Feeling Bad? Sometimes That's a Good Thing

Feeling bad sometimes is a normal part of life, and is something we all experience. Who hasn’t, at some point, pleaded to their cosmic force of choice, “Why can’t I just be happy?!”

But it is important to embrace feeling bad. This doesn’t mean that clinical depression is okay. Rather, run-of-the-mill bad feelings have their place in a healthy and meaningful life. Catastrophizing these normal feelings of sadness, anger, and fear can lead to anxiety and depression.

We tend to break down emotions into two categories: those that feel good, and those that don’t.

Feeling bad can be good for us sometimes — Sadness can lead to productive reflection and growth

Naturally, we want to feel more of the former and less of the later. So when we’re excited, confident, curious, or otherwise of good feeling, we’re satisfied, and if we’re nervous, sad, or angry, we’re not.

In other words, we tend to believe:

Feeling good = good

Feeling bad = bad

In following, the way to improve one’s quality of life is to rid oneself of all trace of emotional discomfort — to never feel nervous, sad, guilty, embarrassed, or angry ever again, and instead to live in a state of perpetual bliss.

It sounds nice, but is it really that simple? Of course not.

Feeling good can be good, and feeling bad can be bad. But the opposite is also true: Feeling good can be bad, and feeling bad can be good. Further, a fear of negative emotions can cause even more distress. But we don’t need to fear bad feelings — believe it or not, they exist to help us.

There’s a purpose to feeling bad

Our emotions exist for a reason. Through two hundred thousand of years of evolution, we have ended up with the emotions we experience today — the core four being ‘mad, sad, glad, and afraid’ (I like to think of these as the ‘primary colors’ of emotion, from which the others are built). You may notice that of these four, only one — gladness — actually feels good, meaning seventy-five percent of our primary emotions are uncomfortable.

Why do so many of our emotions feel bad? Why wouldn’t, after all these years, we have evolved away from uncomfortable emotions, to a state of eternal gladness?

Because survival is hard work.

If you felt good all the time, you’d have little motivation to put in the work it takes to keep on surviving.

Emotions are informational

Emotions tell us things about our environment, and give us input about the way our lives are going, which helps us to make decisions about the future. This may be a split-second decision, like how anxiety can trigger your fight-or-flight response. Or, it could be a more deliberate decision, like how grief over the loss of a loved one can make you contemplate a change in your priorities, or how anger over perceived injustices can lead you to get involved in social change.

Feeling bad can spur you into action

Without fear, anger, or sadness — with only gladness — you may be content to lie around all day doing nothing, even if the world were crumbling all around you (one could argue we could stand to feel a lot worse about a lot of social and environmental issues).

Eternal happiness may be easier, in the short-term, but it’s potentially damaging in the long-term, and certainly less purposeful.

You need to feel bad sometimes to develop meaning

Think a happy life will lead to a life full of meaning?

Not necessarily.

While a happy life can be meaningful, happiness in itself does not impart meaning. Likewise, a meaningful life can feel good, but feeling good isn’t a requisite for meaningfulness.

While the two share common ground, they don’t have all that much in common.

So what are happiness and meaningfulness?

A lot of definitions for these words are kicked around, and many of us have developed a habit of using them interchangeably.

A recent study has revealed key traits of both happiness and meaning. Happiness, the researchers found, comes from satisfying one’s needs and wants in the present, whereas meaning is derived from the giving of one’s energy and resources over time. Happiness, in other words, results from pleasure in the present, and meaningfulness from commitments in the past, present, and future.

For one to find meaning, one generally needs to be looking beyond the present, and must be willing to prioritize commitments above pleasure. Meaningfulness in part comes from the tolerance and acceptance of uncomfortable emotions.

Think of the example above — how anger can lead one to engage in positive social change. Whatever the issue, getting involved means facing the very thing that angers you, which is certain to take a toll on your mood.

I could use many other examples — training for a marathon, undertaking a demanding academic regimen, raising kids. All of these involve daily choices (ie, getting up unfathomably early) that probably don’t feel very good in the moment. These choices are tolerable because they contribute to a larger goal — one that encompasses past, present, and future.

It should come as no surprise that pursuit of meaning is correlated with higher levels of anxiety and stress than is the pursuit of happiness. To avoid these uncomfortable feelings and experiences is to reduce your ability to find meaning.

The gift of self-doubt

Self-doubt may feel bad, but it can be incredibly helpful

We have come to think of self-doubt as an enemy — the billion-dollar self-help industry is predicated on the idea; motivational speakers and marketing gurus far and wide have gotten rich trying to help us vanquish this most unwelcome of experiences. But do you really want to rid yourself of doubt? Be careful what you wish for.

Self-doubt is an amazing tool. The ability to question ourselves, our abilities, and the choices we make is extremely beneficial. If you’re about to do something reckless, for example, there’s probably no better experience for you to have than self-doubt! You certainly don’t want a positive mental attitude if you’re about to shoplift, cheat, or take out a massive business loan before you’ve thought through your business plan. Unbridled confidence is only going to encourage an abrupt and ill-conceived plan. You need self-doubt to caution you, to make you think critically, and perhaps go back to the drawing board.

Walking around all day in a euphoric haze would be great — if you were perfect. If every impulsive decision you made advanced your interests and produced a positive outcome, then being confident and assertive at all times would be ideal. But we aren’t perfect. We make mistakes, and do foolish things. Self-doubt, along with uncomfortable emotions, are there to help us self-correct.

What are your emotions trying to tell you?

In my practice, whenever a client tells me he or she has been experiencing anxiety or sadness, I make sure to explore the root causes of the emotion. Many times the anxiety comes from something inherently dangerous, like driving, and sadness from something inherently difficult like the loss of a relationship or loved one. My goal, then, shifts to normalizing the experience and helping the client to process his or her feelings, rather than trying to eliminate a natural response.

Every once in awhile, a client — usually a teen — will report distress because he or she is afraid of doing something risky that his or her peers are doing — abusing drugs, for example. To this I respond, “Good — your body is working the way it’s supposed to.” In an instance like this, my client is fine — it’s the peers that probably could have used a little more anxiety about the issue.

We spend so much time trying to avoid our negative emotions, that we forget the point of them — to help us. They are talking to us, and we should be listening to them.

When emotions are out of place

I hope you’ve now bought into the idea that ‘feeling bad’ (more accurately: feeling uncomfortable) is often good for you.

A motto of organizers everywhere is ‘ A place for everything and everything in its place.’ This works for shoes and socks as well as it works for emotions: A place for every emotion and every emotion in its place.

Remember that your emotions — even the uncomfortable ones — are there to help you. They only become problematic when their intensity doesn’t match the situation — like a panic attack over a typical social interaction or the catastrophizing of a minor error.

This is when an emotion becomes disordered (or, like an errant sock, out of place). If this happens so frequently that it creates significant distress or interferes with your life, you may meet criteria for a medical disorder. But remember: an anxiety, depressive, or other disorder is just that — a disordered pattern of emotional experience. The problem isn’t the emotion itself; the problem is that the emotion is out of proportion, or maybe just out of place.

References:

Beaumeister, R., Vohs, K., Aaker, J, Garbinsky, E. (2013). Some Key Differences between a Happy Life and a Meaningful Life. Journal of Positive Psychology. 2013, Vol. 8, Issue 6, Pages 505-516