The following outlines strategies for identifying, accepting, and letting go of unhelpful emotions, along with their benefits.

We explore how the energies of various emotions influence our lives and provide alternative views on managing emotions from the perspectives of psychology and neuroscience.

How we avoid dealing with Emotions.

We carry unhelpful emotions because we fear them and they stay with us because we avoid dealing with them.

Emotions are not to be feared, they are indicators showing you what is good an dbad for you. Ignoring them blocks feedback that could help solve problems (The Subtle Art of not giving a f*ck, M.Mansons)

Emotions have energy frequencies, the more positive the emotion the higher the frequency. Furthermore, similar energy frequencies attract one another.

If you focus your thought on what you don’t want - you’re holding onto negative emotions - increasing the likely hood of a negative outcome (the secret, R. Brynes)

There are three most common and ineffective methods of avoiding confrontation with negative emotions: Distracting, Burying, Sharing.

#1: Avoiding Emotions through Distraction

Though distraction may provide short term relief from negative emotions, more energy is consumed then through addressing these feeling directly. These emotions don’t go away, so we end up carrying them around with us.

Spending all our energy avoiding emotions instead of opening ourselves to positive opportunities and relationships can prevent connecting with others and improving ourselves.

However, not all distraction is bad. when emotions are too strong and overwhelming, healthy distractions can divert attention for long enough to reduce to a manageable intensity. Preventing turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms -

#2: Burying Emotions deep inside ourselves

We bury emotions or deeply internalise them when we’re unsure what to do with a feeling we are afraid of or feel guilty about.

You are internalizing negative emotions if you frequently speak poorly about yourself, blame or punish yourself for failures, withhold things that bring you joy, self-isolate, often feel nervous, or have difficulty concentrating.

Burying feelings happens with or without Conscious awareness:

Conscious

We often suppress our feelings, acting as though they don't exist. These suppressed emotions can later manifest as mental and physical problems, such as irritability and headaches.

Pretending a feeling doesn’t exist provokes a physical response because it signals your brain that the feeling is unwelcome or dangerous. Staying tin fight or flight mode for too long can lead to chronic pain (headaches) and mental issues (depression). -

Unconscious

When we experience too much shame and anxiety to consciously acknowledge it, we unconsciously push away the feeling. To protect our minds, we deny that we are even aware of it.

Dismissing your negative feelings is dismissing an important part of who you are and how you experience the world - this worsens your self-esteem. To maintain a better relationship with yourself, you must accept all your feelings - not just the happy ones.

#3: Sharing Feelings with Others

We avoid our feelings by sharing them with others. we do this because we think it will make us feel better. However, sharing does not actually release us from it, it relieves just enough weight from the feeling to allow us to bury the rest of it and avoid dealing with the root cause.

Sharing emotions and seeking support from others can make us feel worse - co-rumeration - where excessive questioning makes you re-expereince the pain of the challenge and related memories. When you recall on enegative memory, your brain resurfaces other, related negative memories. Re-expereinceing memories can intesify your negative self-talk and related emotions. Link

How to release Unhelpful Emotions

The best way to handle unhelpful emotions is to completely release them. Once you learn how to do this, you will feel less attached to external experiences and objects.

Similar concepts exist in the Buddhist process of attaining non-attachment. Non-attachment involves letting go of your desires for and feelings about all things, including your thoughts and emotions, relationships with others, and material belongings. Everything is impermanent, thus maintaining attachments will inevitably lead to suffering. Meditation can help you cultivate non-attachment and inner peace through considering your feelings as an outside observer instead of attaching to or identifying with them.

The process of Releasing unhelpful emotions.

First, recognize the emotion and allow yourself to feel it fully. Don't try to alter it, push back against it, or ascribe moral value to it.

Fighting emotions gives them power, allowing them to grow. Release all your opposition towards them by recognizing them as no more than a passing feeling. This allows all the energy of that emotion to be released as well.

If the emotion resurfaces, you are still holding on to some of its energy. The emotion is complex and made up of several layers of emotions that need to be released to arrive at the root. Releasing emotions requires continual practice, as we are so well versed in suppressing or ignoring them.

Start by learning to recognize the physical sensations that different emotions produce. E.g., flushed and tense when angry, or shaky and sick to your stomach when anxious. This can help you identify the emotions belonging to these sensations.

If you struggle, you can practice by watching a movie or show, take note of the emotions and allow yourself to experience them fully.

these are similar principles as found in Emotion-Focused-Therapy (EFT)

TO find the root of an emotion it can be helpful to sort your emotions into primary and secondary emotions:

Primary:

• The first emotion you feel in response to a situation
• represent the root.
• generally harder to accept - e.g. fear

Secondary:

• emotions that follow
• the layers around the primary that must be released before getting to the root.
• are generally protective or push others away - e.g. anger.

The benefits of releasing Unhelpful Emotions

Releasing unhelpful emotions has several benefits, such as. Less attachment to external experiences and a greater sense of control. Specifically, three additional benefits are explored here: removing self-imposed limitations; improving relationships; reducing vulnerability to health problems.

