What you think about feeling positive and negative emotions influences in:
• Allowing yourself to feel an emotion– If you think that you should not feel negative emotions, every time you feel negative emotion you will not allow yourself to feel it thus suppressing the emotion.
• How long you hold onto the emotion - If you prefer being happy as that is the emotion you think is expected off you in your environment, you’ll want to hold onto happiness. But in reality, Happiness or any other emotion comes and goes.
• How you react while experiencing the emotion - If you’ve developed a thought that you have to be confident almost always, you’ll not be able to process when you feel anxious and might get angry at yourself for feeling anxious.
• Getting judgmental of yourself for feeling an emotion – Sometimes, you might be the only person feeling a certain emotion in a situation while others around you seem neutral. At this point, you might judge yourself as being ‘too emotional’. Any or all these thoughts may lead one to feel moody/ anxious / experience as though their emotions stemmed out of nowhere/ and have trouble getting out of a particular mood. Most of the process of how our thoughts affect our emotions occur subconsciously.
Gentle reminder: All emotions serve a purpose. Allowing yourself to feel them without getting judgmental about yourself feeling a particular way is essential to achieve emotional well-being.