How to Release Negative Emotions: 10 Constructive and Healthy Ways

Sad mask with bad feeling words and happy mask with good feeling words

Most people think that emotions are not controlled. They come and go from somewhere in the brain or the body, and we have no control over them. In my coaching, I come across this misconception with every new client. Usually, they are not happy about something in their life and they come to me because they do not think they can change it on their own.

In general, emotions are not a problem. If they are happy emotions and if we feel good about them, we do not want to change them. But if they are painful and make us uncomfortable, then we want them out of our system and fast – and usually for the right reason. Feelings manifest into our physical world. If you think of emotions as vibrations, then we feel their vibration in our body as a physical reaction.

When I was young, my younger sister and I were fans of Louise Hay’s book You Can Heal Your Life.

We borrowed it from the local library and she bought it for me as a birthday gift. In the book, Louise Hay describes the connection between body and mind and explains how every thought, feeling, idea and action has a physical manifestation.

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Addiction in the Family

Addiction a dependency on an object, a substance or an activity. As hard as it is to admit, we are all addicted in some way or another. If you want to know if you are addicted do something, take it out of your life for a week and watch your reaction.

People can be addicted to food, phone, TV, a person (like their spouse), work, coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, glue, sex, medication, gambling, drugs and more. I had a friend who was addicted to pain killers. She took them as if she was eating candy, and it became obvious she had an addiction because she could not cope without them and needed more and more of them over time.

It is very important to remember that every addiction we develop is an attempt to fill an emotional and/or physical “hole”. We want it to give us the feeling we are missing without it. This is as true when we talk about drugs as it is when we talk about food.

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How to Overcome Hard Times with Mindfulness

Hard times are part of life. Even the happiest and most successful people go through hard times. When they describe their successes, they typically share the hard times and how they got over them. When you are in the middle of a difficult period, it feels all consuming, like end of the world. It feels… hard!

Unfortunately, negative thinking can make the hard times feel even harder. Think of it as driving a car. Good times are like driving in a flow, when all the traffic lights are green and it feels like you are cruising. Hard times feel like there is a stop sign or red light at every intersection, and driving seems to take forever, because the cars in front of you cannot move forward, while you are running late for an important meeting.

When your thinking is negative, it feels like you are driving… backwards.

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Money Can Buy Happiness If You Use It Wisely

Hands holding a ball of $100 dollar bills

I grew up in a poor family. We were five children, my mom left home early in the morning and my dad was the town postman and when he finished his first job, he worked a second job as a handyman. “Money cannot buy happiness” was my parents’ motto.

Only later on, when I started making a lot of money as student, I realized that poor people come up with these beliefs about money to justify their lack of money and they disconnect money and happiness to give their life a better meaning. What my parents really meant was that we could be happy in many ways and money was not a condition to happiness. I agree with that.

Money brings an enormous feeling of happiness if you use it to … give.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School checked the connection between spending money and happiness and they found out amazing things that are important for all happiness seekers to know.

In one experiment, they gave students $5 or $20 and asked half of them to spend it on themselves and the other half to spend it on others. One group was taking the money and enjoying it, while the other was giving it to someone else to enjoy.

What they found was that the “givers” were significantly happier at the end of the day. So money can buy you happiness if you use it to make someone else happy.

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There is Life after Relationship Breakup

Woman punching man in anger with boxing glove

Relationships are at the heart of human society. Some say that being in a relationship is a basic need. In the bible, even the animals in Noah’s ark were in pairs. I think we are meant to be in relationships. Having a partner to share our life and be with us along the way gives lots of certainty in life. Together we share love, friendship, adventures, struggles, finance and children, and together, it is always easier and more fun. Unfortunately, sometimes, it just does not work. In fact, in our society today, relationship breakup comes more often than not and with it comes pain, grief and loss of hope.

I work with many couples through relationship breakups and with individuals rebuilding their life after breaking up with a partner, and I can reassure you, there is life after a relationship breakup. Usually, couples feel a hole in their heart that they wish to fill up. The desire to fill this hole drives them quickly into a new relationship that looks exactly like the one they left in pain.

Why?

Because the separation originated from a hole inside of them, which they thought the other did not fill, and they enter the new relationship with the same mindset. After a short time of excitement and attention, they realize that the new partner, lover or boyfriend/girlfriend cannot fulfill their needs and they go through the same breakup with more pain, more grief and more loss.

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How to Have a Good Day Everyday

Every day may not be good but there is something good in every day

Martin was a gorgeous 7-year-old who came to me for child coaching. His mom called and said she felt she could not help him. He never had a good day. He did not even know what one looked like.

After an abusive relationship with her husband, she divorced him and moved away to start a new life. They had been living in a nice place and their life changed dramatically.

For the first six months after they divorced, Martin’s mom insisted on taking him to see his dad, but his dad did not show up. When his dad did show up, he was angry and aggressive and Martin refused to spend time with him.

