Why It’s Healthy To Feel Your Negative Emotions

We call it toxic positivity because sometimes experiencing negative emotions can be healthy. My take:

“'Toxic positivity"keeps you from embracing the discomfort of negative emotions. But consider that you must welcome the fear, pain, and anxiety of a challenge to run your first marathon, return to school after a hiatus, go on your first meditation retreat, or try your first post-break-up date. Allowing the negative feelings in opens you up to new, enriching experiences. Pursue something a little scary — this is the true road to happiness."

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Need A Boost Of Confidence? First, Step Out Of Your Comfort Zone

Why enter a road race? If I say, Because it's fun, I can hear the groans already. Another reason I do it is because it's out of my comfort zone. I've been running a long time and running on my own is easy. But entering a race, sitting in my hotel room alone the night before, checking my gear for the nth time, wondering just how much colder the wind will make it feel, anxiously trying to sleep and then waking up early, with nervous anticipation, sometimes I really wonder why I do it.

I've decided it's all about getting out of my comfort zone and becoming stronger—not just physically stronger, but mentally stronger. Here's how it works:

The Positive Mindset

As Olympic runner Jeff Galloway said, "The more you frame the marathon as a stressful experience, the more negative messages you will receive." Sitting in my hotel room I sometimes have a negative mindset, worrying about the potential problems and pitfalls of the next day's race. To shake that, I remind myself of how I'll feel walking toward the starting line with fellow-runners, talking about last year's race, those we've run recently and upcoming events, and my positive mindset kicks in. 

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Get Out of the Post-Divorce Doldrums…It's Spring!

Spring is a great time for renewal, reinvigoration and reinvention. It's a time to leave the post-divorce doldrums behind. 

You can get stuck in the doldrums after any period of stress like divorce, maybe even anytime after you hit the big 5-0. An area near the equator, the doldrums are famous for diabolical transitions from calm to squalls, with, by one definition, "light, baffling winds." The doldrums can keep a ship stuck. If this sounds like your life, you're not alone. 

As any life coach will tell you, anytime is a good time to move forward in your life. With the sun shining a little more and life returning all around us, spring is a really good time to seriously consider taking a few steps to leave the doldrums behind and start smelling the flowers again.

Change is different for everyone. Some of my suggestions may float your boat, others may not. Both will trigger thoughts of things you might like to try. To see big changes in your life, you can start by trying something new. 

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Are You Addicted to Comfort?

In our constant search for happiness and the good life, we may be shortchanging ourselves by seeking to eliminate all negative emotions, thoughts and experiences from our lives. That's what Robert Biswas-Diener and Todd Kashdan say in their forthcoming book, The Upside of Your Darkside. You can see a preview in Biswas-Diener's TEDx talk about comfort addiction. 

Consider that our desire for creature comforts (do I really need Google Glass?) and intense efforts to avoid discomfort (the vacation to Club Med instead of a real place) make us increasingly unable to deal with the discomforts life inevitably brings. 

 Happiness experts uniformly suggest that curiosity and challenges, with their associated discomfort, enrich our lives. 

Challenges are different for everyone. Consider how you might bring a little positive discomfort into your life. 

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Avoid Post-Performance Blues…Develop Your Recovery Routine

In an ironic turn of events, the day after finishing a half-marathon, and a week after I finished writing a book, I came across my notes for a possible article about post-performance routines. It was sorely needed, as I was feeling the lackadaisical lassitude of the post-partier. It's easy to get caught up in the excitement of the party, but what now? 

Unless you're a professional party planner, you probably don't consider the events of your life to be like a big event you just arranged, and you probably don't systematically examine what worked and what didn't work. We all have our personal parties, be they public speeches, musical or athletic performances, or our performance as parents, partners or employees. 

During the party, you have difficult moments you may have anticipated, like when the cake doesn't arrive on time and you must find a substitute, or you're two minutes behind target at the midpoint of the race.  Read more here...

Face New Challenges With Irrational Optimism

While investigating high performance, I came across the idea of irrational optimism. Matthew Syed attributes to Arsene Wenger, of Arsenal FC fame, the statement: "No top performer has lacked this capacity for irrational optimism…the ability to remove doubt from his mind." In other words, you do not consider the possibility of failure when you're being irrationally optimistic. Why irrational? Because, naturally, in any significant endeavor, there is always a possibility of failure. The irrational optimism is in having no doubt about your future success.

Recent research findings tell us that being pessimistic may help the elderly live longer. Of course I want people to live longer. What troubles me is the idea that if we consider optimism to be irrational in certain situations, we may conclude that optimism is bad. Read more here...

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