
Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being - villancikos
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/negative-emotions-key-well-being/
======
notliketherest
Depression was a major part of Winston Churchill's life, and he used the
phrase ‘Black Dog’ as a euphemism when talking to family and friends.
Sometimes when I feel the negative emotions come to me (every few weeks /
months), I think about that and I think about just walking alongside the black
dog. It helps to remember that.

~~~
ada1981
Often, depression is actually an avoidance of the underlying emotions -- very
often anger. Unexpressed anger goes inward and is directed toward the self,
which becomes experienced as depression.

~~~
xvedejas
Is this an accepted psychiatric phenomenon, or just some Freudian bullshit?

~~~
jschwartzi
Insofar as a therapist with a psychology degree has said OP's words to me,
it's accepted by some professionals.

------
Sapph
How I see negative emotion is, it's similar to what physical pain teaches us.

You touch a burning stove. It hurts. You learn this action -> undesirable
outcome and avoid doing it. (Sometimes it can take a few times though!)

Just that with negative emotions, sometimes it's less obvious the cause or
it's an interplay between a few. And sometimes, there's a time delay between
an action and the negative emotion. That's why self-awareness and
introspection helps a lot in learning from your experiences.

I think the "you can choose to be happy all the time" movement maligns
negative emotions too much - it can be an important warning "hey something is
wrong" system in life. Also, I believe the use of the word 'happiness' often
leads to misunderstandings.

You cannot be happy, the emotion, all the time. Hour to hour, day to day, we
all go through different emotions.

You can however be more consistently happy, as a perspective on life and
approach to life.

That I believe is what people really mean when they talk about 'being more
happy'.

But a lot of people misunderstand that, thinking if you aren't feeling weeeee
most of the day, you aren't really 'happy'.

~~~
altonzheng
The issue with depression is I think this emotional signaling can be entirely
miscalibrated, and sometimes, you do you have to figure out a way to override
those signals.

~~~
jschwartzi
This can happen if you grew up in an abusive environment and learned that even
people who are supposed to love you unconditionally can be dangerous.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This can happen anytime, and could since the times human life became more
complicated than hunting and gathering and living in caves.

Negavive emotions (and physical pain) may be a warning, but I strongly wish
I'd have more control over them. It reminds me of a typical scene from a naval
or sci-fi movie, when something happens and there's an alarm siren blaring.
The captain comes to bridge and asks some crewman to shut off the alarm sound.
Because such a warning is useful _until_ it's heard and understood, and then
it's only seriously distracting. Much like negative emotions and physical
pain.

------
bluetwo
(In my opinion) Negative emotions are indeed useful. Feeling sad or griping
about something is not all that bad as long as it helps you define what it is
in your life you don't like.

The hard part is forcing yourself, after some time in the dumps, to say "OK,
no what am I going to _DO_ about this?"

~~~
watmough
Yes, this is key.

For some people, it's not really surprising that they're depressed. Low
opportunity, low-income, poor surroundings, poor education, stressful paycheck
to paycheck existence. Of course they're miserable.

Of course, adversely comparing yourself to peers is also a strategy for
misery.

For those of us to be lucky enough to be in reasonable shape, the knack to
avoiding self-pity and depression is to accept yourself, and work through or
around your own limitations and count your blessings.

"I tell you, we were put here to have fun and fart around, and don't let
anyone tell you different." (with apologies to) Kurt Vonnegut.

~~~
ageek123
If the things you listed "Low opportunity, low-income, ..." actually caused
depression, then most of the people in Africa, the Middle East, and much of
Asia would be depressed, but this is obviously not the case. The causes of
depression are complicated and aren't directly related to being poor in an
absolute sense.

