How to stop negative emotions from killing you.

We experience positive and negative emotions. Negative emotions, which give us displeasure, prevented our ancestors from getting killed. In a primordial world where danger lurked in every corner, fear kept them safe.

While the world today is much safer, we are still hard-wired to respond more strongly to negative events than positive ones.

“A major reason for the more noticeable role of negative emotions is that they possess greater functional value. The risks of responding inappropriately to negative events are greater than the risks of responding inappropriately to positive events, since negative events can kill us while positive events will merely enhance our well-being,” writes Psychology Today.

So, managing both positive and negative emotions, both yours and others, is an important skill, because people primarily rely on emotions when making decisions. You wouldn’t want to offend your job interviewer, for example.

Here’s what I’ve gleaned about negative emotions, based on this story by The New York Times:

• People remember negative memories more strongly and in greater detail.
• Negative emotions elicit more thinking. We tend to ruminate about them more.
• Bad impressions are quicker to form and harder to scrub away. (That explains why bad customer service experiences are more likely to be shared than good ones.)
• Research found that a setback at work had twice the emotional impact of progress.
• Rule of thumb: five positive events can overcome the psychological effects of a negative one. This may explain why we tend to keep positive memories in an attempt to compensate for bad ones.

In practical terms, here’s how to stop negative emotions from killing our job prospects, brand perception, or relationships:

• Be aware of a colleague’s emotional state before you offer criticism. If the person is having a bad day, he or she is unlikely to take your critique well. Be extra gentle or postpone it.
• Don’t over-criticise. There’s only so much a person can take at a time.
• Be aware of a person’s emotional resilience. Some people can take bigger hits.
• Instead of the hamburger method, it’s better to criticize right away, and then follow that up with praise. People tend to remember what you say better after experiencing something negative.
• Think twice before doing something that might create a negative reaction. If you make a mistake, the consequences are harder to reverse.
• If you’ve done something that elicited a negative reaction in another person (either accidental or deliberate), strive to get the person to react in a positive way. You can do that, for example, by reacting to negative feedback on your brand in a professional and friendly way.