The Bright Side of Uncomfortable Feelings

When bad feelings have good reasons

TL;DR: Negative emotions have a vital role in our lives — they are essential for growth and survival. Understanding the reasons behind feelings like anger, sadness, or fear can change how we view and process them. By acknowledging and respecting our own emotions, we can harness them to guide us towards the more authentic side of ourselves — shaping us to become more resilient and well-rounded individuals.

A few weeks ago, I connected with someone online who suggested I explore the field of “Evolutionary Medicine”, particularly the works of Randolph M. Nesse. I didn’t immediately recall his name, but later found his book, “Good Reasons for Bad Feelings”, on my bookshelf. I had read it more than three years ago, but the memory of how it made me feel came back instantly. The book essentially started me on this very journey to understand how both the environment and our own minds “shape” our experiences.

I started to adopt the view that there’s a purpose behind every emotion we experience, and that perhaps we haven’t been fully tapping into the potential of our feelings. I previously wrote about the importance of embracing ‘all the feels’, and how our feelings impact the way we experience the world. In this piece, I explore the reasons behind our emotions and offer a new perspective on how our negative feelings can actually be beneficial during our toughest of times.

Anger — A Catalyst for Change

Greta Thunberg’s powerfully angry “How Dare You” speech — “You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.”

Anger, often seen as a purely destructive force, holds a far more significant role than it’s typically credited with. Sometimes, anger can act as a powerful signal that our personal boundaries have been crossed, or that our values are being challenged or ignored. Whether someone has disrespected us, infringed on our rights, or threatened our well-being, anger rises as a natural and healthy response. And while unchecked anger can harm relationships, when expressed with care, it can actually strengthened connections. It can open up conversations that enhance mutual understanding and respect through clearing any misunderstandings, and resolving underlying tensions that may have been ongoing.

Properly managed anger can be a potent catalyst for change. It can drive social and personal transformation by pushing us to confront issues and initiate conversations that might otherwise be avoided for the sake of comfort. Anger has fuelled social movements that fight against injustice and inequality, proving that when channeled appropriately, this emotion can contribute significantly to societal progression.

Envy — The Unseen Motivator

Envy, often dismissed as a purely negative emotion, actually carries significant potential for personal insight and motivation. This complex feeling arises when we perceive someone else possessing a quality, achievement, or possession that we desire. Far from being just a source of petty resentment, envy can become a powerful motivator, pushing us to achieve our hidden aspirations. It’s a mirror reflecting our deepest desires and aspirations that we might not have yet acknowledged openly. When we feel envious, it’s often because we see someone achieving something we think is out of our reach or have qualities we wish we had. Recognising your own envy is a valuable tool for self-discovery, because it helps us identify what’s possible and what we truly want out of life.

Envy does not have to result in bitterness, it can fuel a healthy competitive spirit when we are grounded in a desire for personal excellence rather than a wish to outdo others maliciously. It can motivate us to raise our own standards and push for excellence beyond what we previously imagined for ourselves.

Sadness — The Gateway to Connection

Sadness, often seen as a burdensome emotion, plays a crucial role in how we process and respond to life’s challenges. One of the most significant impacts of sadness is its ability to enhance our empathy. When we’re sad, we’re more likely to relate to the struggles and pain of others. It’s not about feeling sorry for others, but more about truly understanding and connecting with the emotions we are experiencing — a sense of shared human experience in joy and suffering. Research has shown that sadness can enhance generosity and altruism. It can make us more inclined to help, perhaps because we understand and want to alleviate it for others.

While sadness is often challenging to endure, it can lead us to appreciate the transient joys of life. In moments of sadness, we may find renewed appreciation for brief moments of happiness, and the everyday comforts we might otherwise take for granted.

Fear — The Resilience Builder

Fear teaches us about resilience by forcing us to confront our anxieties and challenges. Each encounter with fear provides us the opportunity to develop coping mechanisms and strategies that increase our resilience and critical skills over time. Fear can sharpen our strategic thinking, when our minds become hyper-focused, the heightened awareness can lead to a more calculated and informed decision-making. Or by contrast, it can instill a sense of caution that’s essential for risk assessment, preventing reckless decisions and promoting safety in potentially dangerous activities.

Fear can be paralysing at times, but confronting and overcoming fear can lead to huge psychological growth. To have courage isn’t about the absence of fear but the mastery of it. Each time we face a fear, we are practicing courage. From a neurological perspective, confronting fears repeatedly can decrease the neural response to fear stimuli. Over time, this reduces the intensity of fear response, making fearful situation more tolerable and less anxiety-inducing.

