Positive emotions and feelings. Positive, negative and neutral emotions and whether they are all necessary. The role of both senses in positive psychology

During the day, a person experiences a lot of emotions, which, mixing with each other, create a bizarre bouquet. This bouquet colors a person’s perception, making a day “bad” or “good.”

Surely every person wants to wake up every morning with a smile and spend the day in a positive mood. Living every day happily, filling your life with joyful emotions - this task may turn out to be impossible until a person learns to manage his emotions.

We can change our mood as we want, we don’t have to be dependent on circumstances. In order to feel the emotion of joy, it is not necessary to wait for the right moment when someone or something makes us laugh.

In order to rejoice, you just need to rejoice. To be happy, you don’t have to look for a reason: money, health, a soulmate, recognition, and so on. You can be happy just like that. After all, all we need already is our emotions.

All that remains is to understand the art of managing your emotions. To do this, first of all, you need to know the types of human emotions in order to learn to distinguish and separate emotions from each other, because they rarely appear in their pure form.

Every person has four pure emotions:
  • anger
  • fear
  • joy
  • despondency

These types of emotions create a combination of other feelings and emotions that each of us may experience on a daily basis.

Watch this short video, it shows the faces of different people experiencing the same emotions: from joy to fear.

Conventionally, the types of human emotions can be divided into three main categories: negative, positive and neutral.

List of basic human emotions and feelings

Positive

1. Pleasure

2. Joy.

3. Rejoicing.

4. Delight.

5. Pride.

6. Confidence.

7. Trust.

8. Sympathy.

9. Admiration.

10. Love (sexual).

11. Love (affection).

12. Respect.

13. Tenderness.

14. Gratitude (appreciation).

15. Tenderness.

16. Complacency.

17. Bliss

18. Schadenfreude.

19. Feeling of satisfied revenge.

20. Peace of mind.

21. Feeling of relief.

22. Feeling satisfied with yourself.

23. Feeling of security.

24. Anticipation.

Neutral

25. Curiosity.

26. Surprise.

27. Amazement.

28. Indifference.

29. Calm and contemplative mood.

Negative

30. Displeasure.

31. Grief (sorrow).

33. Sadness (sadness).

34. Despair.

35. Chagrin.

36. Anxiety.

38. Fear.

41. Pity.

42. Sympathy (compassion).

43. Regret.

44. Annoyance.

46. ​​Feeling insulted.

47. Indignation (indignation).

48. Hatred.

49. Dislike.

50. Envy.

52. Anger.

53. Dejection.

55. Jealousy.

57. Uncertainty (doubt).

58. Mistrust.

60. Confusion.

61. Rage.

62. Contempt.

63. Disgust.

64. Disappointment.

65. Disgust.

66. Dissatisfaction with oneself.

67. Repentance.

68. Remorse.

69. Impatience.

70. Bitterness.

Perhaps some of the readers will not agree with this division of feelings. Feelings are divided not from the position of ethics, but from the position of pleasure or displeasure.

A person invests a colossal amount of energy in his emotions. In essence, this energy is neutral, only emotion can give it a positive or negative character, direct it towards creation or destruction.

Take a closer look at this list, determine for yourself in which emotions do you invest your strength more, in the emotions of destruction or creation?

© "Elatrium" is a space of harmony and prosperity.

Negative and positive emotions are a way of reacting to certain events in life. It is important to remember that any life situation is initially neutral, it depends only on the person whether he will succumb to feelings. To tune in to a positive wave and protect yourself from negative emotions, it is enough to learn self-knowledge and self-control.

What are positive emotions

Positive emotions are sensations that cause a surge of positivity, cause good mood, encourage. These include:

  • confidence;
  • delight;
  • serenity;
  • satisfaction;
  • feeling of triumph;
  • inspiration;
  • tenderness;
  • anticipation;
  • Delight;
  • (not to be confused with pride);
  • pacification;
  • , etc.

