Uc Science Today

How much stress can you take? Maybe you’re OK with a small bump in the road, like a parking ticket or a spat with your neighbor. But what about more serious troubles? “Things like going through a divorce, financial troubles, unemployment. Those are pretty big stressors.” That’s Irene Mauss, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. In her recent study, she discovered that you will be much better off if you accept your negative emotions, no matter how bad they are. “We found the same positive effect of emotional acceptance. I don’t know at this point where the upper boundary is, but from other research we can speculate that actually there is no upper boundary in terms of the intensity of stressors." But Mauss says accepting your negative emotions doesn’t mean accepting negative reality. You should still work on making positive changes in your life if things took a wrong turn.