Why do we have emotions? What good are they anyway?
We love feeling positive emotions and hate feeling negative ones. Positive emotions feel good. Negative ones feel bad, so of course we’d like to avoid them. If we had a switch, we’d definitely turn them off, but…(1) that’s not possible and (2) we need them just as much as we do positive emotions.
Emotions exist to communicate information to us about our needs, goals, wishes, and desires. Most people have a strong desire to avoid injury and to stay alive. Let’s say a woman with this mentality decides to cross the street. She looks both ways before crossing the street (because she wants to live and avoid injury), and begins walking across. As soon as she gets to the middle of the street, a car quickly turns a corner and is coming right for her. What emotion will she experience? You guessed it…fear!
The woman’s fear in this situation is communicating urgent information to her about her goals of avoiding death and injury. Fear is telling her, “Hey, your goal of staying alive is in jeopardy because of the oncoming car!” The fear will energize her mind and body to take action, which will encourage her to quickly get out of the way of the oncoming car, so she can continue achieving her goal of staying alive and avoiding injury. Fear is what motivated her to take action to maintain her goal.
Positive emotions also help us achieve our goals. We all have values and we feel fulfilled and satisfied when we’re acting in line with them. Let’s say it’s a Sunday afternoon, and some guy is thinking about all of the things he did over the weekend. He played golf with a friend, he and his wife made decisions about some important issues, and he took his kids to the park. All of these actions are inline with his goals of being a good friend, husband, and father, so he experiences feels proud and satisfied. These emotions feel good, which reinforce his choices over the weekend to act out his values. Pride and satisfaction is a reward for achieving his goals, which increases the chance that he will do more behaviors that are inline with his goals of being a good friend, husband, and father.
Negative emotions feel good and positive emotions feel bad, but both have important information to communicate to us about our goals. If we get carried away by the feeling of the emotion, we are likely to miss the information it is trying to tell us. We can also miss the impulsive and sometimes unhelpful actions our emotions like to suggest (e.g., yelling at our spouse when we feel hurt by them.) If we’re not aware of how our emotions are acting as well-intentioned but unhelpful friends, we are more likely to do what they tell us to do.
We have an opportunity to become more skilled at observing our emotions instead of just feeling them, listening for what the emotion is trying to tell us about our goals, and acting intentionally instead of impulsively. This of course takes a lifetime of practice, but with intention we can strive toward being the best version of ourselves!
About The Author
Brian Whitley
I draw from many different types of therapy to help my clients including Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Harm Reduction, Exposure Therapy, Cognitive Processing Therapy, and Internal Family Systems Therapy. For marriage and couples counseling, I draw from Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy, The Doherty Approach, and the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy.
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