Their predominance makes a person happy and gives energy. They are the main engine for achieving goals, improve relationships with other people, because everyone loves positive people.

What can cause positive emotions

It’s good when positive emotions, the list of which is given above, manifest themselves spontaneously due to natural factors. But sometimes they need to be called “forcibly”. For example, if a person is in a protracted state, feels a loss of strength, feels lonely, he needs a dose of positivity. Self-help is quite easy.

Movement

Exercise causes a surge of endorphins. To cheer yourself up, you need to go to the gym, jog or just jump. If a bad mood is accompanied by apathy and you don’t want to go anywhere at all, you can turn on cheerful music to dance at home.

Affirmations

They help in the long run, because it is important not just to repeat memorized phrases, but also to believe in them, to try to feel what they say. The content of affirmations depends on desires and needs, for example:

  • I'm happily married.
  • I'm happy with my job.
  • I am well.
  • I feel a surge of strength and vigor.

Smile

As the famous children's song says, a smile will brighten the day. It really works. A smile can not only lift your spirits, but it is the main symbol of positivity, and positive-minded people are more likely to attract others like themselves.

Favorite hobby

If the reason for your bad mood is monotony or despondency, you need to do what you like or have wanted to do for a long time. This could be a trip, an outing, or a trip to the movies.

Movie night

You can arrange a movie marathon for yourself. You don’t have to watch only comedies, because you can touch on basic emotions - joy, anger, fear, etc. It’s like getting a shock during defibrillation, it’s neither good nor bad, it’s a clot of energy the body needs. You can watch a melodrama and believe in love again, laugh at a comedy, or give yourself an adrenaline storm during a horror movie.

Pets

Pets, especially cats and dogs, are great at spreading positivity. It's good when I have my own pet. If you don’t have one, you can watch funny videos with animals; it’s not for nothing that they break records for likes.

Good deeds

What are negative emotions

Negative emotions are unpleasant sensations based on a negative perception of a situation that is dissonant with a person’s internal state. In fact, it is the person himself who decides how to react to troubles.

To understand this, it is enough to recall the picture from a biology textbook depicting. The four images show four different reactions to the same situation. A man sits on another man's hat. The melancholic person begins to cry, the phlegmatic person remains absolutely calm, the choleric person loses his temper and screams, the sanguine person laughs. The situation has not changed, but the perception has.

There are many negative emotions, the types of which can be classified according to the following criteria:

  • . Anger, dissatisfaction, indignation, anger, irritation, curl, contempt, jealousy.
  • Sadness. Disappointment, grief, pity, despair, sympathy, regret, .
  • Fear. Anxiety, apprehension, fright, trepidation, excitement, restlessness, horror, wariness, panic.

How to protect yourself from negativity and negative emotions?

It is worth understanding that a negative emotion is a derivative of a person’s reaction, therefore the first rule of protecting yourself from negativity is to learn how to react correctly. It is important to clarify - not to hide from the emotion, not to avoid it, not to suppress it, but to feel it and choose the correct manifestation of it. This can be compared to karate lessons. In the first lessons, they don’t teach techniques at all, but show how to fall correctly. It is impossible to avoid falls, as well as negative feelings, but minimizing the damage from both is quite possible. Useful recommendations will help you do this.

1. Positive environment

Negative emotions are terribly contagious. If there is a person nearby who constantly complains about life, for whom everything is always bad, and everyone except him is to blame for his troubles, you should communicate with him as little as possible. This is a black hole that will suck out all the positivity.

2. Count to 5

Negativity is everywhere, a person in a bad mood can be caught on public transport, in a cafe, or at the next table at work. He will be rude, annoying, and maybe even scream. If, when confronted with such a person, you want to yell at him in response, you need to calmly inhale, count to 5 and exhale. The wisest action is a calm facial expression and the phrase “I will not answer you in kind.”

