Negative Emotion Doesn’t Exist in Objective Reality; How you’re fooling yourself into being upset.

Have you ever found yourself giving advice to a friend, that you didn’t take when that same advice had been given to you before? You probably also thought in the back of your mind that you knew your friend wouldn’t take that advice, just as you didn’t take it the first time around.

Have you ever experienced a great amount of worry about a situation, only to go through the situation and realize it wasn’t 10% as bad as you thought it would be? Afterwards, you might have joked about it with a friend over a beer and a game of pool - and hopefully your friend gave you a load of crap for worrying so much, “just like he told you not to.”

Both of these are prime examples of when we get caught up in our own negative emotions, distorting the objective reality of a situation. This distortion, we’ll find in this post, prevents us from being able to move forward in many situations in all areas of life, be it work, family, relationships, or personal development.

By learning how to create a habit of purposefully eliminating unnecessary negative emotion, we learn a very important step in being able to control our own lives and therefore move with more powerful intent through our lives.

Disclaimer for the semanticists:

I want to clarify that I intentionally chose the language of “purposefully eliminating unnecessary negative emotion.” There are times when negative emotion does serve a purpose which allows you to move forward, such as in the process of grieving. The emotions discussed here do not fall into this category.

Rather, what we are discussing here are emotions of anger, guilt, frustration, insecurity, anxiety, worry, etc. While you may find that those emotions can serve a purpose in the discovery of one’s values and sense of self, my hope is that this article will allow you to find a more purposeful distinction between unnecessary negative emotion and necessary, or beneficial, negative emotion.

Negative Thought Does Not Exist in Objective Reality

The first, and most important thing to understand, is that negative thought, negative emotion, negative belief, etc, does not exist in an objective reality.

That’s right, you’re very often getting upset at things that you have invented and do not exist. You’re making a fool out of yourself, to yourself. You’re getting all worked up, suffering the negative health effects of stress and high blood pressure, putting yourself into a negative and defensive state, and are essentially removing your ability to intelligently and efficiently progress toward your goals. In effect, you are now enslaved to the emotions that you have chosen.

I want to be able to tell you that you are not fooling yourself by getting upset at many things that you are creating in your head, but I would be lying and it would impede you from certain areas of growth if you believed that.

Now that I’ve effectively pissed you off even more, if you need to, take a few deep breaths and allow the feeling of wanting to destroy my face with a pair of brass knuckles and a baseball bat subside before you continue reading.

Ready?

Great. Because the good news is that you can change that. The better news is that it’s easy. And the best news is that it’s free.

What is Objective Reality?

In order to find the objective reality in situations, you must remove the biases you place on the world around you from the situation at hand. This is much easier said than done, but I’ve come across a very simple exercise which gets straight to the point.

I came across this idea in a great book about choosing growth in work and life called Play to Win. In it, objective reality is communicated as how a camera might see a situation.

So, when you interpret someone’s driving in traffic as them cutting you off, the objective reality is that a car went in front of your car. It’s as simple as that. Any other interpretation you have has been invented in your head.

Negative Emotion and Reaction is a Choice

It is when we interpret that situation through our own world view, based on our personal experiences, prejudices, interpretations, and understandings, that you might interpret that you “have been cut off” - a distinctly negative reaction. The emotions that follow are usually anger and frustration, and you may even take retaliatory action by flipping the other driver off, cutting him off, or honking.

It is all of that, that you have chosen to create as your reality of the situation. It is you who has chosen to respond negatively to a reality which does not exist.

Now, you may be countering that idea by saying that you know, for certain, that the other person’s intent was malicious by their body language, etc, and to that I have three responses:

Have you ever cut someone off, intentionally, to avoid putting yourself and another driver in a potentially more dangerous situation?
Have you ever cut someone off, by means of accident, distraction, or otherwise unintentional behavior?
Have you ever cut someone off, intentionally, because you made a decision that you had an emergency to deal with that was excusable enough to possibly drive slightly unsafely?

If you didn’t answer yes to all of these questions, you’re either being dishonest with yourself, or you’re quite possibly the most passive driver on the face of the planet and should probably look into racing school.

Taking these possibilities into consideration, it makes it quite easy to see how unreasonable, unfounded, and unnecessary the choice to react from a position of negative emotion becomes.

Finally, it becomes even more absurd, especially in situations like this, when you factor in the longer-term response that you ultimately impose upon yourself. In this sense, you’re unnecessarily making yourself miserable which results in negative physiological changes such as higher blood pressure, negative psychological changes such as carrying a continual negative frame with which to view the world around you (like those days when it’s “just a really bad day” and it’s not even 9am yet), and the way that this negativity affects those around you as well.

Interpretations of Objective Reality

In spiritual, social, and cultural senses, we see various interpretations of utilizing objective reality in a way that is more beneficial to our goals.

In Zen and Buddhism, an objective exists to separate the self from the mind and to therefore see the world around you in its truest sense.

In Christianity, it is often said that there is a reason for everything and that reason is often under God’s control or a part of His plan. In this sense, the message is intended to offer a more calming and understanding perspective of situations.

In psychology and sociology, the mind is interpreted in order to provide explanations for peoples’ actions, therefore bringing relief and calm through understanding and explanation.

We see indicators, conventional wisdoms, and advice given which all ultimately come back to the same place, which is that purposeless and unnecessary negative emotion should be eliminated for the sake of understanding the objective reality in order to move more powerfully through our lives.

Where to Go from Here

I don’t usually like to provide a viewpoint that removes something without replacing it with something else. In this case, if you haven’t considered removing your negative emotions in this way before, you will likely find it more beneficial to kick this idea around in your head before determining which action to take from here.

I encourage you to experiment with this idea of objective reality and how we choose to create our own beliefs, thoughts, and feelings. Are there more intentional ways that you can utilize your emotions for the purpose of your goals?

That said, there will be a follow-up post to this next week which will discuss positive emotion and objective reality. After all, if negative emotions don’t exist, then positive emotions shouldn’t exist either, right?

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