Transforming negative emotions

Know a friend who’s so upbeat that they bring a jolt of positivity as they walk into a room? It’s as if you’re absorbing their positivity.

The opposite is also true. If you're near a friend or a colleague who's feeling miserable, your spirits also dampen.

We are all emotional beings and we tend to absorb the emotions of those around us. This behavior has a name. It’s called called Emotional Contagion, coined by psychologist Elaine Hatfield.

We, of course, love spreading positive emotions. It’s the negative ones that we need to tackle. Fear, frustration, anger, anxiety, and grief can suck up our mental energy and create a downward spiral of negative emotions. Not just for us but also for the ones around us.

For our sake and for the sake of those around us, it’s important we learn to use the negative emotions to our benefit.

So what’s the right way to deal with negative emotions?

When I was going through a tough time one year back, my well-intentioned friends and family told me to be strong, to fight back. I had lost my 14-year old Labrador. I was miserable. I didn’t have the emotional strength to be strong or to fight back.

A dear friend, who had undergone a similar experience suggested the opposite. She told me to not fight the grief, rather embrace it.

That is the first step to fighting negative emotions. Accept and embrace it.

The next step is to figure out what to do with it.

Let’s fall back on science for finding a solution.

Remember the first law of thermodynamics? Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only conserved, transferred, or transformed into another form.

What, out of the above three, would you like to do with your negative energy:

• Conserving is a bad idea. It’s a sure shot way of inviting stress-related deadly diseases.

• Transferring it? It might make us feel better at the cost of others. Why spread gloom?

• Transforming into another form is the best bet.

The idea is to convert your negative energy into something creative. Something that that can help you evolve and grow. We have the ability to turn:

• Fear into excitement.

• Frustration into determination.

• Anger into passion.

• Anxiety into anticipation.

• Grief into resilience.

By embracing our emotions and transforming them into a positive form, we can grow and evolve into the best version of ourselves.

As for me, I unknowingly channeled it into creating this very newsletter. 10x your mind will turn 1 next month 🎂 I’d like to think that it helped transform my grief into something inspirational for myself and my readers.

We don't have control over the emotions that we feel, but we do have the power to manifest them into whatever we desire.