelmed with negative emotions or for bad things to happen to remind us - we can simply focus on lifting others whenever we can. That's what the new era is all about.

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Great insight by Gallop CEO Jon Clifton on the topic of negative emotions: "we make decisions on how we feel ... there are so many indicators based on rational thought but very little indicators on how people feel .... since we've been tracking it we've seen this massive increase in negative emotions."