~~~
oarla
Exactly! A lot of people in developed and developing countries are depressed
because they thought that wealth and materialistic possessions would bring
them happiness, when all it got was more things to worry about.

~~~
namaemuta
Social standards are the principal causes of depression: too overweight, too
skinny, too tall, too short, being single, not owning a house, not having a
job, not owning a car, not having enough friends, not hanging out enough, not
being noticed/praised enough, not smart enough... and the list goes on and on.

------
andrewljohnson
I see a parallel with healthy companies and management.

Healthy companies don't avoid thinking about problems, don't subsist solely on
interpersonal praise, and don't succeed based on "if we do our best, then
we're doing a good job."

I imagine too many young startups and companies fall into this trap of always
wanting to feel like they are doing a good job, both in self scrutiny and
scrutiny of employees.

That's not to say I think managers should constantly harp on employees to spur
them along, or that founders should constantly berate themselves. But it's
harder than it seems to dole out negative feedback, for some people at least.
We like to talk about being results oriented and merit based, but it's easier
just to say everyone is doing great and trying, which can kill a company
before it starts. And maybe only in the post mortem do we take time to analyze
if we were doing the right things and doing them enough.

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ChefDenominator
I watched a documentary about heroin addiction in a wealthy northeast U.S.
town.

I recall being struck at how the parents of the addicts presented in the
documentary (who were all young) talked about how all of their kids were
always so happy as children.

Then, when interviewing the addicts, there was a clear recurring theme that
they wanted to do drugs because they could not handle the pain of being off
drugs.

I did not feel these things to be unrelated.

~~~
pitt1980
"So happy as little children" seems to be a recurring line in nearly ever
episode of Intervention I've ever seen

I usually assume that the parents are pretty poor historians

Or that people aren't very good at figuring out when little kids aren't happy

I have trouble believing that happy childhood are correlated with later life
problems

~~~
ada1981
As someone who has helped people get off heroin, booze,toxic relationships,
etc.. That jumps out as a red flag that the parents were sending signals that
the kids were ONLY allowed to feel "happy", so of course they would be primed
for addiction, not having learned the beauty of their entire range of
emotions.

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edblarney
I think PC culture is maybe a problem here.

I worked in an F50 and for political reasons ... emotions are just not
allowed.

I personally don't mind a little bit here and there. Someone gets angry,
argues, whatever. It's life. As long as it's not personal.

I worked at startups and we used to debate, hardcore, all the time. No harm
done. At the F50, it was too politically costly - everyone is trying to 'one
up' one another, so it's about making as 'few social mistakes as possible' \-
and getting the occasional 'win' and making sure you kiss your boss's butt.

That's it.

------
MarkPNeyer
I just read "life of a slave" by frederick douglass. It's been helpful to
calibrate my emotional responses. I try to treat emotion like sound or light -
a signal from the outside world, with appropriate responses.

When I get upset at things now, I compare whatever's bothering me to "being a
slave, being whipped for teaching fellow slaves how to read the bible" \- and
i realize how unimportant the thing was.

This ability - to compare our experiences to those of others - is why i think
christianity has something to it. I ignore all the talk about God, and just
think of the story of Jesus - a guy who went around telling everyone, "hey
lets be nice", and got tortured for it. Being able to forgive someone who'd do
that to you is a tall order - but if you have that ability and truly follow
that pattern, you'll be much happier and contented.

I don't see the guy as divine - i see him as a helpful calibration point.
Forgiveness is a path out of anger. There's a lot to be angry about in our
modern world, but that doesn't make it helpful for us.

~~~
d0paware
I used to think that this was a good way to cope with unhappiness that I
experienced. I would tell myself, "At least I'm not starving to death" or, "At
least I don't feel like killing myself this morning." I would feel better at
first, but it didn't change the fact that I would still get the same negative
feelings again. It became frustrating that this tactic lost its effectiveness
over time.

While on one hand it trivializes what it actually means to go through
starvation, or having suicidal thoughts, or what it's like to actually be a
slave, I think it also trivializes your own feelings as well.

Like the article points out, this mentality suppresses your feelings. "Oh, I'm
not allowed to feel this way. Look at all the wealth and happiness I am
surrounded with and non-extreme situations I don't have to face!"

Admitting my feelings and writing them down in my journal in the heat of the
moment, no matter how pathetic they made me seem, gave me a chance to reflect
on what I had written. It gave me a snapshot to come back to later and say "Is
this really what I am like? Have I exaggerated or downplayed my emotions?"

