Positive emotions are a life-long goal for many of us concerned about emotional health and self-improvement. What is more important; the amount of money you made during your life or the times you laughed out of sheer joy? People tend to put their positive emotions behind their negative feelings. This is one of the biggest problems that people come across during their lives. There is no clear way to ignore a negative experience and try to replace it with a positive one. Life just does not work that way. For example, when you were a child, if your goldfish dies, you would be heartbroken. Your parents will probably buy you another goldfish but the sorrow is still there. Things get even more complex when you become an adult. A fight with your spouse the night before will affect your entire day. You might go to work angry, tired, and your mind will wander. On the way home from work you will not notice the sun shining and you would not be tempted to stop at a roadside stand to pick up some fresh fruits and vegetables. All this because that one negative thought has contaminated the way you perceive the reality around you and caused any positive emotions to die. In this moment you will realize that finding a safe place to relax your mind will do wonders for your emotional and mental improvement. That place is relatively easy to find. It can be an actual place or an imaginary location. The best idea is to totally lose yourself in it and start coping with emotions that will lead you to generate positive results. Let us say you have a problem on your mind and it just would not go away. Go bowling; take someone to lunch; go to a movie. Just do something different to take your mind off the problem. Give it a shot and see if that doesn’t help. Get caught up in the game. Your mind will drift away from the negative thoughts that dominated your last hours or days and start processing a whole new kind of information. A safe haven can take many forms. It can be a song, a movie, even a person or animal. The main thing is allow you to get completely involved with this new activity. You might still get flashes of the problem every now and then. Ignore it and get even more absorbed in what you are doing. Just remember that controlling emotions is vitally important for keeping you more upbeat for everything you do. When the bowling game, the song, or the movie ends you will abruptly return to reality.