goodbye to negative emotions
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You’re probably going to find some of the ideas in this chapter strange at first. They’re from the normal Western way of handling emotions. And they can seem to demand almost superhuman qualities. But try this new way and you may be surprised to find it easier than you imagined. Essentially, you’re going to learn to react to outside events in a manner that’s almost certainly new to you. The rewards, in terms of happiness, will be enormous. You’ll learn to look upon your peace fo mind and happiness as a treasure that has to be protected at all costs.
Happiness is not something with which you can take risks; think of it like one of your children, or the greatest love of your life. When anything threatens it, you have to take evasive action immediately.
In the previous chapter I looked at unhappy, negative ways of thinking and how to change them. In this chapter I’m going to look at unhappy, negative emotions and how you can overcome them. If you don’t, the person they’ll harm is you.
I’ve selected ten emotions that can damage your life. There are others, but I’m focusing on these because in our society, to a greater or lesser extent, they’re often considered to be prudent, appropriate and even beneficial, You’ve probably lived with them all your life, and never questioned them – until now.
Potentially damaging emotions
Some harmful anger, blame, cynicism, hate, revenge, jealousy, emotions resentment, suspicion, indifference, guilt
The antidotes empathy, understanding, sympathy, patience, tolerance, kindness, forgiveness
Feeling good about other people
Anger builds more anger. And more anger builds hate. There’s quite a lot of scientific data to prove it, but it’s not really necessary to refer to that to know that it’s true. We all know how we can ‘goad’ ourselves on. And we also know how other people respond. In Oriental thought, as well as physics, every force creates an equal and opposite force.
It’s one of the most important lessons you can learn when dealing with yourself and with other people. Anger is the way to escalate a situation, both internally. The idea that you can get rid of your anger by letting it out is a popular one, but misguided. Shouting at somebody, or shouting at an empty chair which represents somebody, or punching pillows, is the exact opposite of what’s needed. The best way to counter anger is to understand the other person’s position. In other words, let the other person explain why they said or did what they did and, if you still feel angry, explain in turn how you feel and why. This is completely different from venting your anger, as if it’s steam escaping from a pressure cooker. What you actually need to do is turn off the heat.
If you are going to let your anger out then left it out as laughter (see later in this chapter). There’s another very good reason to eliminate negative emotions. Quite simply, negative emotions make you ill.
How negative emotions are dangerous for your health
Negative emotions are assassins. And the person they’re stalking is you.
A link between emotion and illness has long been postulated. but it was only in the 1970s that a psychologist called Robert Ader uncovered one of the mechanisms. He gave rats saccharin flavoured water along with a chemical that suppressed T-cell count still went down. The significance of the experi- ment was that it proved a connection between the brain (which ‘tasted’ the water) and the immune system.
Soon afterwards, a colleague at the School of Medicine and Dentistry, University of Rochester, by the name of David Felten, pinpointed synapse-like contacts where the autonomic nervous system (responsible for ‘running’ the body) spoke to the immune cells using neurotransmitters.
There’s at least one other mechanism connecting emotions and physical health. During stress, the body release a cocktail of hormones including adrenaline (epinephrine), noradrenaline (norepineph- rine), cortisol and prolactin. Generally speaking, these ‘stress hormones’ have the effect of suppressing the immune system. Why evolution should have arranged things that way can only be conjectured.
Possibly it’s a method of conserving energy during a emergency.
The problem is that if stress is prolonged or constant (if, for example, you nurture your negative emotions) then your immune system will be permanently compromised.
What’s more, stress hormones lead to higher levels of glucose, cholesterol and fat in the blood to provide the energy for physical action. But if physical action doesn’t follow (and, in our society, it usually doesn’t), plaque is deposited on the walls of the blood vessels. To that long-term risk can be added the short-term risk of heart attack, when noradrenaline levels are sharply elevated.
A list of the disorders related to negative emotions includes: allergies, asthma, cancers, colds and flu, depression, diabetes, headaches, heart disease, hypertension, indigestion, muscle pain and cramps, sexual problems, strokes and ulcers.
The conclusion is simple: be happy, stay healthy.
Learning to empathize
The way to protect your peace of mind and happiness is with empathy. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that empathy is primarily for the benefit of another person: emapthy is for your benefit. Let’s take a simple everyday example.
Your partner dents the car. You become angry. Why? Did your partner do it intentionally? Of course not. Have you ever dented a car? Possibly. Will you dent a car some time in the future? Probably. Will your anger make the dent disappear? Absolutely not. So what purpose is served by your anger?
What benefit does it bring you or anybody else? The truth is that it does you harm.
Ask yourself these questions:
- How would I have felt if I’d dented the car?
- How must my partner have felt?
- How would I like to be treated if I dented the car?
In other words, you need to empathize, that’s to say, imaginatively enter into another person’s situation.
Blame, resentment and revenge
Ideally you need to resolve a situation when it occurs without carrying any emotional poisons with you into the future. But so often it isn’t like that. Let’s take a common relationship problem. One partner suggests sex and the other then announces a headache. As a result, the first partner sulks.
This is the thinking. ‘This is always happening. My partner never wants to have sex with me, doesn’t like sex and obviously has a problem. It’s clear my partner doesn’t really love me at all. I’m looking for the world’s greatest love affair and this clearly isn’t it. this relationship is a waste of time.’
(You’ll recognize the negative styles of thinking from Chapter 3, including black-and-white, exaggeration, jumping to negative conclusions, perfectionism and labelling.)