3. See the solution, not see the problem

When faced with a problem, a person may be overwhelmed by it. He panics and sees no way out. It is important to calm down, try to find a solution, or better yet, sketch out a list of several, and no matter how realistic they are, it is useful to see an alternative.

4. Abstraction

You can't let others dictate how you live. People often criticize someone else's behavior, wardrobe, appearance, because they don’t agree with them or consider them strange. If you wanted to dye your hair green, quit your boring job to paint pictures, maybe you should do so. At the very least, you need to make a decision based on your desires and thoughts, and not under the weight of fear of rejection or fear of experiencing a negative feeling.

5. Division into “mine” and “someone else’s”

This recommendation will summarize those already mentioned. When faced with negativity, it is important to be able to recognize whose it is. If he is yours, you can work with him, if he is someone else’s, you need to let him pass by eyes and ears. To do this, you need to be able to analyze your condition. If you have a negative feeling, you need to ask yourself a few questions, for example:

  • What caused the negativity? - The boss yelled at me.
  • Why did he yell at me? – I didn’t submit the report on time.
  • How did this affect me? – I feel upset and offended.
  • What can I do to make it easier for me? – Submit your report quickly, apologize for being late, buy your favorite cake to cheer yourself up.

This internal dialogue does not take into account one fact - the boss could have reacted differently. He had no right to raise his voice at a subordinate, and the true reasons for such a reaction may remain undisclosed, so you should not take his cry personally; perhaps it is not connected with the report at all, but with problems in the family and other troubles.

Positive emotions sometimes cannot exist without negative ones. For example, the joy of meeting is impossible without the sadness of parting. You can only feel true trust if you have previously experienced disappointment. That is why it is so important to be able to react to the appearance of negative emotions as a temporary phenomenon and an indicator of a state in which it is not necessary to remain in it for a long time.

We cannot imagine life without emotions. Good or bad, inspiring or depressing - they are part of us, although we still don’t know much about them. We have selected 50 quotes from new books and bestsellers. Let them help you paint your emotional background with bright colors or just learn something new.

1. For better or worse, intelligence can be useless if emotions take over.

2. Although emotions have always served us as wise advisers, the new realities offered by the current civilization have formed with such speed that evolution, with its sedate gait, clearly cannot keep up with them.

3. The root of the word “emotion” is the Latin verb moveo, meaning “to move, set in motion,” with the prefix e- (“e-”), which gives an additional meaning to be directed outward: “to move away, to remove.” This means that each emotion awakens the desire to act. The easiest way to see that emotions lead to actions is by observing animals or children.

4. Feelings are necessary for thinking, and thinking is necessary for feelings. But if passions rage, the balance is disrupted. This means that the emotional mind has taken over and suppressed the rational one.

5. Our emotions have a mind that holds its own views completely independently of our diet.

6. The main “switch” for painful emotions is the left prefrontal lobe. The right prefrontal lobes house negative feelings like fear and aggression, while the left lobes control these raw emotions, likely inhibiting the right lobe.

7. Empathy, another ability that relies on emotional self-awareness, is a fundamental “human gift.” People really pick up on the feelings behind the words.

8. If no changes have happened to you for some time, you have a false feeling that everything is stable and you are in control. But control can only be in one area: yourself, your emotions, confidence and development.

9. Life is time. This is what you do, how you feel, with whom you spend your hours and days, what interesting things you do. And it is within your power to start doing this now. Without delay.

10. If the movement has not started, the person freezes in the “emotional trampling” mode and spends his battery on throwing. And in this mode, she quickly “sits down”

11. Learn not to get driven, not to freak out and not to fall into emotional collapse, even in uncertainty or under the pressure of circumstances. “No money, no work, what tomorrow? A-a-a-a!”

12. When wondering whether to meet with friends in the evening and have fun from the heart or stay at home and sort out the accumulated mail, choose the first! The positive emotions from the meeting will make you much more creative and productive in the days that follow.

