In this episode of Maintaining Mental Fitness Season 2 webinar series with Dr Bill Howatt of Howatt HR, he takes a look at how our emotions shape how we show up for ourselves and others. He focuses on how thoughts and feelings are related and outlines a five-point plan to help deal with negative emotions.
Dr Howatt describes having a challenging day is like a weather system. The day could start out with clear skies, and you are feeling really good and things look bright and then out of nowhere comes a cloud that begins to shadow the sun. You were feeling good but now things start to feel a bit darker. Our emotions are often how we interpret what is happening throughout the day. There are two types of emotions, pleasant and unpleasant. You need both. It would be nice that the skies would always be clear for us but the reality is that even with our best intentions we can be in situations where things block our sun meaning things happen outside the realm of normal.
Positive mental health emotional well-being is going to be based on how we navigate pleasant and unpleasant emotions. You can never get rid of all of your unpleasant emotions as this is tightly linked to your fight or flight response to help protect us from lethal threats.
Taming negative emotions begins with self-awareness.
Emotions will shape how we show up to ourselves and others and our energy levels. We typically react before we process. Our ego’s function is to protect us. High reactivity is compensating for the imbalance of what we feel emotionally.
Negative emotions come at the most inconvenient time. Running from these emotions only cause long term problems.
The key that turns on negative emotions begins with our conscious mind. Most often, it comes from our subconscious mind that is below the surface and outside our awareness.
Which comes first, negative emotion or negative thought.
The answer is negative thought. The root cause of all emotions is based on our self-talk that over the years creates automatic programs.
This fear releases a flood of negative emotions that drive behaviour to avoid this fear.
We can train our brain to move from reactivity and being flooded with emotions.
Evidence this micro-skill can support mental health:
The five-point plan for managing negative emotions:
To track your feelings daily, and use the Hugr Authentic Connections App. Visit the We Talk We Grow Website and scroll to Mobile Apps to Support Mental Health and Wellness and Click to download.
Visit https://maintainingmentalfitness.com/ to watch the full webinar. It is only about 20 minutes.
