Why We Feel and How to Feel Better
By: Josh J Cole
Tags: How To, Emotions, Anger, Self Control, Sadness

I have a three-year-old. We are in a pandemic. I am trying to make a difference. I work with passionate people on hopefully important things. That means I deal with a lot of big feelings.

I imagine we all do. I hope we all do. Emotions keep things exciting — they color the world and keep us moving forward. They can also be distracting and unpleasant. Because of that, they get a terrible reputation in our culture and especially in our workplaces.

But the fact remains: most of us are emotional creatures. Why? What purpose does emotion serve? What help can it be?

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What We Know About Emotion

I am not an expert on emotions. People who are have done a lot of research to figure out why our emotions evolved the way they did and how to deal with them. I have read some research, but I’m not here to tell you what I’ve read.

What I can do is help you understand and use your own emotions in a helpful way. If you start studying emotion, you’ll find conflicting advice, historical context, details about your emotions and others’ emotions and what to do with them.

You will not find simplicity or clarity. I hope I can offer that here.

Emotion, more than anything else, is a complex topic. It exists on a spectrum and our relationship to it varies wildly. Even experts struggle to agree on the details. These facts are just about the only thing I can find consensus around:

Emotions are not good or bad, but they can be pleasant or unpleasant. They’re nothing but chemical data.

Feelings are the experience of emotion, but our emotion is there whether we notice it or not. I may not feel sad right now, but I could still be carrying sadness in me.

Emotions are not under our control, but our reactions to them are.

Emotions, especially unpleasant ones, are expressions of unmet needs.

Emotions fall into a spectrum which can be categorized all sorts of ways. There is no consensus on the primary emotions.

For now, let’s talk about what emotions are for.

Why We Feel

Emotions are a natural part of our biology. I don’t know why that is. I’m only interested in their purpose — how we use them. What we choose to do with our emotions may be all the meaning they’ll ever get.

So how do emotions help? Emotions get needs noticed.

Emotions are instinctive reactions to unsatisfied needs. They don’t always do a great job of getting you straight to the real need, but they’re pretty good at making noise. Example:

Reality: I need food, but am focused on a different problem.

Emotion: I am irrationally angry at my problem.

Feeling: I feel angry. I’m aware a need exists, but do not know which one.

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Brains are so complicated that pure needs often get tangled up in them. Sometimes, we don’t notice until there’s so much emotion on a need that the feeling hits us, and then the feeling hits us hard.

Our brains do this for all sorts of reasons. Maybe we’ve been conditioned not to ask for or react to their needs. Maybe we don’t have words for our needs. We usually don’t even know our real needs and have to trust what we want.

We Got Problems

Sometimes, all we know is that there’s a problem— a gap between what we have and what we want.

That gap can come in two forms.

Hunger: Absence of something you want. This is any time you’ve got an unmet need — maybe you’re genuinely hungry (a “Be” need), in search of meaning in your work (“Believe”), or feeling bored (“Become”).

Danger: Presence of something you don’t want. This is when you’ve got a new need or an increase in need — maybe you’re in physical pain (“Be”), threatened by the popular kids (“Belong”), or your politics are being challenged (“Believe”).

When we’re the predator, we’re worried about hunger. When we’re the prey, we’re worried about danger. We’re usually both and worried about both.

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How we solve problems

Our brains actually have two distinct halves — the instinctive brain and the narrative mind. Experiences come in through our senses, then brains check for emergency situations.

If it’s an emergency, our instincts kick in. Even if it’s not, our instincts color the experience with emotion before it becomes a story our minds can work with. So, emergency or no, our instincts have their say.

The path toward action

We see this in what’s best known as the fight-or-flight reflex, but there are actually four possible instinctive reactions: fight, flight, freeze, and appease.

Before we ever had vast reserves of feeling that we could attach to stories, we had those four instincts. Think of them as the live-in grandparents of our newfangled modern emotions.

I like to use that family resemblance to structure emotions:

Fight = Anger. This powerful emotion kicks in when facing danger might remove the unwanted presence and earn peace.

might remove the unwanted presence and earn peace. Flight = Fear. If your instincts can’t imagine defeating a threat, you’ll get scared and motivated to avoid danger .

. Freeze = Sadness. If you’re dealing with something you can’t address, your sadness might kick in to help you face hunger .

. Appease = Happiness. If there are obvious ways to address a need, the hope and reward of happiness motivates you to avoid hunger.

Note that I’m claiming that there are really only two types of reaction—endurance or evasion. I say this because the continual passage of time removes neutral options. We’re either dealing with something or we aren’t.

Let’s explore each of these in more detail.

Anger

Anger, maybe more than any of the others, gets a bad reputation. It’s ugly, they say, or even evil. They’ll claim that it is antisocial, or useless, or dangerous.

They are lying.

Society tells this lie for an obvious reason. Anger helps you fight, and those who lead society don’t want you fighting. Anger is unpredictable, and society wants you predictable.

Anger is horsepower. It’s a fire and an engine. And it’s often necessary.

