Emotions: Hero or villain?
Emotions have often been the turf for a pitched battle over control. This battle is connected to a variety of psychological misinformation. In one camp, people who glorify emotions as the promised land. “If it feels good, it is good,” they say. Willing, or rather eager, to jump into any experience that promises pleasure, and out of any that promises pain. This group, often composed of youth, is no better represented than by a museum I recently came across in the American Dream mall in East Rutherford, NJ: the Museum of Emotions (see images below). Come in, and we will curate your experience such that you can capture your feeling, just as you might capture an image in a photograph.
In the other camp, people who view emotions as the cause of all problems. Eager to analyze and pick apart the “good” feelings from the “bad.” They argue about what amount of a feeling is “healthy.” Overall, they view emotion as the cause of all bad behavior, and try to reason it into oblivion. This group is typically composed of middle-aged adults (my apologies for being one of that demographic, though not one of that camp). It is no better represented than by the mental health establishment, which has created entire illnesses around sadness (depressive disorders), anxiety (anxiety disorders), anger (disruptive behavior disorders), fear (stress and trauma disorders, psychotic disorders), and yes, even happiness (bipolar disorders) and desire (paraphilic disorders).
Who is right? Are emotions heroes or villains? I’ll show you the assumptions being made here, and why this isn’t even the right question.
Where do emotions come from?
Emotions are an extremely important evolutionary tool. They are coordinated by our limbic system, and fit in both with brain response networks as well as broader physical response systems. Emotions are like our body’s own smart-home system: there are signals to say everything is functioning as expected, or to say we’re acting with peak efficiency and purpose. Our emotions signal danger, or that we are run down and overloaded, or that systems are not working as expected and need to be adjusted. Even better, with our emotional system, we don’t have to worry that the system was designed for people who don’t look like us. We don’t need to say “Hey, Alexa,” or hope that our body doesn’t misinterpret our questions. All we have to do is observe. The information is right there.
That last part – observe – is actually much trickier than it sounds. Unfortunately no time to get into that here; perhaps a different post.
Emotions and Psychological Misinformation
Not only is observing tricky, but this is also where assumptions based on psychological misinformation create problems.
Who’s in charge? I am!
The first assumption is control. We all want it. We all want to believe we have it about everything to do with ourselves. When it comes to emotions, we want to believe we can pick how we feel. “You can’t hurt me.” Or, the classic Stoic line from Epictetus and taken up by cognitive therapists: “It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.” Sounds nice, but it doesn’t hold up. After all, how would a museum hope to curate emotions if it’s entirely up to us how we feel about it?
When you think about it, a system that works that way would be chaos. Imagine having to think through every emotion you have. Someone says, “I love you.” And you stand there frozen for many seconds, thinking, “Well those sound like nice words, and I like this person, and love is generally considered a positive in relationships. Sounds like I feel… happy? Excited? Loving?” We may want this control; for better or for worse, we don’t have it.
Who’s in charge? No one!
Others overdo it the other way. This narrative says emotions are biologically hard-wired. Some people are just keyed up about everything. Others don’t care about anything. This narrative produces helplessness: I’m just designed this way, I can’t do anything about it. It also has an extreme individualistic bias: my emotions are only about me. We remove the context.
However, we don’t exist in bubbles. For example, that sadness you feel was cued. Perhaps you are trying to solve a particular challenge and your body remembers a time when you faced something similar and it didn’t work out. Sure, biology underpins the emotional response. But it is a living response, in constant dialogue with what’s happening in your life and therefore constantly changing.
Think of it like your breath. Sometimes it’s fast and feels like your heart is bursting from your body. Sometimes it is slow and feels connected into the rhythms of the world around you. And other times, you may not notice it at all. Throughout, it’s the same breath, your breath, ebbing and flowing with how you are.
Emotions and eugenics
The next area of misinformation, eugenics, comes out of the belief that emotions are hard-wired. Eugenics is the racist and sexist notion that some people are biologically superior to others. It comes out of a misunderstanding of evolution. Unfortunately, we continue to hear these ideas all the time in group stereotypes: Italians and Irish are intensely emotional, while Germans, Japanese, and the English are cold and calculating. Women are emotional, men are rational. These are all nonsense statements with no evidence to back them. In fact, you can look historically and notice how stereotypes flip. For example, 19th century western culture saw men as emotional and passionate, and women as cold and calculating.
Emotions tie into our cultural values. This can be a good thing: we can use them to promote trust, harmony, and striving together. But that does not mean there’s any evidence for differences in biological tendency or capacity.
Emotions are the end-all
Another major area of misinformation is very much tied to western culture: emotions as an end rather than a means. Many people see “being happy” as their life goal. And conversely, avoid any state of sadness, anxiety, anger, etc. at all costs. This pitfall is everywhere in American culture. We gamble on slot machines and online bets, where we chase the momentary thrill. In social media, where we chase the emoticon likes and hearts, and reduce human connection to the drip of a drug. In consumer culture, where we spend our hard-earned money on the thing guaranteed to make us happy. And in food culture, where we load up on synthesized empty calories and try to ingest as much of it as we can. I just want to be happy, runs the narrative. Life is short. Can’t you just let me take happiness where I can find it?
This one is hard to challenge. Happiness, excitement, joy – these are nice states to be in! There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Just let me have my joy museum! This is where the misinformation becomes so important. Emotions are a signaling system, not an end product. We don’t have friendships so that we can feel love; love guides us to build strong friendships. Love is the means, friendship is the end. When I just focus on feeling love, I won’t tell my friend that she hurt my feelings. I won’t remember to think about my other friends and family too, when I’m caught up in the ecstasy of love with this person. If we’re only focused on the immediate rewards, we may feel like the work of making strong relationships is a distraction.
You don’t want it, you got it.
What do we end up with? Ironically, more of what we were trying to avoid in the first place. More sadness. Greater anxiety. Increased loneliness. More heart disease and diabetes. This is what Dr. Harris is getting at in his book/program, The Happiness Trap. It’s easy to lose our connection to our values and our sense of purpose, when we make the mistake of viewing emotions as the goal itself, rather than simply a signal about the goal.
Emotions and Psychological Misinformation: And the winner is…
Emotions are heroes. Duh.
JK. I hope that by this point, you can see that this debate itself is a false narrative. Emotions aren’t heroes or villains, any more than a particular food is healthy or unhealthy, or a particular person good or evil. Put back into context, emotions are an important tool for living a meaningful, purposeful, connected, and hopefully, fulfilling life. May we all have the support and courage to build this richness together.