(Photo credit Kristopher Roller)
We all feel angry, mad, or sad sometimes and that’s ok. It’s not healthy to strive for constant happiness. Trying to force happiness at inappropriate times can signal mental health issues, such as mania. So, if your pet dies or a relationship ends, negative emotions are appropriate. We need to take time to process our emotions and feel them.
Emotional processing occurs when a person experiences a negative event and can cope with the event as time passes. We all face challenges that cause fear, sadness, and anxiety but these feelings are temporary for the majority of people.
There are many ways to process, or reduce, emotions. You don’t want to get stuck feeling sad or angry long-term, right? Masking emotions with unhealthy behaviors, like abusing alcohol, or blocking feelings doesn’t help us heal.
Listening to music is a one healthy way to process emotions. Sad music lets us grieve, and gets the tears out, so that we can feel our emotions and heal faster. Also, angry music lets us feel anger and safely release it. So, use our Feel Your Feelings playlist as a catalyst for emotional health.
Feel Your Feelings Playlist
1. Say Something – A Great Big World, Christina Aguilera
4. Somebody that I used to Know – Gotye, Kimbra
5. Because of You – Kelly Clarkson
6. A Little Bit Stronger – Sara Evans
7. Everything I Wanted – Billy Eilish
8. Somebody that I used to Know – Gotye, Kimbra
11. We Don’t Talk Anymore – Charlie Puth Ft. Selena Gomez
We all need to cry it out sometimes. Feeling anger, sadness and hurt think can help us discover lessons learned from an experience. You can benefit from post-traumatic growth by finding benefits in negative events. For instance, you might decide to listen more, or talk through challenges in your next relationship instead of pushing away problems. Also, after a hurt, you might have more time to focus on going back to school, learning guitar, or creating art. Finally, emotional processing can help us avoid past mistakes, and this can be combined with post-traumatic growth to create your Best Possible Future.
Want more happiness and to track your happiness trends? Join HappySpree