The power of positive emotions

By Ibrahim Mango

Life Coach and Positive Psychologist

Wouldn’t you love to undo the effects of negative emotions? What about decreasing stress and improving your wellbeing overall? The key is cultivating positive emotions.

I recently covered the Five Pillars of well-being according to Positive Psychology (Positive emotions, engagement, Relationships, meaning and achievement). Here, I dig deeper into the first pillar: positive emotions. Emotions like fear, anger, disgust and guilt are unpleasant and discouraging but in the right context, they are normal and serve a purpose. Meanwhile, positive emotions such as joy, serenity, curiosity and love are pleasurable and inspiring. While perhaps we might prefer to experience only positive emotions, it is neither possible nor healthy to eliminate negative emotions as they serve two goals: 

• Without their contrast to positive emotions, we will not be able to enjoy positive emotions 

• Negative emotions stimulate our survival instinct in the face of danger and can help us survive by triggering the fight or flight response

Fight or flight response

When we experience a dangerous situation such as being attacked, our brain takes over automatically, without conscious thinking on our part and triggers the negative emotion of fear. This prepares us for the fight or flight response (fight refers to confronting and fighting the attacker while flight refers to running away from the threat), which is accompanied by increased stress in the body. Our thinking and actions become more instinctive and automatic while we become less creative and the scope of thoughts and actions available to us becomes more limited.

Unfortunately, our brain cannot differentiate between a real threat and an imaginary danger. So, when we are at a job interview, giving a speech or preparing for an exam, we might still react to a perceived threat in the same way as we would to a real threat. Our negative emotion of fear gets triggered automatically, preparing us for the fight or flight response while we undergo a surge of stress in our body. As in the case of a real threat, our creativity is diminished by constricting the range of our thoughts and actions and, therefore, negatively affecting our performance. The release of stress hormones into the body is likely to also cause a series of health problems in the long run. So, learning to manage these stressful situations is vital. 

Positive emotions

Positive emotions do not help us survive in the face of threatening situations like negative emotions do, but they do change the biochemistry of our bodies. Positive emotions widen our awareness and extend the range of our actions and thoughts while increasing creativity, fuelling personal growth and enabling skill acquisition. Here are some of the most common positive emotions and their benefits: 

• Joy encourages us to become playful (physically, socially, artistically, intellectually), increasing our creative and intellectual skills 

• Interest (curiosity) stimulates us to explore and learn and increase our knowledge, leading to personal growth and future creativity 

• Contentment (serenity) comes when we feel safe and are required to exert little effort. Feeling contentment allows for our positive life circumstances and successes to be combined and solidified into our self-image, promoting self-growth 

• Love of all kinds (romantic, caregiver, friendship) builds social bonds which are not merely satisfying but can also be the source of future social support

Other benefits of positive emotions include undoing the effects of negative emotions and improving physical and psychological wellbeing, as well as boosting resilience (the ability to bounce back after a setback). 

How to cultivate positive emotions

• Keeping a gratitude journal: At the end of the day, list three things you are grateful for or that went well for you 

• Cultivating mindfulness: Mindfulness is experiencing the present moment without judgement. Meditation, prayer, yoga or breathing exercises are examples

• Reframing negative events: We are usually disturbed by our perceptions of an event rather than the event itself. Reframing means finding our thinking bias and seeing the negatively perceived event with fresh objective eyes and accordingly removing the negative emotional sting

• Being kind: Performing random acts of kindness, such as volunteering or as simple as holding the door open for a stranger can increase positive emotions

Takeaway message

Negative emotions restrict our awareness and our range of thinking and behaving by giving precedence to automatic and instinctual thinking and acting patterns which reduce creativity and increase stress.

Meanwhile, positive emotions expand our awareness, extend the range of how we think and perform, encourage creativity and build valuable resources.

Let’s set out to cultivate our positive emotions and reap their benefits while we learn how to manage our negative emotions appropriately.

Making this a daily practice will help us lead a balanced and flourishing life.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine