Sometimes feelings of upset, anger, or frustration 👿 can be actually really good. Think about it:
- If a tiger is chasing you, is meditating and accepting what is, the best strategy for your survival or would it be smarter to put everything you’ve got into finding a solution for the dilemma?
- If you face a personal challenge in your life, will you give up, or will you do everything needed to resolve that challenge?
“Research overwhelmingly indicates that feeling angry increases optimism, creativity, effective performance – and research suggests that expressing anger can lead to more successful negotiations, in life or on the job.“
“In fact, repressing anger can actually hurt you,” says Dr. Ernest Harburg and his team at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
You might ask why am I bringing this up now?
Well, I deeply believe we need to be a lot more upset about our current state of healthcare and how little attention is paid to what we actually truly need as people dealing with Chronic Symptoms (which make up about 80% of all symptoms and healthcare costs).
In Lifestyle Medicine and Health Coaching, addressing our unresolved emotions (e.g. psychosocial stress) is essential. Naturally, there are many strategies, including:
- Awareness of the emotion
- Awareness of what triggers our emotion
- The thoughts (beliefs) connected to that emotion
- Forgiveness & Letting go
- Other tools to help release these “emotional energies”
Another excellent process is to channel our “anger-upset or any other emotion” into action and change. We reframe these internal “energies-in-motion”, address the root-cause of the issue, and create a new reality.
Specifically, with healthcare, I believe we need to channel our attention and actions as a global community into creating new solutions and systems that place Lifestyle Medicine and Health Coaching at the forefront of medicine.
But there is a HUGE problem.
Are we ready for it? Can we look beyond our own personal challenges (or our own small or large business goals) and create a global movement that’s beneficial to EVERYONE.
What do you think?