And from there, I was able to come to two types of conclusions:

1) Accept that sometimes for a given situation I would feel blue no matter
what. Something I realized after 8 years of heartbreak, things not working
out, or rejection in dating is that while I got better at being functional,
the pain itself never dulled. And what a relief! I kept expecting that it
would somehow hurt less after all these years, but that's just not how it
turned out. And I feel so much better now with that in mind.

2) I can decide to act on the problem. I can act and succeed, or act and fail.
And after enough failures, sometimes it's OK to give up for the time being and
work on other types of dissatisfaction.

I think the article did a great job of succinctly describing a process I have
gone through myself for several years. I highly recommend it.

~~~
crawfordcomeaux
Completely agree with you and would add that I've found mourning after
something that gets me down is ESSENTIAL for moving through those things. If I
avoid grieving the loss I'm perceiving, that's also suppressing my emotions.

I used to not associate mourning with everyday events; it was something
reserved for people/pets dying. Now, if I can't shake a bad feeling, I try
mentally eulogizing whatever I lost.

------
norea-armozel
I think there's a limit to those negative emotions in as much as long we
suppress them then we can't recover from their cause. Like for me, my gender
dysphoria has been a life long issue which has been associated with my
depression and anxiety issues. Specifically, the more I suppressed my
dysphoria the more depressed I've gotten (even more anxious). Conversely, the
more I tried to suppress the depression and/or anxiety the more my dysphoria
made me feel worse. Basically, a feel back loop of suck. So the key to dealing
with negative emotions is figuring out what's wrong and either learning to
cope with the cause of them or resolve the cause altogether (sometimes both as
with me since I'm not ready to come out).

------
whack
I've often heard the exhortation to practice meditation, focus on your
breathing and simply accept any thoughts/feelings without any judgement. For a
long time, I simply thought that such teachings were some new-age feel-good
psuedo-therapy. Yesterday, I happened to stumble across the book "The Inner of
Tennis", and spent my entire evening devouring half the book. It made me
realise how profound and powerful those teachings truly are. Give it a read if
you find yourself dismissing such advice.

[https://www.buzzfeed.com/reeveswiedeman/the-inner-game-of-
ev...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/reeveswiedeman/the-inner-game-of-everything-
why-is-a-four-decade-old-tennis)

------
CuriouslyC
I look at negative experiences (not emotions) the same way I look at lifting
weights. It is a stimulus that can cause you to grow stronger. Much like you
have to lift weights with proper technique to avoid injury, you have to learn
to respond to negative events with the proper cognitive strategy to avoid
suffering.

I don't think negative emotions are necessary, however. The benefit comes from
learning to process negative events constructively, which people (sometimes)
learn to do in order to avoid the pain.

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BoringAsian
Grief and sorrow are essential since you're expressing the loss of something
that caused a great change in your life. Knowing that this change existed and
has provoked such strange lows and highs can be deeper and more fulfilling
than painless happiness. IMO anyway.

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noname123
Inspired by this thread, I looked up Freud's 12 Human Defense Mechanism when
negative emotions stew in our mind to look at how I delude myself on daily
basis: [https://kevinfitzmaurice.com/self-esteem/self-esteem-
issues/...](https://kevinfitzmaurice.com/self-esteem/self-esteem-
issues/sigmund-freud-the-12-defense-mechanisms/)

1\. Over-compensation/Projection: To overcome my greatest fear that I'm just a
programmer making a comfortable living but ultimately making meaningless web
apps for BigCo or for startups but afraid of sitting with this feeling for too
long; I try to "cultivate" cultural hobbies like playing in a blues band,
joined a rec-league, travel, attend book/film clubs to convince myself that
I'm different than the other people but find people who are most like me in
the book clubs and art galleries openings are just as empty, pretentious and
obnoxious. Similarly I project onto others my insecurity, and judge them
accordingly to the snobbery by the impact factor (IF) of their "CV" and of
their "cultural output".

2\. Denial/Ritual for Undoing/Regression: I escape via various social media
distractions and comfort food. I go to startup social gatherings, when the
caffeine or alcoholic or fun-social distraction buzz kick-in, I convince
myself that this is the way things are suppose to go. But the buzz wears off,
I realize that my problems are still there and chasing that original high with
that good sushi meal, new brew of coffee or dance-party venue feel like eating
a diminishing return chocolate cake.

3\. Displacement/Identification: I visit a lot of right-wing subreddits like
/r/the_donald that rage against the left-wing subreddits to the point that I
realize that as much as I hate on the facebook feeds of my enemies on the
left, they have also now become my indisposable personal crucible because the
outrage inspired has become almost a comforting ally to lean onto to channel
my otherwise impotent rage; I visit HN and glow over the triumphs by techies
like unveiling of new Tesla model or new VR headsets and startup podcasts and
blog posts about the #hustle. I sometimes even Google search pictures of PR
pictures of Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes (before she became reviled by this
forum) while listening to positive YouTube music video's to bask in the
positive glow.

4\. Acceptance/Humble Identification/Sublimation: I accept that I won't ever
be like Elon Musk or Elizabeth Holmes or a mere YC Founder for that matter.
I've been trying to find more realistic models to model my behavior like my
boss who is very organized, shows up to work on time and is very empathy for
people, but someone who is otherwise (gasp) an average person judged by my
earlier metric of Personal Impact Factor. I try to find more socially
acceptable, stable and support roles like playing Healer heroes in Dota2 or
LoL instead of battling it out with my team about who to play to the Carry; my
fear of just giving in and becoming just an mediocre everyman like Willie
Loman, I just let go and trying to keep score every day cleared up to make
room to find simple joys like washing dishes, taking out the trash on time and
closing JIRA tickets. Walking by the local hip and edgy co-working space, I
cannot help but feel a tinge of poetic sadomasochism that in order to attain
peace, I chased the opposite of what I was afraid of becoming only to end up
becoming the very thing of this existential guilt by way of being wore down by
the daily pressure of unable to run away from this guilt; and realizing that
this guilt of unbecoming of the becoming is also the real unbecoming, but the
real becoming is also the unbecoming.