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When it isn’t useful to you, I recommend forgiveness. All other times, I recommend leveraging anger to get shit done. Let’s look at some examples.

A saber-toothed tiger is nearby. You have a spear. If you attack, you might kill it before it kills you. If you hold your ground, you might get your spear into it as it pounces. Either way, this is your fight reflex at work. You’ve still got it, but it’s grown up a little bit too. Someone’s taking credit for your work, and you have evidence. If you do it in this meeting, you might take the wind out of them in the moment. If you do it afterwards, you might have an opportunity to turn the situation to your advantage. If you weren’t mad, you’d let it lie and more people might suffer from the misunderstanding.

Note some commonalities here — you’ve got opposition and opportunity in both these cases. If there’s a threat and something to do about it, anger’s at its most useful. If you’re missing that recipe, your anger’s gonna be a little harder to use.

When your anger is useful, and especially when it’s justified, we like to call it zeal. There is nothing wrong with zeal. There’s a lot out there that needs to be destroyed. Get out there and make some good trouble.

Fear

Chemically, fear and anger have a whole lot in common. They also appear in similar circumstances — you’ve got opposition that is risking your wellbeing. You have something you don’t want. Danger.

But there’s a difference here — you have no advantages. Often, the scariest things are those you can’t understand. You’re caught empty-handed and empty-headed. There’s nothing you can do but scream, run, or hide.

But you can still do that. When fear’s at its most useful, the situation is still developing and still needs a reaction.

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There’s a saber-toothed tiger nearby. You don’t have a spear, but you’re not dead yet. If it hasn’t seen you, you might survive if you hide. If it has, you might need to call for help or dash to a safer place. Your employer is struggling, and there might be lay-offs soon. You might lay low and try not to get noticed, or update your resume and start planning your own escape. But there’s nothing you can do to stop the real threat of lay-offs.

Fear doesn’t feel great, and it usually doesn’t help you make the smartest or longest-term decisions. It is the mind-killer, after all. More than any other emotion, it is optimized purely for speed. Sometimes you need speed.

And sometimes you need courage, which you can’t have without fear. Short-circuiting that helpless feeling and making a brave choice is a powerful thing that only fear can teach us.

Sadness

While anger and fear deal with real or imagined danger, sadness deals with hunger — those time that we’re missing a need. This goes far beyond food — our basic needs include belonging and personal growth, and we can suffer hunger for any of those things.

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When we can’t satisfy that hunger, we need to deal with it head on. We can’t stab hunger with a spear, but we can face its sad reality, work to acknowledge it, and move on. We mourn all the time in all kinds of small ways.

Sadness feels like giving up, and it should — that’s what it’s for. Sometimes you need to stop. We can’t win every battle.

A saber-toothed tiger ate your dog. Nothing you do will bring your dog back. The tiger is long gone, too — vengeance isn’t an option, and even if it was it would be both pointless and dangerous. All you can do is mourn — you wanted your dog and you don’t have her any more. Your worst nightmare came true — you lost your job. It’s completely gone. No amount of running or fighting will bring it back. A whole future you might have had is dead and gone, and some of your dreams went with it. Sadness lets you face that reality, mourn it, and deal with it. Without sadness, the pain has nowhere healthy to go.

Living with depression, I have a very difficult relationship with sadness. By default, I feel sad all the time. Sometimes so sad I can’t do anything, and all for no clear reason (or all the reasons). Because of this, it has taken me a long time to realize the value sadness can have.

Don’t get me wrong — depression sucks. Sometimes things just suck. But knowing that and mourning it lets you face and endure that reality. Healthy sadness is a skill I’m still learning, but understanding it this way has helped me a lot.

Happiness

If hunger is wanting what you don’t have and danger is having what you don’t want, happiness is when you have what you want and want what you have. Like the other emotions, it’s a reaction to a gap. The difference is that this is a gap you can close or have closed.

Being a pleasant emotion, happiness rewards us when we take actions that get us closer to our needs. It is not what we need in itself — I’ve said it before; saying happiness is the point of life is like saying Pavlov’s experiment was about feeding dogs.

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Happiness’ grandma is the “appease” reaction — when you try to please something so it won’t pose a danger to you.

A saber-toothed tiger is nearby. You throw it a slab of meat so it will like you instead of hurting you. That’s “appease” 101.

But in our world, we work harder to appease our society. Have you heard of emotional labor? Unless you’re an actor, just about the only emotion you’re ever asked to perform is happiness.

After the lay-off, you work at a coffee shop to make ends meet. (After all, our society will happily let you die of starvation or curable diseases if you don’t have money or insurance.) At the coffee shop, you are expected to smile constantly. You’re supposed to be happy to help. You are appeasing constantly.

But happiness is more than just appeasement of potential threats. When we chase what we want, when we follow hope, when we help each other and ourselves, we are appeasing ourselves. We’re trying to get that sweet dopamine.

Hope, like fear and anger, gives us energy. Though it is pleasant, it’s not good or bad. It just helps us get moving, same as anything else.

