Mental Fitness Mondays: Dealing with Negative Emotions
5th October 2026Why your brain goes negative so quickly
I’m feeling frustrated as I write this. I’ve been waiting months for something I ordered and paid for (and need), and today I got an email telling me I have to wait even longer. Sometimes life is so annoying, isn’t it?!
Whatever has wound us up, it’s not a pleasant experience. It can also lead to repetitive thoughts, blaming, and that sense of being unfairly treated. None of this feels good, so why does the brain take us down this negative path so easily?
Biochemistry, baby
Firstly, negative emotions create a significant shift in our biochemistry compared to positive ones. We’re literally different in those moments. Secondly, certain parts of the brain respond to the world through an ‘approach or avoid’ lens. What we experience as negative is often interpreted as a threat, which pushes us into survival mode. The brain and body prioritise survival over happiness.
That all makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. But in everyday life, it can feel like a lot. ‘Threats’ can show up in the form of crying children, underperforming colleagues, a gloomy news story, or opening your inbox on a Monday morning to 150 unread emails.
So, what can we do?
Ultimately, it comes down to perception. Much of what we react to is shaped by our experiences, thoughts and learned responses. Take a simple example. If you find a spider in your shoe and it makes your heart race, you might develop a fear of spiders. Someone else, standing next to a spider enthusiast, might be told how lucky they are to have found it. They could feel curious, even pleased, and develop a fascination instead. Same situation, different perception.
But what about the smaller, everyday irritations? Your teenager uses the last of the loo roll and doesn’t tell you. A colleague wants to move a meeting that’s already in everyone’s diary. Or, like me, you’ve paid for something and months later it still hasn’t arrived. These moments matter because they happen often, and they shape our day more than we realise. I use a simple process: acknowledge, feel, reframe.
Acknowledge
Be honest about what’s going on inside you. Notice that you’re not feeling great. The neuroscientist Dan Siegel describes this as “name it to tame it”. Simply recognising the emotion begins to reduce its intensity.
Feel
Actually feel what’s happening in your body. You might notice your jaw tightening, your stomach churning, or a sense of heaviness or heat. Rather than pushing that away, observe it and feeeel it. Hold a bit of tension, feel the rage…
...but do so calmly and with curiosity. This is often the part people skip, but it’s important - if we don’t allow the feeling, it tends to linger or leak out elsewhere.
Reframe
Once you’ve acknowledged and felt the emotion, you’re in a better place to shift your perspective. For me, the shift was from “how dare they take my money and make me wait this long?” to something more balanced. I found myself thinking, “I’m lucky that I have the money to afford this,” and “I can communicate my experience in a constructive way.” That doesn’t mean pretending everything’s fine, it means choosing a perspective that reduces the sense of threat and helps you respond more usefully.
This is Emotion Regulation in action, one of the muscles in the Self Care group. The irritation about the delayed delivery isn’t really the issue, it’s what happens in your thinking and feeling after that moment that shapes your experience, and that’s something we can influence.
A coaching question for you: When you next notice yourself feeling irritated or frustrated, what do you tend to do first… and what might change if you allowed yourself to acknowledge and feel it before trying to fix it?