
Feeling bad about feeling bad can make you feel worse - RKoutnik
http://news.berkeley.edu/2017/08/10/emotionalacceptance/
======
lisper
Something I wish my parents had told me when I was growing up:

You, the thing listening to this advice, is just a small part of a greater
whole, much of which you (the thing listening to this advice) are not
consciously aware of. This is because you were built by your genes to be good
mainly at one thing: reproducing. That's all your genes care about. They don't
care about your happiness or achievements or having a fulfilled life. In fact,
they don't even really "care" about reproducing, except the same way that
water cares about flowing downhill.

Your negative emotions are real. The pain you feel is real. But it's not
_you_. It's something that is being _done_ to you. In that regard it is
exactly the same as physical pain, which is also not part of you, but rather
something done _to_ you. The fact that you're depressed is no more a character
flaw than the fact that it hurts when you skin your knee.

~~~
Zyst
I actually go the completely opposite way, and I'm the happiest person I know.

I own everything, everything that happens to me, everything that goes wrong
around me, I take my share of responsibility in it. Analyze what I can do to
improve it, and do it.

When I think like what you mentioned I tend to lose control of my emotions, I
feel angrier, I feel sadder. When I own what happens to me, I feel peace. I
know almost everything can be improved. Maybe not short term, but eventually.

Coming back to the other side, I think the core of it is that thinking that
stuff is happening to me makes me feel like a victim. I don't take
responsibility for anything, thus it must be the fault of some external
factor. I try to rationalize and assign blame. All in all, it's a much more
negative experience for me.

~~~
lisper
> I own everything, everything that happens to me

Really? Everything that _happens_ to you? What if you were mugged?

I think you can (and should) take responsibility for what you _do_ (or don't
do), but I don't think you can (or should) take responsibility for what you
_feel_ because you don't have control over that.

~~~
imron
> What if you were mugged?

Walking down a dark alley, alone, at night and not having a sense of
situational awareness. I was nearly mugged because of that, and now have a
much greater sense of situational awareness.

I know, I know, blaming the victim is bad, but sometimes clearly assessing
what led you to be in a certain type of situation can help you avoid those
types of situations in the future.

~~~
csydas
Well not really in this case. This is still trying to align sense and
structure to an otherwise random event. Suppose you got mugged with your
partner on a lightly populated main Street in the evening by a stranger with a
gun, as happened to my partner and I; what is the takeaway there? Muggings,
like many other situations we imagine, tend not to happen as we've seen it in
movies and tv but more so when we least expect it.

A lot about owning a situation is allowing yourself to do what feels right,
not creating a plan for every contingency and situation. Muggings happen and
they're very unfortunate and bad. But owning it well isn't as much about
future prevention as it is trying to make sure that you still can have control
over yourself afterwards. Sometimes things happen; why did some guy key my
beat up old 95 Accord and not the dozens of other cars? Probably alcohol, but
the point is less about the specific reason and more what you do in response
and how you are able to gain control and feel comfortable.

~~~
seppin
cancer ?

------
aphextron
I've come to accept this with regards to sexist/racist thoughts. Once you
realize that it is a normal, ingrained biological urge to have these thoughts
as a result of human evolution and cultural conditioning, it frees you to stop
"feeling bad" about having those thoughts and trying to block them out, so
that you can objectively assess the flawed assumptions behind them and reason
yourself past them without the need for self shaming.

~~~
notgood
Looking at a young woman and the first thing that clicks on my head its asking
and answering "is she attractive?" in a matter of milliseconds; its annoying
as hell... why can't my first through be something more interesting? or at
least why can't it be nothing at all so it doesn't interrupt my thinking? but
I have come to realize that this is a more of a hormonal reflex than what we
usually consider "a thought"; an annoying reflex which exists in a lot of
other species as well, not just humans. I have noticed this reflex only
weakens when I'm feeling depressed or other strong negative emotions; which I
guess makes a lot of sense in an evolutionary context.

~~~
davidreiss
Why is it annoying? Who told you that you need to feel bad?

~~~
rtpg
By having those sorts of thoughts, you are privileging that aspect of them
over any other sort of accomplishments they might have. They have less
opportunity to present themselves in the way they would like to.

Imagine if everyone around you in your workplace would think about how you're
dressed instead of what you're actually trying to talk to them about.

~~~
3131s
Women have the same instinctive reaction to attractive men though. I do agree
everyone should be aware of how attractiveness can influence their perception
of another person, but I don't feel guilty about noticing whether a woman is
attractive or not and I definitely am not going to make a futile attempt to
prevent it.

