From Healthy Work we have always remembered the importance that when sharing stress have:
- healthy life (sleep well, eat properly and exercise)
- the support provided by social relationships (friends and family)
- the thoughts, the management of the interpretations that we give of reality and the concerns that we generate that often do not provide solutions
Today we wanted to write about a more recent focus of study in psychology: emotions.
Historically we have understood that emotions were something that had to be kept out of work. It was with Goleman that we started talking about the need to understand and manage our emotions and those of others in the workplace (emotional intelligence), but there is little literature that talks about managing emotions when we are under stress.
The emotions we experience give us information about what our body is experiencing. Anger and irritability, or sadness and apathy, are, first of all, messages that warn us about what our body is experiencing. To manage them well we must be aware of their presence in relationships with supervisors, supervisees and colleagues.
By now we should know that we cannot change others but that we can always change ourselves and our emotions and how our bodies experience them can be a starting point to get to know ourselves and act on the desired change.
Recently, the Pontifical University of Comillas offered a conference with Leslie S. Greenberg, a specialist in emotion-focused therapy, where for the first time I heard that one emotion is only changed by introducing another, we cannot make it disappear. After so much time talking about mindfulness as a way of letting negative thoughts go and not remain obsessively generating stress, this methodology talks about knowing our emotions to change them and replace them with more adaptive ones that reduce our anxiety.
To the practice of a healthy life, the cultivation of social support, and the adequate handling of thoughts to fight stress, we must now add the knowledge of the emotions we experience and their substitution, introducing more useful emotions for the development of a greater resilience.