13. Happiness arises through the gradual “cultivation” of positive emotions. Likewise, negative experiences create a downward emotional spiral. For example, to a frustrated person, the workday seems endless and the traffic seems terrible.


15. Listening to your body and making choices in its favor every time, you receive a powerful emotional charge.

16. Sometimes excessive consumption of a particular food is caused not by physical, but by emotional hunger. Your brain remembers, “When I’m sad, I eat chocolate and peanut butter.” The trick is to separate food from satisfying a specific emotion.

17. Dreams are also closely related to our emotional state. When we experience negativity in our dreams, we often wake up with a more positive attitude and clearer thoughts. Have you ever wondered where the expression “sleeping with your problem” comes from?

18. A person who does not get enough sleep is like a living wire through which negative emotions pass instead of current. The part of the brain that controls anger becomes overactive.

19. By mastering your senses, you will form healthy habits. Once you understand that every emotion does not arise out of nowhere, it will become easier for you to control your reactions and mood.

20. Cheerful, sad, melancholic, gloomy, inspired, joyful... A person is a real whirlwind of emotions. Even when you feel bad, you are not helpless. No one can take away your right to choose, and only you can decide how to approach the situation.

21. The time-honored history of emotions goes something like this: Everyone has emotions built into them from birth. This is a separate, easily recognizable phenomenon within us. When something happens in the world - a shot or a flirtatious glance - our emotions manifest themselves quickly and automatically, as if someone turned a switch. We express emotions on our faces through smiles, frowns, or distinctive expressions that other people can easily recognize. Our voices express emotions through laughter and screaming. Our body reveals our sensations in every gesture and posture.

22. Your emotions are not built-in, but made up of basic parts. They are not universal, but different for different cultures. They don't start themselves; you create them. They arise as a combination physical properties your body and a plastic brain that makes connections with the environment in which it develops and the culture and upbringing that provides that environment.

23. The law considers emotional harm to be less serious than physical harm and less deserving of punishment. Think how ironic this sounds. The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body, but not the integrity of your psyche, given that the body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are - your brain.

24. Your genes can make you sensitive to your environment and every little problem. And if you're a woman in your reproductive years, the connectivity in your interoceptive network changes every month, making you more vulnerable at certain points in your cycle.

25. Pain is an experience that occurs not only from physical damage, but also when your brain predicts that damage is imminent. Let's say you're getting a tetanus shot at your doctor's office. Your brain constructs an instance of “pain” because you have previous experience with injections. You may feel pain even before the needle touches your arm.

26. When you feel sick, assume you have a virus rather than thinking that your discomfort means something personal. Your sensations may be mere noise. Maybe you just need some sleep.

27. When teaching your children about emotions, try to look beyond essentialist stereotypes: smiling when happy, frowning when angry, and so on. Help them understand the diversity of the real world - that depending on the context, a smile can mean happiness, embarrassment, anger, or even sadness.

28. And now I advocate using anger as one of the additional incentives on the way to your goal. It's a beautiful emotion. And, as it turned out, it is very creative if directed in the right direction. The emotion should not be “This bastard is now going to burst into tears because he lost such a beauty like me. Let him suffer for the rest of his life!”, but rather like this: “I’ll blow the nose of everyone who doesn’t believe in me!”

29. Often excess weight is a subconscious desire to hide, run away and close off from the world. This fear arises from dissatisfaction with life in general or from the fact that a person lacks emotions.

30. Our emotions are like food in the refrigerator. If you don’t survive (“eat”) them on time, they begin to rot and poison our lives.

31. Almost all pregnant women are characterized by increased emotionality. Often this is one of the first signs of pregnancy, which is very puzzling if the woman does not yet know that she is pregnant.


33. Very often a tired baby, who has had too many emotions and impressions, cannot fall asleep. This is one of the reasons why children who don't get enough sleep during the day don't sleep well at night.

