Pain Is Your #1 Superpower
The Hero’s Journey Comes With Hardship. Harness It!
A hero’s journey begins with something life-altering or bad happening to them. It reframes their outlook on life and helps solidify their hero’s journey. Think about all the most successful businessmen in superhero comics like Batman or Ironman and how they got their start. Bruce Wayne watching his parents die or Tony Stark’s kidnapping leading him to engineer his infamous iron suit. Where would they be without this defining moment that helped shape who they were destined to become?
They needed to harness the good from a bad situation and use their pain to empower them.
This paradigm of ‘good versus evil’ or ‘light and dark’ is a prevalent theme in comics, business and life. It has even entered into the way we think about our emotions: we have good and bad emotions. That’s why when you’re feeling anxious, you’re more prone to experiencing the symptoms of anxiety — sweaty palms, shallow breathing or panic. Or when you’re happy, you feel terrific, and you can’t stop smiling that it becomes contagious.
But what if this is the wrong way to look at it? What if these lines are too rigid and not so black and white? What if the real reason you experience these so-called ‘bad emotions’ is that they’re opportunities to evolve or to fix an area about yourself that is no longer serving you. What if the real reason you were let go from your job was, it wasn’t meant for you; that’s why your performance slipped?
What if the pain you feel is actually positive and an instrument of change? Let’s dig deeper and find the good in pain, shall we?
The Role Of Emotions
There’s a lot more to emotions than “good ones” that leave you feeling happy and “bad ones” that leave you feeling sad. Nobody wants to be unhappy; therefore, we do our best to avoid negative emotions. And we do our best to live in a perpetual state of bliss because society says we should. But quite frankly, this isn’t sustainable, and it’s not even possible. Especially once you realize that negative emotions serve a purpose, in the same way, that being appreciated does.
What Are Emotions?
Emotions are something we all can relate to. As we go about our day, we’ll go through an array of emotions, some good, some bad. Emotions help us make decisions and communicate with others through our emotional expressions. Experts Don and Sandra Hockenbury define emotions as reactions to a subjective experience or a response to either a behavioural or physiological event. Subjective experiences mean as individuals, we all feel emotions differently. Hyper-sensitive employees may perceive the job criticism, “I’ve noticed your work has been lacking,” as a personal slam. They may even take it the wrong way, despite the fact, it’s an observation. While behavioural responses are emotional expressions like when you’re happy, you smile. And physiological responses are the mind-body reactions, like gut feelings or your built-in fight or flight reflex.
Types Of Emotion
There are six basic emotions, according to Psychologist Paul Eckman, that every human is programmed to feel: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise. This list was expanded to include: amusement, contempt, embarrassment, excitement, pride, satisfaction and shame, you can categorize other feelings of bliss, happiness, excitement in there as well, this is just a baseline. And every emotion serves a purpose:
- Anger — To overcome problems or obstacles
- Disgust — To rid yourself of something unhealthy
- Fear — To keep you safe from danger
- Happiness — Serves as a reminder to appreciate what’s important
- Sadness — To connect with loved ones
- Surprise — To focus on new experiences
Naturally, we all want to feel good, and society tells us robust health and wealth will make us happy. So we buy into the notion that we should villainize what makes us feel badly. But what this leads to is an unhealthy pattern of avoiding feeling certain emotions. “Men don’t cry,” is a common statement that promotes the repression of sad emotions. But sometimes the most therapeutic thing you can do for yourself is to cry and let it all out. That isn’t a popular opinion among many, but it is true. There is a purging of energy (positive & negative) that happens when you cry, laugh, puke and even yawn. These painful things aren’t bad, they are part of understanding and creating a stronger relationship with your emotions. Accept them.
Another popular way to examine the psychology of emotions was discovered in 1980 by Psychologist Robert Plutchik and is known as The Wheel of Emotions. It began originally as eight emotions: anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise and trust — half of which are negative. Later the Wheel of Emotions was expanded by linking the eight emotions with their opposites to prove how complicated and interconnected our emotions are.
- Anger — Fear
- Anticipation — Surprise
- Disgust — Trust
- Sadness — Joy
Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions also highlights the interconnectivity between good and bad emotions. Using common sense, like sad being the opposite of joy or happiness. The spectrum is colour-coded and puts emotions like sadness on a gradient, with grief being the most intense form of sadness, while pensiveness as the least intense. This explains why it’s easy for you not to trust someone if you witness them doing something you find despicable. Your gut is going to help guide you in a moment such as this. If you aren’t ready to connect then you can’t understand why it makes you feel the way it does, and you can’t make the right decision to get out of the way.
Evolution, Emotions And Anxiety
Evolutionarily speaking, emotions are hardwired into our DNA. Think fight or flight reflex; it’s your body’s way of identifying and responding to environmental threats. The popular theory is that emotions were our ancestor’s way of ensuring their safety and communicating with their tribe, so their needs were met. That’s why when you encounter a fearful situation, the physiological response is to run away from that large predator. Your brain gets involved by shutting down unnecessary processes, spiking your adrenaline and increasing power to your legs to get you out of there faster. The downside to this safety mechanism is that anxiety today is the most common mental disorder in the United States. Why, because modernity has brought about the rise of non-imminent dangers, like stress over bills or social media pressures, leading to a surge in anxiety rates. What once served us well now threatens our mental health.
