Hi everyone, welcome to Radiohead Space and to Friday, it's Dr. Laurie Santos here.

Thanks so much for having me as your guest host all week.

Today I'm going to talk about why we shouldn't run away from uncomfortable feelings.

Sometimes it may seem easier to ignore tough emotions, but research shows that

acknowledging those feelings and dealing with them can bring us closer to the happiness we seek.

These days our negative emotions can spring from so many different sources.

I think sometimes our negative emotions come from the things we experience online.

We read the news and we're feeling frustrated, we're feeling scared, we're feeling angry.

But sometimes we experience negative emotions interpersonally.

We get upset at a colleague of ours.

We feel sad when something bad happens to someone we care about.

And then sometimes these negative emotions just arise within us.

We have these brains that spontaneously start to ruminate about the bad things that are going to happen in the future or that happened in the past.

Negative emotions come from all over the place.

By definition, negative emotions don't feel that good, right?

Like that's why we call them negative emotions.

And that can lead us to want to run away from them.

But the sad and ironic thing is the act of running away from our negative emotions winds up making them worse.

The analogy I like to tell my students is that trying to shove down a negative emotion like sadness or anger,

it's akin to when you're used to, as a kid, take the beach ball and shove it under the water,

like in the pool or at the beach or something.

You can put a lot of work in to shove that beach ball under water.

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