M.H.
In one of his recorded talks titled The Middle Way, Alan Watts described the recognition that the positive and negative elements of life cannot exist without one another.
“If you try to gain the positive and deny the negative, it’s as if you were trying to arrange everything in [a] room so that it was all up and nothing was down,” Watts said. “You can’t do it. You’ve set yourself an absolutely insoluble problem.”
Emotions such as fear, sadness, disappointment, and worry are unavoidable. They are part of the human condition — the necessary antipodes of joy, delight, pleasure, contentment, and relief. Attempts to stamp them out are doomed to fail.
‘People think good mental health means never feeling bad, and I think there is a general sentiment being reinforced across the board culturally that people shouldn’t have to feel bad.’
I thought of Watts’s lecture recently when I spoke with the psychologist Michelle Newman. Newman, PhD, is a professor and director of the Laboratory for Anxiety and Depression Research at Penn State University.
I spoke to her for a print feature I was writing about the rise in anxiety disorder diagnoses among Americans, which have become much more commonplace now than they were 20 or 30 years ago. She highlighted some usual suspects — namely our increasingly solitary and isolated lifestyles, and also the saturation of our digital spaces with sensationalized and distressing content.
But then she brought up something I wasn’t expecting.
“The other thing that’s changed is that people are more avoidant of negative emotion,” she told me. “People think good mental health means never feeling bad, and I think there is a general sentiment being reinforced across the board culturally that people shouldn’t have to feel bad.”
She added, “Especially in younger people, there’s this notion that if it makes me feel bad, the other person needs to stop doing it, or I need to avoid situations like this. But it is important and healthy to feel the whole range of emotions.”
To be sure, it’s natural to want to minimize negative emotional experiences. They’re no fun. The problem is that if we go overboard in our attempts to eradicate anything that makes us feel bad — if we think of all negative emotions as worrying signs of illness, or if we view all unpleasant experiences as threatening or even harmful — those interpretations can promote mental imbalance and, ultimately, disorder.
There is a mountain of psychological research that shows “avoidance” — or keeping away from things that make you feel bad — tends to exaggerate the strength of your emotional response if you encounter that thing in the future.
If you’re afraid of dogs, for example, fleeing every time you see a dog is likely to make your fear worse. It will “reinforce” your phobia, to use the psychological argot.
Likewise, the research on exposure therapy reveals how spending time engaging with the sources of one’s angst or distress tends to minimize those unpleasant experiences. The more time you spend speaking in public, the easier and more carefree public speaking becomes.
‘If you call things mental health problems that are just ordinary kinds of sufferings or normal, transient responses to adversity, that . . . leads more people to feel in some way broken or damaged.’
The applicability of all this goes well beyond phobias.
“The whole model of stress and coping, as well as cognitive-behavioral therapy, is all about the idea that it’s not the event itself — but what you say to yourself about the event — that makes you feel bad,” Newman says.
The Johns Hopkins psychologist and neuroscientist Roland Griffiths made a similar point to me last year when we were talking about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. “People come out of the experience [of psychedelics] with a different framing of who they are relative to their experiences,” he said. “They recognize that they were slapping a label on themselves or their experiences, and often that recognition changes everything.”
Lately, our relationship to negative emotional experiences — the labels we slap on ourselves when we experience worry or sadness or anger — has soured.
We’ve absorbed the psychiatric messaging that these bad feelings, if experienced “too often” or if they “begin to interfere with our life” — highly subjective criteria that ignore the circumstances that precipitate these emotions — may be evidence of some kind of disorder.
The psychologist Nicholas Haslam has argued that “harm inflation” within his profession has bled into popular culture in problematic ways. When I spoke with him earlier this year, he told me that “we pathologize more and more things — we treat more and more phenomena as signs of mental illness — and that doesn’t necessarily benefit people.”
He added: “If you call things mental health problems that are just ordinary kinds of sufferings or normal, transient responses to adversity, that . . . leads more people to feel in some way broken or damaged.”
There are a lot of reasons why we’ve ended up here. Haslam and others have argued that there are obvious commercial and socio-political forces that benefit when we interpret negative emotions in exaggeratedly dire ways.
Meanwhile, the rise (and cultural saturation) of the positive psychology movement is also a contributing factor.
I’ve written before about the “happiness paradox” — how prioritizing happiness as a goal tends to make people miserable. I think it’s difficult to spend time online these days without absorbing the idea that you can and should feel good most of the time, and that negative emotions are often a worrying indicator of some kind of nascent or simmering disorder.
A 2021 study I stumbled across recently in the journal Frontiers in Public Health nicely summarized this view. “The absence of psychopathology does not necessarily indicate wellness,” its authors wrote. “Emotional distress may manifest into more serious disorders if not managed correctly.”
This kind of messaging is surely well-intentioned, but it promotes the idea that negative emotions are like little weeds of mental dysfunction in an otherwise tidy yard — weeds that need to be watched carefully (or blasted with Roundup) — lest they bloom into disorders.
But that’s wrong. Those unpleasant emotions are as much a part of us as their happy counterparts. They are the Downs that makes life’s Ups possible.
“The reality is that if you’re able to feel good, that also leaves you vulnerable to feeling bad,” Penn State’s Newman said. “Healthy people feel the whole range of emotions. They’re part of life.”