(Read: “The Brain that Changes Itself” details our brain’s incredible ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections throughout life, Normal Doidge is also a proponent of fear-reduction through brain neural rewiring using exposure therapy)

Guilt — The Moral Compass

Guilt plays an important role in helping us maintain social harmony and ethical conduct. It arises when we believe we have done something wrong, particularly if our actions have harmed others, or violated our own moral standards. Guilt signals when we’ve strayed from our moral path, and has the ability to encourage us towards prosocial behaviours. Guilt can lead us to make amends and seek forgiveness from the people we’ve wronged. Psychologist, June Tangney notes, “Guilt is the emotional state that arises when one believes they have violated a moral standard and bears responsibility for that violation.”

The discomfort of feeling guilty can be a powerful motivator to avoid repeating behaviours that triggered the guilt in the first place. Guilt is vital for learning from past mistakes and guiding us to making better choices in the future.

Depression — An Honest Signal

Depression is usually viewed as a debilitating emotional state, a condition that slows down our usual pace of life. An interesting theory suggests that depression may have evolved as a way to help us cope with the loss of important social and hierarchical battles. By reducing motivation and activity, depression may have helped our ancestors avoid conflicts and situations where continued effort could lead to worse outcomes, more injury or further social losses. It primes our mind to confront thoughts and feeling, deepening the reevaluation of our life’s choices, values and relationships.

The feeling of depression can act as a harsh but effective mirror — it reveals the discrepancies between what your actions and your deepest desires. Through this reflection, we might recognise a misalignment in our lives, such as pursuing a career that doesn’t fulfill us or maintaining a relationships that don’t support our well-being. The clarity we can gain during depression can motivate changes that are more inline with our authentic self.

(Read: “Depression’s Evolutionary Roots” outlines why depression should not be thought of as a disorder, but an adaptation for analysing complex problems)

Shame — The Fading Critic

Shame is different to all the other emotions I’ve listed because shame is largely a learned emotion. Unlike some basic emotions like fear and joy, which are evident even in very young children and across different cultures without explicit teaching, shame involves an understanding of social norms and expectations, which are taught and internalised from an early age — through interactions with our parents, friends, teachers and other influential figures in our lives.

Although shame can make us more aware of social norms, there’s a growing skepticism about its necessity as more people are questioning if shame really helps us at all? Unlike guilt, which is typically linked to a specific action and can motivate us to make amends, shame is about the “self” rather than the “behaviour”. This intense focus on the “self” can cause feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, which are unlikely to inspire positive changes.

Some cultures and subcultures are actively moving away from shame-based approaches, emphasising the importance of openness, vulnerability, and compassion — influenced by the growing trends in mental health awareness, human rights advocacy, and shifts in education strategies (such as progressive education systems and evolving parenting philosophies).

In Conclusion

Every negative emotion you experience has its place, because there’s a fundamental reason they exist. Acknowledgement is the first step to taking control of it. Understanding that these feelings aren’t a unique or a strange part of us, we will start to see that it’s a universal aspect of the human condition — not just remnants of our evolutionary past, but active and extremely necessary tools for our survival and growth.

Emotions are not obstacles — they are our guides. So go on, approach your negative feelings with curiosity and respect, not avoidance and dread. Instead of being overwhelmed by emotions, use them to our advantage. Listen to what these feelings tell us about our needs, our environment, and our relationships.

And be conscious of the effects of evolutionary biology and our mind. Our emotions are rooted in our ancestral past that were shaped by the pressures of survival and reproduction, not health and happiness. In the rapidly changing modern society we now live in, many emotional responses that were adaptive in ancient environments have now become maladaptive in contemporary settings, causing many of us stress and psychological discomfort if left unattended.

My Favourite finds this week

1. Donald Glover’s Mr & Mrs Smith — this is possibly one of my favourite TV love story. There’s something about two broken people finding love that does it for me. It’s….. oh, so human. Some may view this as an action series, but this is romance all the way! I have always been amazed by Glover’s creation (“This is America” was a masterpiece), but this series went beyond my expectations with their level of details in just about everything. I can only say, the writers really know how to portray genuine love and the absurd side of human relationships.

2. School of Life’s Good Parents — I hope everyone in the whole world watches this video. This is the kind of information we need in order to edge humanity closer to reduced suffering, and I am not exaggerating. Just 7 principles of being a good parent, and understanding what a child really needs. Can you spot your own “inner child” in this video?