![]() ![]() Rather than trying to think more dichotomously, lean into the zone of mixed emotions, which psychologists call “dialectical thinking.” This is the attitude that opposite emotions are normal and compatible. Psychologists call this “dichotomous thinking,” and studies show that it is neither helpful nor healthy on the contrary, it is associated with a number of personality disorders. My wife-a Spaniard-has told me that she thinks a lot of Americans do this: Everything has to be either wonderful or awful. For example, you could attempt to eliminate shades of gray in your romance by simply deciding that it is “good” or “bad,” and then acting accordingly. O ne seemingly obvious solution to the problem of mixed emotions is to try to eradicate them through more binary thinking. In other words, hating your relationship or your job is emotionally easier than being ambivalent about it. Last year, a researcher found just this when he measured the effects of positive, negative, and mixed emotions on well-being: Positive emotions pushed well-being up, and negative emotions pushed it down meanwhile, the independent measure of mixed emotions also pushed well-being down, and by more than negative emotions alone. You might say that the bad and good are at war internally, exhausting you emotionally. You might assume that your net happiness at a given time would be something like your positive emotion minus your negative emotion if good > bad, then you are “net happy.” But as Catullus suggests, it’s not so simple: Mixed emotions can impose a psychological toll that’s greater than the result of that equation, because they are confusing and conflictive. Or in one moment, you feel good about the overall partnership (I’m glad we’re together!) but bad about certain aspects (she isn’t very affectionate, and that worries me). Sometimes you feel positively about your romantic relationship in the morning, and negatively in the afternoon, for no clear reason. Today, many emotion researchers believe that mixed emotions happen to just about everyone. Read: Sit with negative emotions, don’t push them away Neuroscience added support for this hypothesis when scholars found that positive and negative emotions largely correspond to activity in different hemispheres of the brain (for many people, negative emotions align with activity on the right, positive on the left). ![]() In the 1960s, new psychological research began to collect evidence that positive and negative emotions were in fact separable, and as further research observed, could be felt simultaneously, and also in rapid succession. Even today, people often talk about happiness and unhappiness in this way- as if the presence of one means the absence of the other. If you felt “less bad” as time passed after a loss or trauma, that simply meant you felt “more good.” Researchers didn’t think you could feel good and bad at the same time. Well into the 20th century, many psychologists believed that positive and negative emotions existed on a continuum. T he idea of being able to experience truly “mixed” feelings is quite new. You might think that purely negative emotions are the most unpleasant ones in truth, a cocktail of negative and positive can be worse. They are one of the most complex psychological phenomena we are capable of, and bring us a great deal of distress. Mixed emotions drain your emotional batteries, like a phone connecting to multiple networks simultaneously. Perhaps your childhood was both good and bad, not fitting into a neat frame, and thus feels impossible to explain to others or even yourself. ![]() Or maybe some of your memories are painfully mixed and hard to interpret. Maybe your ambivalence is instead directed toward your employer, and you can’t decide whether to stay and work to make things better, or go someplace else. Romance isn’t the only part of life in which mixed feelings can cause pain. But mixed feelings leave you confused about the right thing to do. Even purely negative feelings would be better, because the course of action would be clear: Say goodbye. If your feelings were purely positive, of course, the relationship would be bliss. If you’ve ever had mixed feelings about someone you love, you know the intense discomfort that results. ![]() I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.” “Ō dī et amō,” the Roman poet Catullus wrote of his lover Lesbia about 2,000 years ago. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. “ How to Build a Life ” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. ![]()
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