Again, this goes back to the valuable connection we all have to our heart, lungs, and digestive system (gut). If you want to truly understand pain and negative emotion, you have to make sure you’re receiving the proper information from the whole neural network. If you’re just using your brain to make decisions then you’re missing more than half of the information.
You need not look any further than the workplace to see the ramifications of stress and anxiety. There is so much pressure on employees to meet deadlines, to perform their best, so someone else jockeying for their position doesn’t replace them. It’s no wonder anxiety is on the rise in the workplace.
Pain Is Positive, Even If It Comes Across As Negative
Painful emotions get a bad beat. Say, for example, you head to work one day only to be informed that your company has laid you and hundreds of other employees off. Your first reaction would be shock and upset. Being laid off affects your livelihood, and it’s not a situation anybody wants to find themselves in. But will you allow this bad situation to get the better of you? Or will you use this as an opportunity to try your hand at something new? There are other jobs out there. Besides, even if that’s your desired career, it doesn’t mean there won’t be a better job with a different company waiting just around the corner.
It’s all a matter of perspective. You may not see the good in losing your job initially, but in hindsight, it may turn out to be a good thing.
I recently fired 80% of my client base, that took me down to about 30% of my revenue. That was a big decision, fully wrapped up with a whack load of fear, but that fear lead to new contracts with companies I’m much more aligned with. Fear can debilitate you if you let it, but if you understand what you’re afraid of and why, you’ll find the answer to make the right decision.
Fear is also a funny emotion. Going back to our primal instincts, we really should only be afraid of anything that is of immediate danger (natural disaster, large killer animal, and unfortunately our man made killers; guns, explosives, etc.) But everything else is really just our ego telling us we can’t do something. If you’re afraid to ask that girl out, afraid to apply for that job, or afraid to buy that house, look inside and see why, because it isn’t that you’re afraid of the situation. You’ve been told that it is hard, bad or could lead to embarrassment of some kind. That is all bullshit.
What Are Negative Emotions?
Negative emotions are just a type of emotion characterized by being unpleasant. Emotions like anger, sadness, fear or disgust are feelings that don’t generate happiness. Bad emotions also tend to be more powerful and memorable than positive ones. That’s why superheroes backstories involve tragedy. Or in your life story, how you’ll never forget those terrible life-changing moments. Having negative emotions is as normal as experiencing positive ones. The big difference is, we live in a ‘pursuit of happiness’ kind of society where we avoid feeling ‘downer emotions.’
Why We Need Negative Emotions
Bad emotions in the moment are painful. But less so, if you can break free of the short-term pain by looking long-term (forward and backward). If you can use the pain as a motivator by realizing it serves a purpose, it’ll hurt less in the moment.
So why do we need negative emotions? You can’t have light without darkness. The same can be said about emotions; you won’t appreciate all the good in your life without dredging through some bad times. Bad emotions can be warnings that you’re out of alignment. For example, if you allow frustration to simmer between you and a colleague, you may find their irritants start to grate on you until anger sets in. Bottling emotions never served anyone well. Now let’s say the source of this conflict between you and another employee stems from the fact they got a promotion over you, one you were better qualified for. Rather than being cross with a fellow colleague, harness those negative feelings and use them constructively by having a professional conversation with your boss. You may find that from this conversation, you can turn a bad situation into a potentially good one. Behind that promotion might be an even bigger one your boss was eyeing you up for, or your boss could be playing favourite because your colleague is his best friends son. Either way you will get an answer: you’re better than that original promotion, or your boss isn’t doing what is right for you or the company and you need to leave. And if nothing else, at least you aired your grievance rather than allowing your resentment bottle up.
Embracing Negative Emotions
If you live in this fictitious world where you can only have pleasant emotions and all else is bottled up and shelved, what happens when you run out of shelf space? Or a bottle bursts? You can’t ignore or choose not to deal with emotions; it’s just not healthy for you. All those raw painful emotions will eat away at you and could even lead to disease or the manifestation of mood disorders. You don’t just suddenly develop anxiety; it’s a slow build-up. In fact, one of the best ways to learn to be more accepting of our darker emotions is by embracing and experiencing them. Don’t just shut them down, honour that emotion and feel it; by doing so, you’re taking away some of anxieties power over you. And then release it. It’s only when you don’t catch and release the bad emotions that you start to embody them. That an anxious moment turns into an anxiety or fear. The more you allow these bad emotions to surface without shelving them, the more emotionally resilient you become. And that means the more able you are to decode why a pesky emotion comes to light. Emotional intelligence is the #1 superpower that we can all learn. Don’t take that lightly.
From Negative To Positively Charged
There is power in negative emotions. You just have to be willing to look past the pain and threw the darkness until you find what that emotion is trying to tell you. Rather than repressing painful emotions, embrace them, so they lose some of their hold over you and in time you’ll become your own super hero!
