Everyone feels negative emotions from time to time and these feelings might be a sign of a mental health condition such as anxiety or depression.
Negative emotions are unpleasant and disruptive emotional reactions, like anger, sadness, fear, or jealousy.
These emotions aren’t just unpleasant; they also make it hard to function in your normal daily life and interfere with your ability to accomplish your goals.
It is important to note that no emotion, including a negative one, is inherently bad. It’s perfectly normal to feel these things in certain contexts or situations.
When these emotions are persistent and interfere with your ability to live your life normally, they become problematic.
Negative emotions can stem from a wide variety of sources. Sometimes they are the result of specific experiences or events. For example, you might feel upset that your favourite team didn’t win a game or angry that your partner did not live up to your expectation.
These negative emotions can arise from:
• Relationship conflict: problems that arise from interpersonal relationships such as challenges with romantic partners, family, friends, and co-workers.
• Unmet needs: when your needs are not being fulfilled – whether these needs are physical, emotional, social, psychological, or spiritual in nature – it’s normal to experience sadness, anger, loneliness, envy, and other distressing emotions.
• Poor coping skills: ignoring the emotions, ruminating on the emotion, withdrawal, avoiding, and destructive or risky behaviours.
How to deal with negative emotions
• Understand your emotions. Look within and pinpoint the situations creating stress and negative emotions in your life. Looking at the source of the feeling and your reaction can provide valuable information.
• A key purpose of your emotions is to get you to see the problem, so you can make necessary changes.
• Find an outlet like exercise or meditation.
