In the most basic sense, all emotions are designed to serve an important purpose.

Emotions motivate you towards the things you need, and away from the risks you encounter.

When we misunderstand this, we resist those emotions, and we suppress them, or ignore them. Or, we do the opposite - we overthink, we imagine worst case scenarios, and we amplify those emotions.

Either way, when we suppress or amplify our emotions, we warp them. Our perspective on what's real, and what's important is no longer clear at all.

Your first step is to make sure you stop suppressing or feeding those emotions.

I've talked about emotional suppression before. Here we're going to focus on emotional amplification, and how it affects us.

How we feed negative emotions

Rejection feels painful, and it’s easy to react to that pain by searching for the cause. Our brain searches far and wide for some way to explain the pain.

If you’re like most people, you’ve probably seen some of these thoughts pass through your mind.

• “Maybe I deserved it.”
• “Maybe I’m not worth anything”
• “Maybe I can’t trust people”
• “Maybe all men / all women totally suck.”
• “Maybe I’ll always be alone and miserable”

Those thoughts are total bullshit.

They are your mind struggling to explain why this hurts so much. The problem is that those thoughts are meaningless, and when you entertain those thoughts and dwell on them, you're feeding them.

Feeding them makes them grow, and your emotions will react to those thoughts too.

Soon, a bad moment becomes a bad day... becomes a bad week... becomes a sense of a "hopeless future"... becomes depression.

And you can't remember ever feeling happy.

But that can only happen if you feed those emotions with those junk thoughts.

Don’t make that mistake. Instead of dwelling on “why did this happen?” and “why do I feel this way?” just accept that’s your reality at this moment. Things didn’t go the way you hoped.

That’s OK. You’ll be fine.

Then choose to give your attention to something better. New hobbies, new people, new friendships.

Fill that gap with what you need, instead of staring at the gap all day long.

Responding to "real" emotions

Once you’ve learned to stop amplifying negative emotions, you’ll be feeling your real, un-warped, natural emotions - and you can act on those much more clearly.

What are you feeling?

Loneliness? Anger? Boredom? Frustration?

What are those things telling you that you need in your life?

Those emotions are motivation- your mind telling you what you need.

Now go build that.

You’re mind is pretty simple, when you learn how to work with it, rather than fighting it.