It wasn’t a psychologist but a 16-year-old boy who sparked a global wave of soul healing. In 2022, German teenager Elias Baar published a grief journal (The sadness book), encouraging readers to write down their feelings, tear out the page, and throw it away to let go. This simple yet profound act resonated worldwide, inspiring a wave of TikTok videos where people shared how they wrote down and released burdensome thoughts.
The pressure to always be positive can be overwhelming. Elias Baar's book offered a much-needed antidote to today’s societal positivity pressure. Renowned psychologists Adam Grant and Lisa Feldman Barrett recently discussed in a podcast how our ability to regulate emotions lags behind our advancements in other areas. Their insightful conversation highlighted the need to better understand and regulate (not control) our emotions in a balanced way.
The problem isn’t our feelings; it’s how we judge them. Society labels emotions as either good or bad, valuing happiness while dismissing fear, anger, and grief. This mindset leads to identify with our feelings as a status of being and causing us to suppress them if not matching what is accepted in our societies. Valuing all shades of our emotions, yet not identifying with it, is essential for true well-being.
Suppressing feelings can diminish our quality of life and lead to illness. Acknowledging emotions and finding their transformative seeds can help, for example, to see in anger guidance for mobilizing energy, overcoming obstacles, or stepping into one's own power. Suppressing them, on the other hand, leads to declining well-being or even chronic illness. Learning how to embrace all emotions and discovering the purpose they might help us with, is essential for our health and happiness.
We need good ways to honouring and process our emotions. This doesn’t mean a free licence to abuse or destructive actions. Emotional regulation means acknowledging feelings, but not let them drive our lives in unregulated ways. Instead finding wise ways to process them without harm. For example, we can express anger without harming others through sports, writing, shouting out loud where no people are around, or even smashing dishes in controlled spaces. This is why Elias Baar’s book was such a helpful success, providing a safe space for sad thoughts and a process for releasing them physically.
Learning to value all emotions could bring more peace to our world. Imagine a society where we honour despair and happiness in the same natural way, where tears and vulnerability can be expressed as openly as laughter and joy. In such a society, any emotional or stress related diseases, such as depression and anxieties would have less chance to take root. In such a society, we do not let our emotions take over in an uncontrolled way, nor do we attach to them or suppress them to the detriment of our well-being. Instead, we acknowledge the wisdom they hold to help us grow into our highest version.
