The War on ‘Bad’ Emotions

In Inside Out, the Pixar movie about the emotions inside a young girl’s head, the punchline is delivered when Joy, leader of the emotions and protector of Riley, realises that Sadness is the key to stopping the 11-year-old from running away from home. Up to that point, Joy and the others, Anger, Disgust, and Fear have kept Sadness at arm’s length, viewing her as a threat to Riley, frequently warning her to stay in her “circle of Sadness” else risk hurting the girl. Sadness, over the course of the film, starts to see herself the same way, echoing her peers: “Riley’s better off without me!” In the final act, she runs and hides away from Joy, convinced she is bad and only makes everything worse: “Just let me go!”  

When it comes to emotional expressivity, our culture is much the same. We’re more comfortable expressing positive emotions, like joy, than negative emotions, like sadness, valuing the first as good and the second as bad. We rejoice boldly, we weep in secret. How then, as a society, have we come to manage these ‘unacceptable’ emotions? Or have we not managed them at all, hiding them away from view, like Sadness?  

In this article, we draw on research conducted by experts in the study of emotions and identify 3 practical ways we can meet ‘undesirable’ emotions head-on and process them in a fashion healthy and beneficial for us.

1. Treat emotions as data

We’re used to classifying our emotions: good, bad. Positive, negative. But the refrain of psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb who writes the Dear Therapist column for The Atlantic is this: 

People say, ‘Joy is a positive feeling, and anger or anxiety or sadness are negative feelings.’ That’s just not true. Feelings are neutral, they don’t have a positive or negative connotation. [Or if we look at it another way], all of our feelings are positive in that they tell us what we want. If you’re feeling [anxious], why? Something’s not working. Emotions are like GPS. They help to guide us. They tell us what direction to go in.

Similarly, David R. Caruso, a psychologist and research affiliate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, says this about emotions:

Emotions are data, and emotions communicate meaning and intent. It’s critically important to know that I’m either irritated with someone because they’re late for a meeting or I’m concerned because maybe something’s happened to them. So since emotions are a form of data or information, it’s important to accurately convey those to people in a way that they will also accurately perceive.

In short, all emotions, whether they make us feel good or bad, have purpose. And that purpose is to alert us to a change in our well-being and point us in the direction of appropriate reaction. The first step to getting better at expressing our emotions is therefore, unlearning our associations of ‘goodness’ and ‘badness’ with certain emotions and believing them all to be helpful and instructive. Emotions aren’t icky feelings to dread or avoid, but clues to improving our well-being. 

2. Practise emotional granularity 

That brings us to our next point: knowing what to do with the data. After we’ve accepted that all emotions are helpful, how can we begin to work through them? Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says to engage in a practice called ‘emotional granularity,’ which simply means taking note of our feelings as they come up and naming each separate emotion as precisely as we can. 

Caruso, our emotional intelligence psychologist, offers a scenario:

Someone might say, ‘How was lunch?’ ‘Oh, it was awful, I really hated it.’ Then you stop and say, ‘Wait a minute, you hated your lunch? You hate your lunch?’ ‘Well, no, I mildly disliked it.’ That’s incredibly important because hate is a very powerful feeling. And so you need to be able to differentiate and distinguish between levels of intensity around emotions. And rather than ‘fine’ or ‘okay,’ you could also simply say ‘I’m somewhat distracted this morning’ or ‘I’m concerned.’ I think people can, in their own voice, use more of what we would call ‘feeling words.’ Of which there are hundreds, if not thousands.

In grief, for instance, we may feel many emotions at once. It may not be sadness alone, but also frustration, anger and anxiety. To practise emotional granularity in this case is to isolate each of those emotions and tend to them one by one. It also means trying to understand what exactly has caused us to feel those individual emotions. 

The New York Times columnist David Brooks puts it best in his article, ‘The Benefits of Emodiversity’: 

The more finely you can identify different body states—distinguishing, say, among aggravation, irritation, frustration, hostility, anxiety, and disgruntlement—the more you will understand yourself, and the more effectively you will move in the world.

3. Let it pass

Now that we’ve put our emotions into precise language, what’s next? Experts reveal a comforting scientific fact: our emotions don’t last forever. As therapist Margaret Cullen writes in the Greater Good Science Center Magazine by the University of California, Berkeley:

Emotions are like energy waves, varying in shape and intensity, just like ocean waves. Their nature is to arise and pass away pretty quickly, like all natural phenomena.

Likewise, psychotherapist Gottlieb writes in her memoir, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone:

Sometimes in their pain, people believe that the agony will last forever. But feelings are actually more like weather systems: They blow in and they blow out. Just because they feel sad this minute or this hour or this day doesn’t mean they’ll feel that way in ten minutes or this afternoon or next week. Everything you feel—anxiety, elation, anguish—blows in and out again.

In other words, if we choose to sit with our emotions and allow them to run its course, they will pass. That’s not to say they will not return—in fact, it’s almost a guarantee that they will—but in that moment, the emotion is temporary and we can be encouraged by the knowledge that we will not feel terrible forever. 

But there is a condition. Cullen cautions: 

If you attempt to interrupt this process, through acting out or suppressing, you will keep thinking about and holding onto those emotions you’re trying to avoid.

That is to say, in hanging on to those emotions or avoiding them, we risk intensifying them. The lesson appears to be this: If we wish to be rid of a particularly ‘bad’ feeling, we must sit with it and allow ourselves to fully experience it. Only then can we move forward and achieve emotional homeostasis.

At the end of Inside Out, Joy regards Sadness with new appreciation, finally understanding her purpose. She pushes her towards the console, to the shock of Fear, Anger and Disgust, and commands, “Sadness, it’s up to you. Riley needs you.” Hesitantly, she approaches the control panel and twists a bulb that fills Riley with sadness. Roused from indifference, she jumps up and shouts to get off the bus. At home, reunited with her parents, Riley cries as she faces her feelings of loss and sadness for the first time. Mom and Dad nod in understanding and the three embrace. Riley smiles. The emotion has passed.  

*Some quotes have been edited for length and clarity.