~~~
rtpg
We live in a society where this issue affects women way more than it does men
(see Clinton getting lectured at about not constantly smiling). Bringing this
up is part of a fight to reduce systemic bias.

~~~
3131s
I get that and generally agree. I am more challenging the idea of feeling bad
/ guilty about sexual attraction, which I interpreted as being implied by some
of the other comments in this thread.

------
egypturnash
I feel like this validates my tendency to deal with a serious Low Mood by
turning out the lights, lying on the floor with headphones on, and listening
to the saddest, loneliest music in my collection for a while. I'm gonna feel
sad whatever I do, and I may as well make some time to give in to _really_
feeling sad and getting it out of the way.

When I feel bad I generally do a quick mental checklist: Have I drunk any
water lately? Have I eaten? Have I had my pills? Usually the answer to at
least one of those is 'no' and I feel better after correcting them. Then since
my need for a warm place to sleep is pretty well settled, it jumps up a few
notches to checking when the last time I cuddled someone was, how I feel about
my current project, etc.

~~~
lamby
Thank you for sharing this.

------
nyrulez
This article is going to make you feel bad about "feeling bad about feeling
bad"...don't go there. You've been warned.

~~~
jrs95
Too late...I don't even know what level I'm in anymore. Hopefully this will
stop before I experience a depression stack overflow.

~~~
notgood
Jokes on you, at 2 levels I already overflowed. I would buy more emotional DDR
memory for myself but the human body is closed hardware with no extra slots
available.

~~~
westmeal
There's a slot in the back but it unfortunately isn't backwards compatible.

------
thedevil
I learned to accept that I feel bad sometimes and it made me happier.

But I went farther than that.

I also learned to accept that my ideas and behaviors are inconsistent and it
helped me better understand the world and myself.

And finally, I learned to accept that I sometimes do bad things (and desire to
do even more bad things) and it made me a better person.

(Disclaimer: my experiments have n=1, no control group and subjective
measurements chosen in hindsight.)

~~~
KGIII
That touches on a couple of Buddhist thoughts.

The human condition is suffering. Suffering comes from desire.

Rather than desire your unhappiness to disappear, you've accepted it. Thus,
you do not suffer from it.

Or so they say.

~~~
hackits
You're a bad Buddhist.

~~~
KGIII
We all are.

------
madiathomas
This article sounds like a long version of Carl Jung's quote -> "what you
resists, persists" to me. That's how I deal with pain. I don't try to resist
it. I simply allow myself to go through the pain. Cry occasionally if I had
to. Feeling bad about feeling bad doesn't make me feel better, it simply
delays my healing.

------
mirimir
Been there, done that :( For me, it's been a negative spiral that ends with
behavioral paralysis.

Over the years, I've managed to train myself to be amused by feeling bad.
Because it's so pointless and silly. And so I smile, feel happy, and consider
what needs done. Sometimes what needs done is sleeping for 15 hours. But
that's very different from refusing to get out of bed.

------
averagewall
I wonder if causality is backwards. Perhaps if your negative emotions are
really causing problems, you're more likely to actively to to stop them by
telling yourself not to feel them.

~~~
pdpi
It's both — it's a feedback loop. Here's a typical couple of days when you're
dealing with uncontrolled anxiety:

You feel like shit, that makes you unproductive and slow and dull. End of the
day, you didn't get anything done because you stare at your text editor and
your brain just refuses to engage in anything but panicking over... something.
You get home, Now you still fill like shit the same as before, but also feel
like shit over the fact that you didn't get anything done today and and you
need to make up for it tomorrow. But then you don't get any proper sleep and
you still have to catch and on lost time and you're in for a pretty bad day,
but you shouldn't think like that, why are you wallowing in self pity, just
get over yourself and get stuff done. But that doesn't really work, oh shit oh
shit oh shit thingsarespiralingoutofcontrolwhatdoIdo?

You fall into that trap and now you're proper screwed. Anxiety is causing
problems, problems are causing anxiety. The alternative is to learn to cut the
second order effect short, which stops the loop. Yes, you had a bad day, and
yes, your project is delayed because of it. What's done is done, and you can't
fix it, so just accept it. Let people know you're behind schedule, replan if
necessary, and move on.

In many ways, breaking that cycle is an exercise in allowing yourself self-
compassion without indulging in self-pity.

~~~
FooHentai
Agree with all of this. Additionally, splitting the idea of myself into past,
present and future really helped as well.

