While our minds suffer from a negativity bias, we have a strong desire for positive emotions. We strive for being happy since we have a strong desire to feel good at all times, while other emotions are often neglected. As a consequence, we often arrange our daily lives in such a way that we don’t encounter any major emotional complications. Believing that we have everything under control, we feel well prepared - until something unexpected happens.

Achieving a permanent state of emotional balance is not something we should aspire to. Nevertheless, we can become aware of the fact that all emotions have their value. We took a closer look at four strong emotions and will show you how you can use mindfulness to manage them better.

1. Anger

Anger can quickly overwhelm us, because it is one of those emotions that is expressed on a physical level. When we get angry, our pulse quickens, our hands get sweaty, our ears start to buzz, our breathing speeds up. Dealing with anger is so challenging because it is often triggered by a specific event. Perhaps you have been treated unfairly or witnessed great injustice. Sometimes anger doesn’t show itself at that moment, but we later feel resentful or even regret having bottled it up.

Anger is an incredibly powerful emotion. So much so that it often scares us when other people get angry. Anger carries the potential for aggression, but we don’t have to direct it against ourselves or others. The best way to understand why anger also has positive sides is to decide between situations in which you are treated unjustly and moments in which you take on more of an observing role. When you observe injustice, you may feel motivated to act or stand up for someone.

During meditation you have the chance to reconnect with your anger. First locate it in your body. It could be in your abdomen, in your chest or in your throat. No matter where your anger is, try to perceive it simply as energy that is there now. If you feel you are losing control over your anger, this emergency tip will help you: step away and breathe.

Make a conscious decision to leave the situation, change the room, the place, go outside and take a few deep breaths. Your anger will not vanish into thin air, but you have the chance to reflect on where the intensity comes from. Has something been building up inside? Is your anger really directed at the person you wanted to direct it at or was it just the trigger? Breathe and stay with yourself and your feelings of anger for a moment, without directing them against anything. Perhaps you can perceive that it is energy that is available to you and does not have to be “bad” per se.

2. Fear

Fear can arise when we encounter something unknown or when we face an unpleasant experience again that puts our mind on alert. Fear often manifests itself on the physical level as anxiety, which is accompanied by feelings of restlessness or nervousness.

In the first step, you can check whether your fear is really justified or whether your thoughts are creating this emotion. One trigger for fear is imagining the worst outcome for a situation. Our “mind” then creates future scenarios that are not real but nevertheless cause a very real emotional reaction. For example, some people have a fear of flying, while they feel relaxed sitting in a car. Everyone knows that according to statistics, driving a car is much more dangerous than flying, which is why this fear is unwarranted. Nevertheless, our mind likes to imagine the worst-case scenario, no matter how unlikely it may be.

Anxiety can manifest itself in many ways, even without a specific trigger. Many of us constantly feel nervous, worried and insecure - subliminal feelings of anxiety that affect our quality of life. During meditation you can learn to evaluate worries and fears more clearly. As a result, we are less likely to worry or ruminate about our problems. In addition, mindfulness helps us to become aware of our own emotions more quickly and not to get caught up so deeply in our thoughts in the first place.

3. Jealousy

Jealousy is a painful emotion because it triggers a whole range of other feelings, e.g. fear of loss, lack of self-worth or the feeling of not being enough for someone. Even worse is the fact that jealousy often isn’t triggered by a specific event. The mere idea that a loved one is enjoying themselves elsewhere, that someone is “better” or has other things going on, can already make us feel jealous. The culprit is our mind. Even if a certain situation doesn’t pose an acute threat, it might already increase the electrical activity in our cerebral cortex. The cortex is the area of the brain where information is processed and linked to past experiences.

Try to find out what is actually happening right now and whether you are just making up stories. Nobody enjoys being jealous, yet jealousy can be a valuable emotion. Observe it closely. Where does your jealousy come from? What are the hidden beliefs behind it? Is it perhaps your own need to always be the best?

Do you feel unappreciated in your relationship? Do you constantly compare yourself with other people? In many cases, jealousy has more to do with yourself than with the person you are jealous of or who makes you feel jealous. During meditation you can try to create a space within yourself for this emotion. If the jealousy is allowed to unfold in your body, it will reveal more to you than just the story that was the trigger. This will allow you to get to know yourself and your patterns without having to run from the emotion.

4. Disappointment

Being disappointed can be a very painful experience since a situation suddenly turns out to be completely different than expected. On a human level, we can be disappointed when someone behaves differently than we had hoped. If we accept the deception as it is, however, we have freed ourselves from an illusion. And that can be very valuable, despite the disillusionment. We often hold on to our ideas too rigidly, have rather static images in our heads of how something or someone should be. In the end, it is hardly possible for someone to match our ideas exactly, unless that person is willing to change for us.

If someone disappoints you, you can ask yourself in which areas you held on too tightly to your own ideas about that person and whether there hadn’t been signals that it was a deception. Disappointment therefore offers great learning potential. It gives you the opportunity to confront your ideas, to examine your beliefs about the world or other people. Any disappointment has something to do with our expectations. Of course it’s okay to be sad when a wish hasn’t come true. It doesn’t matter if it’s a job cancellation, the end of a relationship or simply a hotel room, a concert or a party you were looking forward to for a long time and which in the end wasn’t what you had hoped for. Mindfulness training can help you accept new situations - even if they are not (or no longer) what you had hoped for.

Accepting reality is one of the basic principles of mindfulness and can be applied to situations, to people and also to our emotions. Perhaps you now got a first impression of how emotions that throw us off balance also have the potential to create balance. Mindful self-reflection provides a brief change of perspective. This allows us to recognise both sides of an emotion and accept what we feel. Acceptance helps us perceive our own feelings as part of the natural range of emotions and not to give them too much power over our own well-being.