Have you considered how a degree of negative emotion can be good for you? Anger and envy, for instance, can spur you on to greater efforts than were likely in the absence of such emotions. Companies and bosses use this understanding to their advantage, deliberately creating points of rivalry to nurture a competitive edge that encourage employees to contributed their best. So do lovers, teachers and yes even parents.Every lover understand and appreciates the role jealousy can play in fast forwarding a flagging relationship. Faced with a rival and the prospect of losing the lover, the beloved takes steps to cut out competition and firmly established the tie. Teachers deliberately single out a student to praise and announce as a favourite, thus inspiring envy, competition and a need to excel among others. Parentssubtly play off siblings against each other to achieve the desired behaviour among them.Bosses do the same, by dropping hints of praise for a rival or throwing two rivals in to the same situation, then sitting back to reap the benefits as both employees deal with their negative emotions by working harder and better in an attempt to show each other down.

Literature has always recognized the benefits of the darker emotions. In Wuthering heights, an uneducated and unkempt healthcliff is so torn by Catherine’s rejection of him as husband material in favour of Edgar that he disappears for a few years and returns rich and a ‘gentleman’. In The Count of Monte Cristo, Dantes wrongfully condemned to life imprisonment, keeps himself going through tough times by the strength of his anger and vengeance. He, too, returns rich to wreak vengeance on those who wronged him. However, literature also points to the destruction caused by unresolved negative emotion. Healthcliff and Catherine’s unresolved passion for each other leads to destruction of not just their lives but of others around them. Dantes revenge has devastating consequences not just for the guilty, but for the innocent too.

Today, expert studies tell us not to avoid negative emotion or leave them unresolved. Ignoring the darker emotion is just a way of postponing the inevitable and denying reality. Researches hasten to add that uncontrolled negative emotions such as anger, fear, pain or jealousy are destructive, but it is even more harmful to ignore them. Prof George Vaillant a psychiatrist at Harved Medical School, reveals after research, “negative emotion are often crucial for survival…. We all feel anger, but individuals who learn how to express their anger while avoiding the explosive and self-destructive consequences of unbridle fury have achieved something incredibly powerful in terms of overall emotional growth and mental health.

Psychotherapists encourage us to indulge our full range of emotions because each emotion has something to teach us. Each emotion thus plays a critical role in our progress and mind-body healing process. In fact, in one survey, 55 per cent of the participants said a bout of anger had led to a positive result in office.

Accepting rather than rejecting a negative emotion takes the edge off its destructive power. If you live the emotion. You will be relieved of it and it may even help you. Psychotherapist Greenspan suggests we think of emotions as teachers. Sorrow teaches us about interconnectedness. Fear is a survival instinct. And anger indicates that something’s wrong that must be made right. To this I would add – envy teaches us that we need to better ourselves; disappointments tells us our expectations are unrealistic or that we need to increase our own efforts; frustration tells us we are bored with present circumstances and it’s time for a change. Being stressed means we need to list our priorities; loneliness tells us we need to be connected; guilt tells us we have been unjust to some or something and need to make amends.

This is how the darker emotions help motivate people to action and allow them to heal.

As Leonardo di Caprio says in Inception in praise of the power of negative emotions, “Positive emotion comes from negative emotion all the time. We are all looking for reconciliation, a catharsis.”