That is, whatever past Foo did is done. Maybe he was a dickhead and didn't
study for the exam that future Foo is gonna have to sit. So present Foo can be
a better friend and get that shit out of the way now, so future Foo can relax,
pass, and gets to drink beer.

Like that concept of being your own best friend, only the friend you're
forgiving is your past self and the friend you're doing favours to is future
you.

Helps to get away from hang-ups about what is already in the past, and for
some reason many people struggle with the idea of themselves as a person they
should be kind towards.

------
atomical
I have learned some strategies for dealing with emotions from Feeling Good:
The New Mood Therapy by David Burns. By controlling your thoughts you
ultimately control how you feel.

~~~
ballade
Perhaps to a certain degree, but people with imbalanced brain chemistries who
are affected by bipolar disorder, personality disorders etc. cannot simply
'think' bad moods away. It's unfortunately more complicated than that.

~~~
Swizec
It's simple, if you want to fly, just fall and miss the ground.

Simple doesn't mean easy.

I used to suffer from severe clinical depression and ultimately the only thing
that's helped was to learn how to control my thoughts. It still rears its head
when I'm tired, hungry, or drunk enough so I don't have the energy to control
my thoughts. Hell, sometimes I just relax too much and forget to and it comes
rushing back.

But on the bright side, the need for constant productive output has really
helped both my career and my physique. Pros and cons I guess.

Ultimately I find this much more desirable than the antidepressants that just
made me numb to everything.

------
joe_the_user
I don't know if this claim is true or false but I'm pretty sure that doing a
study on this kind of thing is an extremely fraught enterprise. Edit: more so
than even simpler psychology studies, many of which are coming back with
problems.

How does one determine that someone is really "feeling bad about feeling bad"
or whether they're satisfying some expectation of the experimenter or doing
something else? And moreover, cause and effect can be slippery, maybe those
with more extreme problems tend to be caused to do the thing the experimenter
thinks is a mistake rather what they do having an effect.

------
lalos
Alan Watts said it better:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emHAoQGoQic](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emHAoQGoQic)

worrying about worrying about worrying

~~~
jasonkostempski
Are there any existing recordings of Alan Watts that don't contain a
distracting background track? If what he has to say is actually useful, there
is no need for the cheap trick.

~~~
nicky0
Yes: [https://www.alanwatts.org/](https://www.alanwatts.org/)

Also (good starter collection): [https://www.discogs.com/Alan-Watts-Out-Of-
Your-Mind/release/...](https://www.discogs.com/Alan-Watts-Out-Of-Your-
Mind/release/2831541)

(There seems to be a small industry of YouTubers taking snippets of Watts and
adding music and images to make short inspiring videos. To be fair, most of
them don't do the background music thing.)

------
theBobBob
Somewhat similar to some problems I used to have with sleeping. If I was
particularly stressed and had trouble getting to sleep a couple of days in a
row. Then I would be stressed, tired because of lack of sleep and now starting
to stress about not being able to get to sleep leading me to find it even
harder to sleep.

------
gaius
"Men are affected not by things but the view they take of them" \-- Epictetus,
Stoic philosopher

------
ThrustVectoring
It feels like a "duh" thing to me.

Emotions are adaptations. They trigger in particular circumstances and they
cause particular behaviors. The entire point of having an emotion is to engage
in emotionally appropriate behavior until the circumstance has passed.
Positive emotions are attractors towards the triggering class of
circumstances, while negative emotions are repellers.

"Feeling bad about feeling bad" pretty much works out to be something like
"naive gradient descent on the function that maps attention onto emotional
valence". This doesn't solve the underlying situations that cause you to feel
bad - it's like not looking at pictures of your dead wife, rather than
grieving, getting support from friends and family, and then moving on with
your life.

~~~
pizza
You rang?

Emotional Valence and the Free-Energy Principle (2013)
[http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...](http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003094)

------
jnty
This effect is at the root of homesickness, I think. In my experience you're
never _really_ homesick when you're happy - homesickness only happens when
you're sad for some reason and you can't separate it from the place/situation
you're in. That reason is only sometimes a direct result of that situation,
but your instinctive response is to think "this would be better if I were at
home" regardless.

Getting over homesickness seems to be about being able to accept the bad
thoughts as you would do at home and move on, rather than "feeling bad about
feeling bad" in the form of wishing you could just go home.

I'm fortunate enough to have never experienced it, but I imagine serious
grieving is like this too.

------
pfista
This paradoxical idea of sitting with and being close to the very things that
make you suffer is central to Alan Watts' teachings, who westernized Zen
Buddhism in a secular way. Robert Wright also talked about this very topic in
a recent episode of Fresh Air.

------
teekert
If this piece interests you, you should read the "subtle art of not giving a
f*ck." Its a nice down to earth book about dealing with negative emotions and
high expectations.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28257707-the-subtle-
art-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28257707-the-subtle-art-of-not-
giving-a-f-ck)