34. A growing body of scientific research shows that emotional inflexibility—getting stuck on thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that don't serve us—leads to a range of psychological problems, including depression and anxiety.

35. Negative experiences are normal. This is human nature. And an overemphasis on positive thinking is another radical way our culture tries to combat normal fluctuations in emotions, just as society sometimes rushes to treat childhood hyperactivity or mood swings in women with pills.

36. Firstly, everything is decided by your emotions. Secondly, suppressed emotions inevitably take their toll, and find a way out in a completely different place than you expect.

37. When we are too joyful and cheerful, we often do not pay attention to serious threats and risk. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that excessive joy can be life-threatening: in this state, you are more likely to take adventures and underestimate the risks of alcohol.

38. Courageously and with interest, accept yourself entirely - with a peeling nose and frayed ears, with “good” and “bad” emotions, without missing anything and without bypassing anything with sympathy. Accept your inner experiences, try to get used to them and explore them without trying to get rid of them as quickly as possible.

39. Don't try to get rid of fear. Try to go towards what is valuable to you, straight through your fears, lighting the path with your values. To be brave does not mean not to be afraid of anything; to be brave is to move forward, no matter how scary it may be.

40. There is a huge difference between stress and anger, stress and frustration, stress and anxiety. If we cannot clearly express how we feel, those around us are unlikely to be able to understand us and provide the support we need.

41. Neuroscientists have proven that stress, as well as negative emotions: anger, sadness, uncertainty, anxiety, put the brain in reward-seeking mode. You end up wanting what your brain thinks promises a reward, and you are convinced that this “reward” is the only source of joy.

42. Attempts to repress thoughts, emotions and drives backfire and force you to think, feel and do what you most want to avoid.

43. Feel what you feel, but don’t believe everything you think. When an unpleasant thought comes to your mind, notice how it feels in your body. Then bring your attention to your breath and imagine how the thought dissolves or goes away.

44. Journaling allows us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and our emotions, even difficult or painful ones. The more aware we are of our feelings and thoughts, the more prepared we are to gain life experience and develop ourselves.


46. ​​Smiling brings positive results. But laughter is a much stronger manifestation of emotion. It helps to cope with worries and fear, improves mood and appearance, and makes it easier to cope with difficult situations and disappointments.

47. You know better than anyone else how you feel in stressful or difficult situations. Therefore, it is very important in such cases to listen carefully to your thoughts and reactions in order to take appropriate action if necessary.

48. Morning exercise is critical to maximizing your potential because it puts you at the peak of your mental, physical and emotional state, giving you the chance to be a winner that day.

49. By visualizing what you want to get from life, you stir up your emotions, which, in turn, lifts your spirit and mood and simply pulls you towards the realization of these images.

50. The average person allows their emotions to dictate their actions, but the actions of people who have achieved great success in life dictate their views and beliefs.

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Tags: Meditation exercises and techniques, Emotion management, Psychotechniques and exercises

Hello dear reader. In order to show the relevance of our conversation today, I want you to stop reading the article for a few moments and answer the question: “What emotions are you currently experiencing?”
Have you thought about it? Did you answer?

Now let's see what problems often arise when answering this question.

  • Many people answer this question in the following way: “Yes, I don’t feel any particular emotions right now, everything is fine.” Does this mean that there really are no emotions? Or does this simply mean that the person is poorly aware of his emotional state? The fact is that a person always experiences emotions, every moment of his life. Sometimes they reach high intensity, and sometimes their intensity is low. Many people pay attention only to strong emotional experiences, and do not attach any importance to low-intensity emotions and even do not notice them at all. However, if emotions are not very strong, this does not mean that they are absent.
  • Another possible answer to the question posed is: “Somehow I feel unpleasant. I feel uncomfortable." We see that the person is aware that there are unpleasant emotions inside, but he cannot name which ones. Maybe it's irritation, or maybe disappointment or guilt, or maybe something else.
  • Often our question is answered like this: “I feel like it’s time for me to get up from my computer and get to work” or “I feel like this article could be useful to me.” Many people confuse their emotions with thoughts and desire to do something. Trying to describe their emotional state, they describe everything except emotions.