~~~
zby
Would you really like to be Elizabeth Holmes?

------
Kenji
They usually stop being useful when they destroy you from the inside and make
you do things you'd never do in a normal mood range. But what he says has a
nice ring to it, in line with all the modern self-help nonsense.

~~~
kornakiewicz
The dose makes the poison.

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a_plastic_bag
“The complexity of life” is really ambiguous. The actual headline, “Negative
Emotions Are Key to Well-Being”, is much more descriptive.

~~~
sctb
We've reverted the title from “Acknowledging the complexity of life may be a
fruitful path to well-being”.

~~~
agumonkey
I find “Acknowledging the complexity of life may be a fruitful path to well-
being” to be much more revealing. The 'term' negative is too subjective.

------
Stenzel
I doubt the term "negative emotion" holds up to scientific standards.

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johnlbevan2
> "In fact, anger and sadness are an important part of life, and new research
> shows that experiencing and accepting such emotions are vital to our mental
> health."

Translation: "New Research": Having watched Inside Out.

~~~
ptrincr
I searched the thread to see if anyone had mentioned inside out. I found that
quite a powerful movie, with an important message. A lot of time and money has
been spent trying to prevent people from feeling any kind of negative
emotions. Most recently in the form of medicating these emotions away.

There are a few issues with medication, as I see it. Should we try change a
person? Are you the same person if you medicate how your brain responds to
certain events? There are risks involved of course, people react differently
and increased anxiety levels are often associated with some anti depressants.
There is also the problem of dependence and the search for the "perfect pill"
to make them feel perfectly at peace.

And finally there is the question of whether or not these negative feelings
are actually a key part of who we are, and trying to lock them away, and
contain them just prolongs the suffering we endure. I think sometimes you just
got to embrace what you feel and go with it.

Let me stress though, I completely accept that for some people medication is
absolutely vital to ensure they stay well, and for many others it can be
completely life changing in a totally positive way. I just think it shouldn't
be the first thing your doctor recommends when you present with depressed or
anxious thoughts.

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halis
Great news, I should live forever then.

