Why Feeling Low Is Necessary For Experiencing True Happiness
Originally published at lmt-lss.com on April 7, 2016.
Our negative emotions drive us towards happiness.
We often call things like sadness, anger, shame, guilt, jealousy, and embarrassment negative emotions. By way of thinking of them as “negative” in nature, we try to avoid them as much as possible, and when we do happen to experience them, we try to get rid of them immediately. And why not, you might argue? Nothing good seems to come off of experiencing these emotions anyway. We’re just left feeling sad and hopeless at the end of it, and frankly, we’d rather not.
But that’s where the catch is. While it doesn’t feel good to not feel good, it’s necessary for experiencing the “positive” emotions, like joy, happiness, elation, and excitement. Here’s why.
When you get angry at a person or in a particular situation, you’re essentially signalling something to that person and to yourself. For instance, you might burst out in anger with your girlfriend because you feel undervalued or not appreciated enough. That anger is a way for you to protect yourself against being misused, ill-treated, or exploited. Be being angry, you’re reasserting your value and also signalling to the other person that things need to change.
Psychologist Aaron Sell once revealed after years of experience in studying anger, “The primary benefit of anger for an individual is preventing oneself from being exploited.” You can see how, with the help of our example.
Anger has other uses too. It can cause the end of a conflict — “shut the hell down!” — and also motivate you or another person to take a long-pending action. So you see, anger’s not all that bad if you can keep it under control. In fact, it sometimes works wonders.
Similarly, fear is necessary for our well-being. We often hear people say, “be fearless,” and we think it makes sense and try to live life that way. But really, if you were fearless, you’d be getting into a heck of a lot of trouble. When you come upon a road with dim lights and strange men sitting on the street corner while walking at night, you decide to take another, much safer route. Why do you do that? Because you sense that otherwise you’d be putting your life at risk. So the fear of those consequences are what keep you safe. Without fear, we would be happily walking into all sorts of trouble, and often putting our lives at risk.
For another example, let’s consider shame. Say you were fired from your job despite your best attempts and you sat at home thinking you’re worthless, that you’re incapable of doing work that so many others are doing relatively easily. Slowly, a sense of shame begins to creep in, and you wish you could do away with this bad feeling. But it’s this feeling of shame that pushes you to think inwards and find out what went wrong and think of ways to fix it. And after this tough phase, you find your strength and resolve, and bounce back.
Now imagine if you didn’t have any shame. Would you be able to push yourself hard to correct and resolve your mistakes? You’d probably just continue to be yourself and make the same mistakes over and over again, which would ultimately harm you in the long run.
“Negative” emotions, therefore, are most useful if you want to be safe or bounce back from tough situations. In other words, you need to feel those negative emotions to fuel your positive energy. In any case, if life was all ups, it would such an awful mundane bore otherwise, wouldn’t you say?
