For me building a fundamental understanding for how emotional impulses work was essential and helped me to get "unstuck" about a year ago, understanding what the impulses are for and how we misuse them.
Further understanding how emotional impulses in the rawest form are neither positive nor negative but instead they are pleasant or unpleasant. What we do is apply interpretation to these in themselves harmless emotional impulses and turn them into, for the most part, negative sensations as we're prone to being negative from a survival perspective.
Lack of action turns into procrastination, anxiety and angst. In the long term, depending on which of the primary affects we're talking about, and this is detrimental to self-esteem and self-worth.
It might be interesting to look into Sylvan Tomkins research on affect theory. A lot of our problems stem from a poor relationship with our emotions, that which is closest to us all and effect us tremendously. Negative thinking is a huge part of this, getting to terms with this is good and limits the effect, but it's important to understand the underlying cause and examine those as well.
A spin-off on unpleasant emotional impulses is that we do hold the power to change so that we redefine what previously was negative into something positive, e.g. anxiety is more than likely to be an invitation for growth and we can learn to want and like anxiety as we start seeing it as a possibility rather than a limitation that holds us back and down.