When Feelings Get Tangled

Our emotional reactions get triggered by our stories and experiences based on the criteria mentioned above, but they don’t always behave quite right. They can get twisted for two major reasons:

Your nature: Different brains are pre-disposed to different chemicals and different reactions to problems. Mine, for instance, is pre-disposed to sadness and freezing in the face of danger. Your nurture: Every experience you have, your mind keeps track of what did and didn’t appear to work. If I have enough experiences where sadness hurts more than it helps, I might be conditioned to get mad instead.

The core emotional triggers

Note that neither of these are actually great predictors of whether an emotion is the best reaction to a situation. The emotion that you’re feeling is a data point, but it’s not necessarily to be trusted.

If we always responded completely appropriately to our circumstances, we might follow this flowchart.

But we don’t, do we? It’d be kind of boring if we did. But knowing the core path of our emotions might help us identify which one would genuinely be most helpful in a given situation.

As an example, I’ve recently been dealing with a situation where I’m feeling powerless and it’s making me mad. But is anger actually useful here? Not exactly — there is no actual danger and I am, in fact, completely powerless. By my handy-dandy flowchart, sadness is the more useful reaction. If only I could choose it.

When you get familiar with yourself and your default reactions, you might even start to notice patterns. For instance, I tend to feel sad when I should feel mad because I’m too scared of my anger to use it. I know to be suspicious of my sadness and ask myself if there’s anger under there.

On top of that, it’s rare that we feel just one thing. Any one scenario in life might be colored by a little mad, a little sad, along with a mix of happy fear. And any of those could be results of mis-matched conditioning or chemicals.

But knowing that doesn’t do much good alone. We’re going to feel what we feel, regardless of how well that emotion fits our circumstance. And even when it does fit your circumstance, it still might be more distracting than useful.

But, as with everything, we’ve got options.

How to Change How You Feel

Our emotions are reactions to our reality, and our only access to reality comes through the stories we tell ourselves. If we want to change our own minds, we need to change the way we see the world.

That’s all.

Here’s how:

Find Your Feeling — Before you try to address a useless emotion, you have to find it and know what it is. “Name it to tame it.” Just acknowledging how you’re feeling and saying it out loud gives you a chance to move past the distraction. This is why it’s valuable to have a short list of primary emotions — no analysis paralysis, just pick one or two of your four options. Feel It — There is no such thing as an evil feeling. They don’t exist. If you’re being honest with yourself, you’re feeling something real and true. This feeling is valid. What matters is what you do with it. If you’re mad, shout into a pillow. If you’re happy, do a dance. Let your body harmlessly experience how you feel. Thank It — No matter how unpleasant it may feel, it’s doing a job and it’s doing it well. Remember: emotions get needs noticed. It’s doing that. You might feel silly thanking it, but it really does help. Question It—What is the feeling trying to tell you? Where did it come from? What unmet needs do you have? Is there something you want and don’t have, or something you have you don’t want? Can you sate the hunger or fight the danger? What’s the need behind it? Replace It —Check out the flowchart above. Which emotion fits best? Take the evidence that inspired your first story and tell a new story that’s designed to trigger the emotion you want. I don’t know how you’re wired, but I bet you know how to make yourself mad, glad, sad, or scared. Get to Work — To make your new feeling real, you’ll want to do something with it, however small. Maybe scream into a pillow or do a dance. (This little trick takes advantage of a nasty little feature of our brains that makes us forcibly re-interpret reality to justify our past actions.) Then use your feeling to do what it’s meant to do.

Example: At a job, you’re required to work on a project that you know to be a poor use of company resources. You’ve done your best to convince the powers that be that it’s the wrong choice, and no change has been made. You find yourself acting whiny and irritable. 1. Find Your Feeling — For you, those are symptoms of anger, one of your go-to reactions when something feels like a waste. 2. Feel It — You’re pissed. That’s okay. You rage and swear and stomp somewhere where no one can hear you. 3. Thank It —Thank the rage. There is a problem that it helped you notice. 4. Question It — Why are you mad? Your boss wants you to waste time that he’s paying you for. You know you could help more in a different way. But your job is to do the project you’ve been asked to do. 5. Replace It — There’s no danger here. You’re hungry to help more than you’re able to help, but there’s nothing within reason that you can do. This is a sad story about wasted potential, not malicious misuse of time. 6. Get to Work — Mourn the upcoming waste. Make a plan to get it over with as soon as possible so that you can get back to what you care about.

This process can work for any emotion, and once you get the hang of it you might find that it starts happening quickly and automatically for some of your more frequent mis-matched feelings. All conditioning can be re-conditioned.

Why to Love Feeling

Our feelings can be a headache, but they’re useful — they get needs noticed and motivate us to solve them. Whether fear is speeding you up or sadness is slowing you down, your emotions can help you improve your world.

Even when they get in the way, it’s not because they’re bad. They’re just misaligned, and they can be realigned. We’re taught to be so scared of how we feel that it’s easy to forget that how we feel is important and useful.

And even if it wasn’t? Emotions still color in the world. They light life up, making it complicated and beautiful.

I’ll love them for that, if nothing else.