Positive Emotions Are The Best Weapon Against Adversity
We teach our children to read, to write, to dress and to cycle. But what about when it comes to their feelings? Teaching children positive emotions can be their key to happiness. Positive emotions can make them more resilient when it comes to facing adversity later in life. People who can bend without breaking when confronted with adversity are capable of experiencing positive emotions even in very stressful and critical situations.
Many problems with mental health, originate in emotions. Misunderstood and oppressive emotions harm not only the body but also the mind. Emotions are always “learned”; the difference is that they can be learned on their own, for better or worse. Or you can also have a direct and conscious influence over them. Thus, you will help children understand, change and regulate their emotions.
To educate your emotions
Teaching children about their emotions means educating them for life. Emotional intelligence is a set of abilities that help you recognize both your own and others’ feelings. It also helps you deal with emotions in an appropriate way.
A few years ago, emotional education was limited to learning to suppress certain emotions. Fortunately, we have slowly but surely begun to discover emotional intelligence, and we have begun to attach some relevance to it. And it includes an adequate expression of emotions, not an suppression of emotions.
The ideal way to reduce the future levels of violence, while increasing the levels of altruism, is to encourage social and emotional education from an early stage. If a child is able to identify their feelings and the feelings of their peers, the child will know what is the appropriate way to react to them. This will serve as a foundation for the child’s further social abilities. It will make them know how to react and when to react to something.
Also, knowing how to express one’s feelings will prevent the child from feeling that he does not have a voice. It will help your child ask for help if he is scared or feels threatened.
How do positive emotions help us?
Positive emotions promote receptive, flexible and integrative thought patterns. It is quite possible that this way of thinking has come at the forefront of great discoveries and the most important achievements throughout human history.
It’s hard to imagine Michelangelo annoyed when he painted the Sistine Chapel, or a furious Newton sitting under the famous apple tree, or for that matter Edison or Marie Curie depressed in their laboratories. The opposite is more likely. It is easy to imagine these people as they think about the possibilities and alternative solutions they had, while combining incompatible elements, and were completely engrossed in their work. Excited and eager as they moved forward in the progression towards a desired and meaningful goal.
Along the same lines, it has been proven that diagnoses of disorders that have led to reduced capacity have been more successful when physicians were manipulated to feel happy (Fredrickson, 2003). “More successful” refers to the fact that in this study the doctors spent less time integrating the information into the study. They were less likely to base their conclusions on their original thoughts and ideas. Therefore, they were less likely to make hasty or premature diagnoses.
Positive emotions not only help us to feel good about ourselves, but it is also a factor when it comes to stimulating our abilities and personal competence. Experiencing positive emotions every day helps us to consistently feel happy.