#1: Ridding you of self-imposed limitations

Our thoughts are rationalisation of our feelings. If your feelings are stuck in a negative state, your thoughts will reflect a pessimistic outlook.

You can be brave and Bold instead of fearful and inhibited.

Hawkins (Letting go) argues that thoughts emerge from feelings. On the other hand, R. Bush (Designing the Mind) LINK argues that emotions originate from thought. Between every stimulus and emotional response, there is a thought pattern provoking that feeling. If you are satisfied with the outcome of a situation, you'll experience positive emotion. If you are dissatisfied, you will experience negative emotion.

This notion is also supported by Tony Robbins’s strategy for Breakthrough change: (Mind) State - Story - Strategy.

I am not experiencing life, I am experiencing the life I focus on

Change your Story to change your life! and to change your story you must change you Sate (Mind) - oyur thought patterns an underlying beliefs.

In "Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself," J. Dispenza also discusses the relationship between thoughts and emotions. Thoughts are the electric charges in the quantum field, and feelings are the magnetic charges. Thoughts send electrical signals into the field, and the feelings we generate draw things back to us. Together, our thoughts and feelings create a state of being, producing an electromagnetic signature that influences every atom in our world. Altering your state of being to align with a potential outcome existing in the quantum world can propel you into that potential experience.

To alter aspects of your reality, you need to think, feel, and act differently. You must transform into someone new and establish a different state of mind. This change will create a new state of being with a unique electromagnetic signature. (J.Dispenza, Breaking the habit of being yourself)

#2: Improving your relationships

Your emotions affect the people around you regardless of whether you consciously express them or not. The things you feel about a person affect how you feel about a person affect how they feel about you. Avoid negatively influencing someones feelings by releasing the motions that might invite that persons negative energy.

Known in psychology as emotional contagion - emotions can spread through tone of voice, body language,, and facial expressions.

Example: Pride is an unhelpful emotion that can damage relationships. Instead of gaining the respect and admiration you seek, you are more likely to elicit jealousy and competitiveness from others. When you let go of pride, you recognise that you don't need others' approval to feel worthy. Others will naturally appreciate and respect you when you respect yourself.

Try cultivating dignity instead of pride. When you embody dignity (the feeling of self-compassion and humility separate from external success and failure) you no longer feel the need to be perfect and stop comparing yourself to others.

#3: Reducing vulnerability to health issues

There is ample evidence that many health conditions are linked to emotional stress. Chronic stress can suppress your immune system, trigger new health conditions, and exacerbate existing ones.

Your beliefs can influence your physical health. Emotions, thoughts, and beliefs carry energy, and focusing on them can manifest as physical symptoms. If you perceive the world as dangerous and full of disease, you may find yourself getting sick more often.

If you let go of your fear and anxiety, you will likely find that your health issues begin to disappear.

J. Sarno, author of "Mindbody Prescription", posits that the mind opts to express emotional distress through physical symptoms because society deems them more acceptable. Doctors validate these symptoms as "real", further reinforcing their social acceptability.

The Energy of Emotions

Unhelpful emotions have low-frequencies and Beneficial emotions have high frequencies.

Low-Frequency emotions

Low frequency negative emotions attract negative experiences and hinder personal growth and success. the most common ones are: Grief, Anger, and Fear.

Grief

Grief arises when you believe that you need something external to complete you and then you lose that thing. this can be a relationship, a person, a worldview or a dream you have.

When you place a lot of importance on external attachments, every loss you experience feels like losing part of yourself.

Experiencing unexplained sadness, irritability, depression, or lack of motivation can be signs of unprocessed grief. Grief can also manifest when a hoped-for outcome doesn't come to fruition, causing you to grieve for the perceived lost potential.

Being unwilling to accept greif and burying your feelings keeps you in a state of grief. remaining here leads to hopelessness and regret.

To release grief, you must allow yourself to grieve fully. Realize that you are capable of handling these feelings and that you can love and care for people and things without attaching them to your sense of self.

If you are struggling to deal with grief and loss on your own you might benefit from grief counseling -

Fear

Fear manifests in different ways and is highly pervasive because it has been connected with our survival throughout evolution. Thus we are particularly sensitive to fears in the following categories: Violence, contamination, loss of status, predation and environmental dangers.

Some fears can prevent us from living the kind of life we want to.

Fear is problematic because its energy often attracts the very things we are afraid of. If we believe something is going to happen, it often does. Once this occurs, we interpret it as evidence of our fear, perpetuating the cycle.

Furthermore, whenever you harbor negative thoughts, you obstruct your subconscious mind from accessing useful information and the positive energy from your environment that could potentially alter your situation. Consequently, your subconscious mind generates negative experiences that match your fears and concerns. (J. Murphy, The Power of your Subconscious Mind)

To break free of Fear:

Begin by acknowledging that there's no need to fear being afraid. You must learn to sit with your fear if you aim to release it. Understand that instead of protecting you, it's holding you back!