Since his dad did not care whether he came or not, his mom decided to stop putting pressure on them to see each other. “Martin is way better than before. He used to cry and have nightmares, but it’s much better now”, she said.

Still, six months passed and Martin was angry, negative and grumpy and life was tough on him. He never smiled, the whole world was bad, it is everyone else’s fault and every tiny thing made him blow up with anger and throw temper tantrums. After years of abuse, Martin’s mom told me she needed help, because she felt she was losing her son.

So first, we played “If I were a wizard”.

This post is part 16 of 19 in the series From the Life Coaching Deck

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Gratitude: The Happiness Attitude

When we focus on our gratitude, the tide of disappointment goes out and the tide of love rushes in - Kristin Armstrong

Over years of learning about happiness and success, emotional stamina and wellbeing, I realized that gratitude is the best antidote for frustration. Frustration is a feeling, a thought. If we change the thought to gratitude, we will no longer feel any pain.

Life is full of challenges as we grow and become more aware of our surrounding. We are born into total dependency and we learn from our parents and other adults around us how to be frustrated when our desires are not fulfilled. This brings us lots of heartache and suffering.

The way we react to frustrations in life as kids is the way we will react to frustrations in life as grownups. We also pass this way of reacting to our children and the cycle never ends. If our reaction to frustration is positive and empowered, we hope the cycle will continue, but if our reaction to frustration is painful, we must stop the cycle NOW!

This week, I had a chat to my 14-year-old daughter Noff. We talked about her being very frustrated about an upcoming school assembly, which she hated. I told her about Pollyanna, the girl who inspired me to be a positive person and change my life from frustration to success. I asked her, “What is good about the assembly tomorrow?” She answered straight away, “It’s the last assembly of the year and there are no classes during assembly”. This made her feel better.

You see, there is something good in everything, even if it seems all bad at first glance.

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Distorted Definition of Depression Increases Depression

Young man walking head down in a wide fied

Depression is a big problem in our society. People think that nowadays we have more depression, when in fact we do not. What we have is a distorted definition of happiness and depression.

Here are some myths about happiness and depression that make people feel even more depressed.

Myth 1: Happy people are happy at all the time

When I go over the happiness scale with my clients, many of them think that they are supposed to be happy all the time. I can understand how people with this distorted definition of happiness can feel depressed. Some of them say that on a scale of 1-100, a happy person feels 95 happy or even 100. Since 100 is a state of total excitement and bliss, we cannot experience the excitement if we are high all the time.

Human beings’ nervous system notices differences. Feeling just a little bit happier than before works just as well when you go from 32 to 35 as when you go from 62 to 65. So every day, focus on being just a little happier than you were yesterday.

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How to Get Rid of Procrastination

Procrastination is the thief of time written on a blackboard

Procrastination is a big problem for anyone who would like to achieve anything. Although from the outside it looks like it is not a problem to do nothing at all, it is not a state of doing nothing from the inside. Inside, there is a fear that right now, doing nothing seems better than anything we can think of doing.

It is important not to confuse a state of bliss and contentment with procrastination. Bliss is doing nothing and enjoying it. Procrastination is doing nothing from fear of the outcome of anything we do.

Procrastination and anxiety are twins and anxiety is the elder. Anxiety is a fear of some imaginary bad future and procrastination is our coping mechanism with anxiety (not a very effective strategy, but a very common one).

When we use it too often, we reach the “whatever” stage, when we “pretend” we do not care what the outcome will be. We always care! Unless you are a Buddhist in your heart and soul (which is a good aspiration), you care about the outcome. You can say you do not care, but you cannot cheat your own subconscious mind into believing you are the Dalai Lama and will be happy with whatever happens.

When our mind thinks we are in danger (because of something someone said or because of what someone might say), it has three choices: fight, flight or freeze. Procrastination is equivalent to the “flight” response – running away at the sight of danger.

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Emotional Intelligence Helps Raise Stress-Free Kids

We would all love to have stress-free kids, but we don’t. In fact, most parents today are stressed about their children’s stress level, which is a Catch 22.

My philosophy is that what we feel as parents is projected onto our children through very sophisticated neural mirroring functions that we all have. So stressed parents raise stressed kids, and when kids are feeling anxious or stressed, we feel even more stressed. This is a never-ending vicious cycle.

I think high emotional intelligence is the cure for stress and parents need to focus on increasing their own emotional intelligence and that of their children.

You are probably asking yourself, “What is the connection between emotional intelligence and stress-free kids?”

High emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize our own feelings and manage them. So if our children recognize our stress, they can learn ways to deal with this situation and can grow up without taking our feelings on themselves.

As hard as it is to admit, our children are stressed due to their relationships, schooling, academic achievements, digital connections, peer pressure and intense exposure to the media. This is part of their everyday life, and as their parents, we need to seek alternative ways to medication in order to switch this pressure off.

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