The most effective psychological rule: send the emotion back to where it came from. Every negative emotion has a source — and an addressee.
Can you learn not to accumulate negative emotions? Can you build a stable, positive relationship with life inside yourself, without the emotional rollercoaster?
If you (like me) are a religious person, you know that prayer has enormous power and can very quickly bring you back from chaos and irritation to calm and inner peace.
If you lean more on a scientific view of the world, there are also plenty of techniques that help a person process and release negative emotions organically.
For some, journaling works. Some talk to a therapist regularly. Some let off steam through physical activity. Some fix their routine and get enough sleep (our nervous system recovers during sleep).
There are also more advanced methods, like EMDR techniques. In simple terms, these are exercises you do with your eyes while your brain processes accumulated negativity.
The main rule
But from my point of view, the most effective psychological rule is this: “You need to send the emotion back to where it came from.”
I got this phrase from my therapist during individual therapy.
The essence of this principle is that a negative emotion always has a source.
Either another driver cut us off on the road, or some woman at the utility office spoke to us rudely, or a loved one said something very hurtful.
In all these situations, it makes sense to calmly return the negative emotion to the person it belongs to. The key word here is calmly.
What this looks like in practice
When someone cuts me off on the road, I might swear (without profanity, of course) at the other driver. He doesn’t hear me, but the irritation doesn’t build up inside me, because I gave it an outlet.
When I run into rude words from a woman at the utility office, I might ask her: “Are you having a really tough day? Bad mood? People getting to you?” I’m not escalating or provoking a conflict, but I’m letting her know her behavior right now isn’t the most pleasant.
When a loved one hurts us with their words, it makes sense to say so honestly. But it’s important to do it not from a position of criticism and blame (that leads to a fight), but simply by talking about the feelings that were touched by those words or actions.
The worst thing you can do with negative emotions is just swallow them and never work through them. Then a volcano can build up inside a person so large that at some point even sedatives won’t help.
So just as we regularly clean our apartment, we should also do some cleaning in our “emotional home” — not accumulating negativity in it, but always sending it back to whoever it belongs to.