Don't follow a strict diet out of fear of disease later in life. Instead, choose to eat nourishing food because you love yourself.

Making decisions with love means opening yourself to vulnerability, uncertainty and fear, but choosing what you love anyway. This helps you discover what you really want and opens up new possibilities. making fear based decisions results in taking the safest path and means missing out on what you truly want.

Use fear as an indicator of an existing limitation you need to break free from.

Anger

Anger can be useful but is also an extremely destructive emotion. you bury anger because you feel guilty or think it to be undesirable. Anger draws negative energy towards you , even if you don’t express it.

Signs that you may have repressed anger include: difficulty with confrontation and setting boundaries, using sarcasm and passive aggression, self-isolating when upset, feeling resentful towards others, and engaging in frequent negative self-talk. This can make it hard for people to get close to you and often lead to misunderstandings or conflict. Physical symptoms include, insomnia, high blood pressure, cardiovascular issues and chronic stress.

Channel your anger toward the positive

Instead of suppressing your anger or directing it at others, use it to improve the situation or yourself. For instance, if you're angry at your parents for the way they treated you as a child, you can use this as motivation to seek therapy and learn to treat others better than you were treated.

Anger can give you short term energy through its production of norepinephrine, triggering the fight or flight response. This prepares your body for action and provides a boos of energy - channel it towards a productive task - such as setting boundaries or changing something that requires energy.

High-Frequency Emotions

To achieve a state of peace, free from negativity, you must let go of unhelpful feelings and make room for beneficial ones. Positive emotions, with their high frequencies, attract success and fulfilment, helping you rely less on external sources of joy and acceptance. The most potent positive emotions include Courage, Love, and Peace.

Positive emotions and thoughts encourage better physical and mental health.

Courage

Courage represents the transition from a mindset of limitation to a mindset of capability.

Turning your attentions to what you can do rather than what you think you cant do.

Courage is one of the four cardinal virutes of the Philosophy of stoicism - they believe it is essential for a good life. Courage is doing the right thing even though you are scared, it means acting to help yourself or someone else in need regardless of potential negative consequences. (R. Holiday, Courage is calling).

When you embody courage, you can be joyful, centered, and self-assured. You believe that you can attain what you want and need using your existing abilities, and you learn to respect yourself. Embracing courage means you are willing to take risks and learn from mistakes to foster growth.

Practicing taking on fear and showing courage on a daily basis teaches you how to manage your fears in small steps. Small wins build self-esteem over time.

Love

Love is more than just a high frequency emotion - it is a way of life.

Putting out love freely means it will come back to you freely.

One exercise for this is the Loving kindness meditation - visualising someone you love, someone you feel neutral about and someone you dislike and offer the same blessing to each.

Once you’re no longer holding on to your negative emotions you will realise that love is everywhere, just waiting to be discovered and manifested in a multitude of ways.

When you exist in a state of love, your presence and actions encourage the people around you to be better too - calmer, more confident, more patient…

Practicing gratitude everyday is linked to a lower risk of depression, anxiety and addiction. It makes people more resilient and is linked to better interpersonal relationship satisfaction.

The most powerful manifestation of love is self-love, to see love everywhere you must offer it to yourself. (The secret, R. Bryne)

Practice self love by diving into a hobby, and exploring your creativity. Pay attention to your body at all times, not just when something goes wrong - plan more rest, eat healthy, move more.

Peace

Peace is the ultimate goal of emotional release, wherein you’ve freed yourself from all negative energy.

it i the highest and most evolved emotional state - reaching true enlightenment. when you are enlightened you are no longer bound by the continuous cylce of birth and death (samsara), and you are free from all earthly attachments. It is the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice.

At pease you feel inner stillness, unity, and contentment. no external force can disturb this internal peace and you no longer experience earthly suffering as you are no longer tied to your earthly body.

This state of pease and unity is being connected to your true being - your deepest self - which you can only connect to when being truly present in the moment. Your life energy is unaffected by your physical body, mind, ego, or external factors. (E. Tolle - The Power of Now)

True peace means you no longer experience desire. You don't need to covet (wish for) anything because the energy you put forth is so strong and positive that anything you need automatically arrives in your life.

Alex McAdam

Lean Coach

LinkedIn / Website

Table of contents

• How we avoid dealing with Emotions.
• #1: Avoiding Emotions through Distraction
• #2: Burying Emotions deep inside ourselves
• #3: Sharing Feelings with Others
• How to release Unhelpful Emotions
• The process of Releasing unhelpful emotions.
• The benefits of releasing Unhelpful Emotions
• #1: Ridding you of self-imposed limitations
• #2: Improving your relationships
• #3: Reducing vulnerability to health issues
• The Energy of Emotions
• Low-Frequency emotions
• High-Frequency Emotions
• Links and resources
• Table of contents
• Link to Book
• See Also