The result is resentment and a desire for revenge, with thoughts like:
- I can’t be treated like
- I’ll teach my partner a
- I’ll make my partner
- I’ll pay my partner back several times
These are particularly destructive emotions, especially in a relationship. If you think in these kinds of terms you cause immense unhappiness not only for you partner, but also for yourself. While you have those kinds of thoughts you just can’t be happy.
It’s easy to see why. You:
- cut yourself off from you partner’s company
- stop enjoying things together
- deny yourself physical contact
- prolong negative emotions for hours or even days
- make yourself physically
In short, to use an old cliche, you’cut off your nose to spite your face’.
The right course is to accept that your partner does have a headache. You should ask if there’s anything you can do (a painkiller, a cup of tea, taking over your partner’s chores.) All the while, you should be thinking like this: ‘My partner and I have been together for years and we’ve had some incred- ible sex. I love my partner and I know my partner loves me and wouldn’t deliberately do anything to upset me. We can’t expect to be perfectly synchronized for sex. That’s asking the impossible.’
As a result of which, you remain happy and probably enjoy sex a few hours later.
Felling good about yourself
If you feel guilty, give yourself a pat on the back. Congratulations. You’re a member of the human race and a creditable one at that. Of course you feel guilt. A person who doesn’t is known as a psychopath. But there’s no point in hating yourself either. Everybody makes mistakes. You can’t be blamed for that.
If your guilt becomes a source of discouragement and ultimately depression, then you can’t function to the benefit of other people. That would be adding another mistake on top of the earlier ones.
One of the life’s great paradoxes is that it’s the most thoughtful people who tend to be the least satisfied with themselves.
If you’re hard on yourself it means you recognize the need to grow. Growing is, itself, a generator of happiness. Be happy that you still have a journey to make – a hugely enjoyable journey.
As the old saying goes, nobody is perfect. Buddhists believe that’s why you have to keep returning to Earth so you can progress further. The Buddhists say nobody can achieve perfection in one
lifetime and, whether you believe in reincarnation or not, that much is certainly true.
Remember that success is a very poor teacher. Success never requires that you examine yourself. Failure, on the other hand, is a very good teacher. Never be afraid of failure – just make sure you learn from it.
The stress buster
Back in Chapter 1 I advised you to practise smiling even when you don’t have a reason to smile.
I hope you’ve been doing this, because now I’m going to ask you to do something even harder. I want you to laugh without having any particular reason to laugh.
Why? Because laughter is a great stress buster. It can de-stress you. It can de-stress other people. It can de-stress the whole situation. And the easier you can turn it on the better. It doesn’t even have to be ‘authentic’ laughter. As we all know, a placebo-pretend medicine – can prove highly effective. And pretend laughter is the same. What’s more, it can do something a placebo can’t. It can turn itself into the real thing. Start laughing and, quite soon, you-and everyone else-may find it’s the genuine article.
Get into training
If you’re going to smile, laugh and be happy more than ever before, you’ve got to get into training. if you were strengthening your biceps, you’d pick up weights even though you didn’t actually want them, in other words, for no reason. It’s the same with smiling and laughter. You’ve got to learn to smile for no reason. you’ve got to learn to laugh for no reason.
Then, in the same way that you can become capable of lifting heavier and heavier weights, so you can become capable of smiling and laughing in ‘heavier and heavier’ sitautions.
I learned this lesson years ago from a woman who taught children with a wide range of disabili- ties. She was always smiling, always laughing in the midst of difficulties and, at first, it annoyed me. How could everything seem so funny to her? How could she be so insensitive to all the problems of her pupils, let alone the rest of the world? It seemed to be a kind of madness.
One day, perhaps reading my mind, she explained it to me. Many of her pupils with quite severe disabilities were nevertheless happy. How could she not be happy with all the advantages she had? And then I saw very clearly my own disability. She had pupils who, for example, couldn’t walk without calli- pers. In my case, I couldn’t be happy, couldn’t laugh, unless I, too, was provided with artifical assistance.
She wasn’t mad at all. She was one of the few sane people. It’s the rest of us who are mad. If we need assistance to laugh and be happy then we, too, are disabled. So practise your unassisted laughing and cure your disability.
What happens when you laugh?
Let’s first of all trace what happens in the brain when you hear a good joke.
- An electrical wave moves through the cerebral (the largest part of the brain) within less than half a second of seeing or hearing something potentially funny.
- The left side of the cortex analyses the joke or
- Activity increases in the frontal
- The occipital lobe processes any visual
- The right hemisphere of the cortex is where you ‘get’ the joke.
- The most ‘primitive’ part of the brain – the limbic system (especially amygdala and hippocam pus) – is involved in the emotional
- The hypothalamus is involved in the production of loud, uncontrollable laughter. So your brain is getting a good workout, for a
In turn, the laughter.
- increases the disease-fighting protein Gamma-interferon
- increases T-cells and B-cells, which make disease-fighting antibodies
- increases immunoglobulin A, the body’s first line of defence against infections of the upper respiratory tract
- increases immunoglobulins M and G
- increases Complement 3, which helps antibodies pierce defective or infected cells in order to destroy them
- benefits anyone suffering from diabetes because it lowers blood sugar
- benefits the heart
- lowers blood pressure (after an initial increase)
- lowers stress hormones, including cortisol
- strengthens abdominal muscles
- relaxes the body
- reduces pain, possibly by the production of
- flushes water vapour from the lungs
- speeds recovery from surgery, especially for children. One extra reason to laugh:
- It stops everyone thinking you’re dull. And one reason not to:
- Your underwear may get
