Why Are We Determined To Feel Bad?
Over the weekend, I got in the teeniest of tiny disagreements with my boyfriend. So tiny, in fact, the whole conflict probably lasted a couple minutes. My boyfriend listened to my side and immediately calmed down. Within minutes he told me he was ready to forget it and move on with the day. I, meanwhile, was determined to feel angry for a bit longer. All in all, it probably took me close to a half hour before returning to my normal self.
My boyfriend and I talked about this later because he couldn’t understand why I spent so long feeling bad about something so relatively small. He explained that in his mind, once we had reached a resolution, there was no purpose or desire in feeling negatively about it any longer and was able to simply go back to his normal, happy self. I, on the other hand, attempted to explain that it is extremely difficult for me to simply be angry one minute and not the next.
If I’m 100% angry in the moment, then in the next five minutes after resolution, I’m 90% angry, and the following five minutes I’m 75% angry, and so on. It simply takes me longer to come down from an emotion. Consequently, something small won’t ruin my whole day, but it will ruin my next 15-30 minutes. He seemed to understand this and we worked out what his response should be towards me during those minutes. Great, right?
Well I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that discussion. It really was something so small and so solvable, and the fact that my boyfriend got over it so quickly almost made me embarrassed for how long I felt negatively about it. Why was I so determined to stay angry?
Sure, the explanation that it takes me longer to process is valid, but it doesn’t work in reverse. It doesn’t take me a long time to come down from being happy or excited. It’s frustration, anger, and sadness that take longer to work their way through my system, and I know I’m not the only one who feels like this.
Two possible theories have surfaced, possibly working hand in hand.
The first, is that when I’m mad or frustrated with someone else, I desperately want them to understand what I’m feeling. I want them to process the situation, sit with it, and realize the impact they’re having on me. The way that I do this is by staying in my own negative emotions longer, thereby forcing the issue. Even though, in this case, my boyfriend was already over it, some part of me didn’t want him to be. I wanted to be absolutely sure he understood the effects of this disagreement and that the resolution is extremely important to me. The only way I know how to do this myself is to sit with my emotions for a bit, therefore when someone else is involved, I want them to do the same. Logically, I believe that he processed our conversation but emotionally it doesn’t feel like it since he didn’t have the same response as me. Staying mad longer was possibly my way of ensuring he understood the gravity of my emotions.
The second theory is more long term. I wonder if I don’t spend enough time analyzing my positive emotions. I am extremely adept at determining the root cause of my negative ones. I am quick to feel but also quick to recognize what is causing that feeling, and possibly how to move forward. Positive emotions don’t garner the same response. I simply feel them when they’re there and miss them when they’re gone. But when I’m feeling them in the moment, I don’t take the time to stop and analyze why I’m so happy, how I could prolong the feeling, or how to extrapolate it to other situations. Perhaps if I spent a more equal effort analyzing them, I would be slower to come down from my positive emotions and also a bit faster at processing my negative ones.
It is important to allow yourself to feel the full range of your emotions, being able to sit with your feelings and learn from them is an invaluable skill. As such I would never advocate for shutting down negative emotions completely but, sometimes it seems we are determined to wallow in our feelings and unfortunately this seems to apply to to the negative ones more often than the positive ones. We want to feed our anger and drown our sorrows and we spur them on rather than simply letting them pass through us naturally.
There is actually a scientific explanation for this - it’s called the negativity bias. This bias explains the evolutionary concept that humans are hardwired to disproportionately weigh negative responses over positive ones. A few thousand years ago, this was directly related to life and death. Things that made us feel bad usually killed us, so we needed to pay extra attention to learn to avoid them in the future. But now, things aren’t so clear. We experience a whole range of negative emotions that are not directly related to our capacity to stay alive - yet we allow them to stick anyways.
While it’s great to know there is a data-driven explanation for feeling this way, it’s something I’ve always struggled with. On the one hand, it’s allowed me to learn a lot about myself since I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time understanding my negative emotions. On the other hand, it also means I’ve probably spent a lot of time feeling bad for no real reason. I’m not sure if I’ll ever be able to break my negativity bias, but if I can spend even one more minute a day feeling good rather than bad, then it’s worth working on.