~~~
vldx
Eh, you can skip that (it's not a bad book) and go directly read the Stoics.

~~~
teekert
Does the work of the stoics make you laugh and speed your eyes over their
witty pages and puns? I also liked "a guide to the good life" [0], but the
Subtle art is a much easier and lighter read.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-
Stoic/dp/1522...](https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-
Stoic/dp/1522632735)

~~~
vldx
Thanks for your downvote; it substantially aids your argument.

As I've said, the book does re-package some millennia old ideas and adds
couple of hundreds usages of the f*ck world -- because it's of highest
priority to be witty for some, apparently. Hell, CBT essentially does the same
-- but it doesn't feels witty as it should be, right? Witty is of utmost
importance after all.

~~~
tome
> Thanks for your downvote; it substantially aids your argument.

How do you know who downvoted you?

~~~
vldx
Occam's razor.

~~~
teekert
Haha, Occam failed you this time ;)

------
thinbeige
Maybe this sounds too simple and not academic:

The more I am busy (with meaningful work) the less time I have time to feel
bad about feeling bad or just thinking about this.

This doesn't mean one should escape into random work but that there maight be
a slight correlation.

~~~
colordrops
I've found that when I'm in a better mood I find myself more busy with
meaningful work, so the correlation may go the other way.

~~~
thinbeige
IDK and in my case the cause effect direction is the other way.

Imagine you get busy because of external deadlines you cannot influence and
you need get things done and don't have time to think a second about anything
unrelated.

Even if you are in a bad mood and don't want to work you MUST because of the
deadlines. Once you are working towards the deadlines, all bad feelings are
gone.

Not sure how it works the way around, I am happy, now I make myself busy with
random taks?

Edit: Still thinking about your opinion and now I might agree. If you feel
good you might have the willpower to start new meaningful things which make
you busy again.

------
danschumann
Therefore.. Feeling good about feeling good, can make you ecstatic.
<punExplainer>When you keep feeling good about your previous good thought, the
system is stable, hence, 'static'.</punExplainer>

------
megous
I think the same goes for worrying too much about and trying to assert too
much control over one's impulsive behavior. Like trying to eliminate it
completely. It may paradoxically bring more of it.

------
pvdebbe
Reminds me of Mr Prosser who felt bad about vacating Arthur, then felt good
about feeling bad.

------
ahugebeach
Is this why some antidepressants work, they can break the cycle ?

~~~
ajkjk
That's what being on an SSRI has felt like to me: it seems to dull neurotic
'loops' in my head. It doesn't make them go away entirely but, maybe, (it's
hard to explain) it seems like the loop doesn't bother the rest of my brain as
much.

------
gadders
Overthinking is a curse. JFDI.

------
peepopeep
By controlling your thoughts, you control the universe. Mind blown.

------
Apocryphon
It's bad feels all the way down.

------
rashthedude
No shit.

------
thinkfurther
> We found that people who habitually accept their negative emotions
> experience fewer negative emotions

and

> those who generally allow such bleak feelings as sadness, disappointment and
> resentment to run their course reported fewer mood disorder symptoms than
> those who critique them or push them away, even after six months

Yet the comments so far are mostly about "controlling your thoughts", rather
than accepting negative emotions (and maybe looking at what they're trying to
tell you rather than killing the messengers).

~~~
PeanutCurry
I think recognizing why we feel a certain way is important but a little
different than what the article is discussing at face value. A lot of what the
article discussed seemed to describe people feeling added emotional stress
because of a reluctance to believe that the negative emotions afflicting them
were okay (for lack of a better term). It's like the difference between
struggling to swim out of a powerful current versus simply letting it carry
you and waiting for the lifeguard because you know you're already caught.
Granted, you should probably signal the lifeguard but that breaks the
metaphor.

~~~
FooHentai
How about the waterfall metaphor - If you get washed over a waterfall (or a
wier) you'll stick in the eddies below, your instinct will be to swim up and
try to keep your head above water. But, doing this will ensure you keep
getting washed back under the waterfall. Instead, a better approach is to swim
down, then away downstream.

Point is directly fighting against something can keep you trapped by it.
Rolling with it and working yourself into a better position without resistance
can, eventually, take you away from the problem.

