Melting the Emotional Snowball
Emotional snowballing happens when our reactions to uncomfortable emotions create more uncomfortable emotions. This core emotion grows as it goes, like a snowball gathering more snow as it rolls down a hill. A common example is worry about worry, but emotional snowballing can occur when any one emotional reaction builds from another.
Before we dive into how this happens, let’s take a look at the nature of emotions themselves.
The ‘core four’ emotions
When it comes down to it, we only have four core emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear (easily remembered as: glad, sad, mad, and afraid). Some debate that there are six core emotions, with excitement and disgust among them, but I prefer the simpler model.
Think of these as primary colors on a color wheel. These emotions have been hardwired into our nervous system over many thousands of years of evolution, and are as integral to our human experience as our own eyes and ears. They are equally crucial role for our survival.
Evolutionary psychologists have identified the driving evolutionary purposes of each of our emotions, which can be seen pair with their adaptive functions below:
More bad feelings than good — and that’s good
When I look at the above graphic, I notice that of these four emotions, only one of them — happiness — actually feels good. The rest — sadness, anger, and fear — are generally thought of as uncomfortable or undesirable. That means 75% of our core emotions don’t feel good! No wonder so many of us pine, ‘I just want to be happy.’
Nevertheless, all of our emotions exist for a reason, and we can expect to feel them daily, to some degree (really, we often feel more than one thing at the same time — a blended emotion — but we are in the habit of defining our moods by whichever emotion is the most prominent at the time).
Naturally, we all like to feel good, so it may seem intuitive to want to maximize our feelings of happiness, while reducing the uncomfortable ones as much as possible. But when we recognize that there are benefits to all our emotions, this idea takes on a certain naivety. Even if we could, theoretically, feel good all the time, should we really want to? I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I would want to give up the majority of those benefits listed in the table above. I like to be alerted to threats and danger.
But even when we understand the reasons for uncomfortable emotions, we often fight against them . . . to our detriment. This is emotional snowballing.
The emotional snowball
The snowball begins
I like the term ‘core emotions’ because it works on two levels. First, these are our most primal feelings; second, they are the core from which greater emotional experiences can grow. Think of an emotion reaction as an emotional core:
In this example, the emotion is fear. Imagine something that makes you fearful — speaking in front of a group, taking a flight, etc.
This fear is an automatic and instinctual reaction — it may even precede conscious thought. So how do we respond to this core emotion?
Unfortunately, we often respond, like this:
The emotional snowball grows
When we become afraid of our own emotional reaction (worry about worry), our snowball grows and gains momentum.
While our core emotions are often automatic, the ‘second layer’ of emotion is most often deliberate, meaning it is typically accompanied by a supporting thought: This anxiety is going to cause me to say something dumb, for example. Here, we’ve contextualized our core emotion of fear — our automatic processing of a threat — as something that is itself a threat. What possible reaction could we have but more fear?
This ‘second layer’ can also come in the form of a different emotion. For instance, we can become mad that we are afraid, which would look like this:
An accompanying thought for anger about fear might be: I can’t believe I’m feeling afraid again. This thought contextualizes the core fear as a problem, which can cause us to fight against the core emotion rather than to seek to understand it.
As another example, if someone says or does something hurtful to us ,we may feel sad:
And if it’s been a particularly rough day or week, we may have a thought like, this sadness is never going to end! This is likely to evoke fear that our sadness won’t pass. When this happens, again, the snowball grows:
Melt the emotional snowball away
While three-out-of-four of our core emotions are uncomfortable, these core feelings are generally tolerable if unpleasant. It’s the ‘second layer’ of the snowball where we really begin to feel emotional overwhelm.
But we can develop a different way of responding to our emotions. Understanding the adaptive functions of our core emotions helps us to contextualize them in a productive way. Every emotion we have exists to help us solve problems — when we have uncomfortable feelings, we can learn to ask ourselves, what is this emotion telling me, and why? When we are able to accept these emotions, and interpret the information they are transmitting, we will be able to harness their potential to improve our lives. In so doing, we will learn to embrace these uncomfortable emotions, and not fight or fear them.
We can even feel grateful to our uncomfortable emotions for their adaptive benefits. It sounds hokey, but it’s true — we need to feel uncomfortable to survive.
While we can’t eliminate uncomfortable emotions from our lives, we can keep them from overwhelming us. It’s counter-intuitive, but the best way to prevent the second layer of the emotional snowball is to work on accepting and appreciating the beautiful complexity of our emotional system.
References:
- Shariff, A. F.; Tracy, J. L. (2011). “What Are Emotion Expressions For?”. Current Directions in Psychological Science. 20 (6): 395
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