What Your Negative Emotions Are Trying to Tell You

Pushkin. Hey Happiness Lab listeners, welcome back to our special series on spring cleaning your happiness. Today we're doing another trip Into our back catalog to find some of my favorite past episodes. And today's choice is a conversation I still come back to whenever I'm facing a tough emotion.

This episode is all about how to clean up the way you manage negative feelings. And as happiness spring cleaning hacks go, the ones you're about to hear today are going to be super important because negative emotions, feelings like sadness, anger, fear, overwhelm, They tend to come up on the regular these days, and we don't often deal with these emotions all that well. Sometimes we try to avoid difficult feelings by distracting ourselves or trying to suppress what we're feeling. Other times we get very caught up in our negative emotions, keeping them alive through rumination and worry.

But what if we used a healthier strategy? What if we instead got curious about what our tough emotions were trying to tell us? What if we looked more carefully at the solutions they might be suggesting? These are the questions I'll be diving into in this episode. I'll chat with Harvard psychologist Susan David about strategies we can use to get more agile with our tough emotions.

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