Emodiversity: variety of emotions as a mental health secret.

In nature, the more diversity there is in an ecosystem, the stronger, richer and more resilient it will be. Emodiversity follows this same principle. Thus, the more heterogeneous our palette of emotions, the greater our flexibility and strength, because understanding this universe without being only at the extremes is to invest in health, it is to gain in intelligence and maturity.

If we think about it, an idea that society itself promotes, as well as a large number of self-help books, is that, in order to achieve well-being, we must exclusively experience positive emotions. Something like this takes us, almost without realizing it, on an Arthurian journey in search of that grail of happiness with which to avoid colors like sadness, disappointment, frustration or anger at all costs.

We forget, perhaps, that there is no better strategy than understanding the enemy himself. Running away from negative emotions is putting a blindfold on, it's vetoing a life learning experience that we can deal with with greater resources under any circumstances.

Because life, like emotions, is diverse and highly complex. Only those who allow themselves to delve into all the feelings and emotions to understand them will better adapt to the daily fluctuations.

We have been conditioned to believe that negative feelings are enemies of well-being. Furthermore, there is no shortage of people who think that someone who moves from joy to anger, from disappointment to illusion in the same day is unstable and even fickle. So it's time to clarify the terms, it's time to introduce into our language an essential idea for mental health: emodiversity.

What is emodiversity?

Emodiversity defines our ability to feel and experience a wide range of emotions, and the more the better. This ability, or rather the fact that we allow ourselves to feel each feeling without blocking or denying it, is an adaptive advantage. In other words, not only do we manage to be more authentic, but we will also have more resources to face difficulties and achieve mental health.

This idea is not new. In 2012, a study published in the journal Emotion came to a conclusion. The University of Queensland researched how the classic expectation that happiness equals positive emotions could affect the Australian and Japanese population.

This cultural principle leads the population not to know how to deal with negative emotions and to avoid them. The search for happiness (fixed to this base), sooner or later, generates unhappiness.

Taking apart happiness.

To learn to be happy, we must, so to speak, press the reset button on our mental hard drive. Let's start again, erasing much of what we've been told so far (unlearning).

A first thing to consider is this: negative emotions are not harmful. Every emotion felt and accepted is a commitment to ourselves. A commitment to understand each other, to assume realities and to be responsible when looking for solutions or generating changes.

A second aspect to integrate into our internal “programming” is that experiencing as many emotions as possible is gaining emotional resilience, mental health, and psychological capacity. In this way, those who are exclusively at the pole of positive emotions will lack the tools to deal with difficulties and frustrations.

Furthermore, those who only oscillate on the pole of negativity and grief are at greater risk of developing depression, anxiety disorders, etc.

Emodiversity as a health secret.

In 2014, the Universities of Yale, Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona and the University of Cambridge carried out an extensive study to analyze the benefits of emodiversity. This dimension, understood as the ability to allow us to experience a wide range of emotions, has a direct impact on our physical and emotional health.

Something that those responsible for this study saw is that those people who denied their negative emotions or focused their lives in that perpetual state of frustration, discouragement and bad mood not only developed more psychological disorders, but also had weaker immunity, greater organic inflammation and a tendency to develop more diseases.

As we see, emotions affect our quality of life and have a direct impact on our health.

Caring for and paying attention to our emotional ecosystem.

An emotional ecosystem rich in sensations, vast in accepted emotions, nourished by deciphered feelings and valued as valuable learning, forms a stronger and wiser psychological environment. We need to learn to take care of this emodiversity by being honest and courageous with ourselves.

Sadness, anger, fear or disappointment are not weeds we have to pull up. It's not those baobab seeds that the Little Prince feared because he said they would blow up his little planet.