What are emotions?
If we delve into biochemistry, they are specific chemicals released in our brain in response to certain actions, triggering sensations that we call emotions.
For us, first and foremost, they are the body's way of telling us how a particular situation affects us and how we are feeling right now. Metaphorically speaking, it's a way for the body to communicate with the mind, with our consciousness.
In the past, people believed that emotions were evil or wrong and had to be fought against. However, that mindset didn't lead to anything good—quite the opposite. Over time, while studying the nervous system, scientists came to a much more useful conclusion: emotions are our allies.
Even now, let's think logically: if they were useless and pointless, would they have survived through evolution?
So in reality, emotions are our best allies on the path to a happy life.
Why ignoring certain emotions is a bad idea
Emotions are just an indicator, like a notification on your phone letting you know about something. If you delete the notification, does the thing it reported disappear? No. It's the exact same with emotions: ignoring them doesn't make their underlying cause go away—we're just fooling ourselves and pretending everything is fine.
What's more, because emotions aren't just something abstract—they're very real chemicals produced in our brain and nervous system—suppressing them over time leads to illness and pain in various organs. This is what people really mean when they say "all diseases come from stress" (or "from nerves").
So it turns out it's not from nerves, but from suppressing and ignoring emotions 🙃
Negative emotions? Is that normal?
Overall, the idea that negative emotions are something wrong and need to be hidden, transformed, or dealt with somehow came to the mainstream from the 90s toxic positivity movement. Back then, it was just a taken-out-of-context theory from a psychologist studying depression.
Since then, things snowballed, and the trend of relentless positivity took off—"focus on the good," "look, others have it worse," and so on.
But in reality, negative emotions are fundamentally no different from any others, except that they feel bad.
You might feel that if you experience a lot of these emotions, it makes you a bad, angry, difficult, or depressing person. I really want to emphasize that this is not true. Emotions do not define who we are as a person; they simply signal something. And if someone isn't okay with you having negative feelings, that doesn't make you wrong or your emotions abnormal.
