What Are Healthy and Unhealthy Negative Emotions?

With Albert Ellis’ REBT, a distinction has been made between healthy and unhealthy negative emotions. Healthy negative emotions are viewed as healthy or rational emotional responses to an actual adverse event, and helps an individual strive to change what can be changed realistically and accept constructively what can’t be changed.

This helps the individual to move towards their own happiness producing goals, purposes, and desires. Unhealthy negative emotions are unhealthy and irrational responses to an inferred or adverse event. Instead of helping you, they interfere with your belief system. They interfere with what you think you can change and what you can’t change. This leads you to sabotaging your move towards happiness producing goals, desires, or purposes.

What are examples of healthy and unhealthy negative emotions?

Healthy negative emotions: concern, sadness, healthy anger or annoyance, and other negative emotions that may community and self-helping actions. Unhealthy negative emotions: anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, and any other negative emotion that may interfere with actions and results in destructive behavior or inaction.

Acknowledging healthy and unhealthy negative emotions

Within REBT, negative emotional responses are a result of an individual’s rational or irrational belief towards an adverse event. Healthy negative emotions are negative emotions that can help an individual move towards what benefits them, whereas unhealthy negative emotions can sabotage an individual’s move towards what benefits them.

You experience grief as a negative emotion when you go through loss and death. Grief is healthy when something positive comes out of it. A good example is helping people deal with their own grief. On the other hand, when you use grief as an excuse, it becomes an unhealthy negative emotion. You then use this grief to avoid doing anything at all.

Separating Healthy and Unhealthy Negative Emotions

Healthy and unhealthy negative emotions can affect the way we think. If we are going to feel the effects of negative emotions, it’s better to experience them in a healthy way rather than letting unhealthy emotions control the way we think.

Here are some examples of healthy and unhealthy negative emotions, and how to separate them:

- Concern vs Anxiety – felt when adversities threaten our personal domain. Concern is rational, anxiety is irrational.
- Sadness vs Depression – Experienced during an undeserved plight or event. Sadness is rational, depression is irrational
- Remorse vs Guilt – Experienced after hurting someone or an individual has broken his or her moral code

For negative emotions to be healthy and unhealthy, there lies a fine line between two distinct emotions for different events. You experience both concern and anxiety when faced with adversity. Anxious behavior is deemed unhealthy because individuals withdraw and avoid the threat. This would cause you to overprepare to help combat this threat. Concern is healthy because an individual has realistic options to face the threat.

Depressive behavior is unhealthy because an individual becomes clingy and dependent on others. This often develops tendencies for self-destruction. Meanwhile, sadness allows the individual to express the emotion non-compliantly.

People who feel guilty tend to escape it through self-defeating ways, like making unrealistic promises about never sinning again or rejecting offers of forgiveness. Remorseful behavior involves facing up to the pain of having sinned. You ask for forgiveness but do not beg for it.

You can check out this video from Bright Side to help you understand if you’re emotionally healthy or not:

The Role of Coaching Cards in Identifying Healthy and Unhealthy Negative Emotions

Emotions are critical in our daily lives, influencing our decisions, behaviors, and overall well-being. Among these emotions are healthy and unhealthy negative emotions, which can significantly impact our mental health. Identifying and differentiating between these emotions is crucial for personal development and emotional intelligence. One effective tool for this is coaching or picture cards from platforms like metaFox.
Coaching cards, particularly picture cards, are powerful visual tools that can facilitate the identification and understanding of our emotions. These cards typically feature images or prompts that evoke specific emotions or thoughts. Individuals can better articulate their feelings and gain deeper insights into their emotional states by engaging with these visuals.

In closing, negative emotions are part and parcel of our lives. How we experience and make them can determine whether or not it’s healthy for us.

What Are Healthy and Unhealthy Negative Emotions?