Meditation exercise for understanding emotions

When working with clients, I often use a meditation exercise to help them better understand their own emotions. It is so effective that I decided to make an audio recording so that anyone could use this technique. The mechanism of action of the exercise is based on the connection between emotions and bodily reactions. Any, even the most insignificant, emotion is reflected in the body (read more about this). By learning to listen to your own bodily reactions, you can become more familiar with your emotions.

You can do the exercise right now. Here's the entry:

Once you have learned what emotions are and have easily learned to describe your inner state, you may be interested in exploring yourself more deeply. For example, you may want to figure out what positive meaning emotions can carry that, at first glance, are absolutely meaningless and even harmful. Read about this in the next

1. About the benefits of positive emotions

It is known from psychology that person really needed positive emotions . For our mental and physical well-being, we simply need to smile as often as possible, to be in a state of satisfaction, happiness, optimism, etc. The more often this happens to us, the more confident and comfortable we feel in life, the more active and creatively oriented we are, the better our relationships with others, and the more positive our worldview in general. At the same time, our physical and mental health remains strong for a long time.

Scientists have proven that positive emotions have an unusually positive effect on our physical health and well-being. When we rejoice, laugh, smile, amazing transformations occur in our body: all spasms, clamps, tensions relax, blood circulation of all tissues and organs improves, the immune system is activated, vitality increases, inflammation and tumors resolve.

There are many known cases when, using positive emotions people were cured of the most severe, incurable diseases.

2. About the reasons for the lack of positive emotions in modern life

However, a person’s life is too hard, difficult, sad, full of experiences and stress, difficult circumstances, illnesses, obstacles, and he often has no time for joy, no time for laughter, no time for positive emotions . This is especially true in life modern man. After all, the range of our stress factors has expanded: we no longer worry only about the problems of ourselves and our loved ones. Television alone daily loads us with the horrors and suffering of all humanity, “entertains” us with horror films, bloody scenes and scenes of violence, social conflicts, tenses us with political battles, etc., etc.

Well, problems with your own health, work, money, bosses, and loved ones only intensify this whole bunch of negative experiences...

Maybe that’s why Ukrainians, Russians, and residents of other CIS countries are so joyless as a whole? Maybe that’s why harsh statistics tell us every year about the rapidly declining numbers of our indigenous population; about the increase in crime, drug addiction, alcoholism, homelessness, the birth of disabled children, mortality from AIDS, cancer, cardiovascular diseases?

No, television, of course, is trying to somehow compensate for the excess of negative information and supplies us with all sorts of shows, music concerts, performances by comedians, comedy films, and tries to set us up for a wave of positive emotions... Probably, this is what helps us somehow stay afloat. ..

However, statistics on all social parameters are still bleak. It continues to show a sharp deterioration in all vital parameters of our populationcompared to the Soviet period, a reduction in its number.

3. What is the solution?

What to do: how to return optimism and happiness to our families, how to stop mortality and degeneration of the population?

Our people, as in ancient times, continue to hope for a new “good” priest-tsar-president, take an active part in election battles, are indignant, protest against social injustices, conflict with the authorities and with each other, condemn some politicians, hope for others... Is there only a way out in them, in politicians, in presidents?

Maybe the reason for our negative emotions and experiences is not in politicians, presidents and mayors, not in life circumstances, but in ourselves? Probably, it is we ourselves who do not know how to rejoice in what we have, who do not know how to love life together with them? Perhaps this is why politicians emerge from our midst so unprincipled, greedy, and heartless?

So maybe the way out is in the restoration of national morality and ethics, in the revival of Christianity as a national, state-wide religion, a bearer of enduring moral values?

Read also on this topic