Emotional Health

Hi everyone,

A lot of the general shape of Notes on Emotions is summarised in Some Useful Emotion Management Principles, but a thing I realised in trying to write the introduction is that I’d never really laid out the goal of the project. What are you using these principles to do? What does emotional health actually look like?

After some reflection, I came up with a surprisingly simple (and thus probably wrong, but maybe interesting) answer: Emotional health is having your emotions well integrated with your every day practical reasoning and experience of the world.

I’ll unpack that a bit more in the rest of this letter.

Emotional Intensity

For me this project started out with an attempt to experience more intense emotions. I’d noticed that my emotional profile was really quite flat - I didn’t really feel bad, but I rarely felt great either, I was mostly just stuck in neutral. I didn’t want to accept the answer “Some people just have fairly flat emotional profiles and there’s not much they can do about it” that I got from some people (I was correct, this is bad advice. An emotional profile that flat is literally a form of depression, and is worth trying to fix).

That being said, intense emotions aren’t a good thing in and of themselves. For many people attempting to improve their emotional health looks like the opposite: Their emotional experience is too intense, and they can’t deal with that.

I feel like the common theme is that the level of emotional intensity should be appropriate to the situation - if something great/terrible happens we should feel great/terrible. If something vaguely bad happens, we shouldn’t feel terrible, but also we shouldn’t feel great unless the situation is actually great.

Importantly, emotional health does sometimes result in feeling intense negative emotions. It’s tempting to treat negative emotions as the problem, but actually sometimes your life just sucks and your emotions are trying to get you to acknowledge that.

Sometimes this does result in being overwhelmed with emotion. When you’re feeling grief for example (cf. Parts of you are missing) this may be pretty intense to the point of overwhelming. Often in those cases being “overwhelmed” is to some degree the point of the emotion - it’s a signal that you need to pause and take stock and reflect and deal with the thing.

(It feels very callous to say “Yes sometimes people should experience intense grief”, but I still think it’s correct. It’s bad that the thing happened that triggers the grief, and it is bad if they are unable to recover from the grief, but the grief itself is the correct response to the situation and denying it is unlikely to be healthy).

Appropriate Emotions

As well as intensity tracking the situation, it’s important that the emotion itself tracks the situation. Emotions roughly correspond to particular ways of being in the world (e.g. I think I have been badly treated, so I feel angry, so I behave angrily), and the ideal is that the emotions we experience are ones that are appropriate to the situation.

This is, however, slightly tricky for two reasons:

• We may disagree with others about whether an emotion is appropriate. Frequently others will judge our emotions inappropriate when what they really mean is that they are inconvenient to them. If someone does something bad to you and you get angry, chances are good they won’t be very happy about that. Too bad for them.

• Even when our emotions are inappropriate, it can be difficult to know what to do about that.

Figuring out what to do about this is one of the areas I’ve had to do the most work on figuring it out. I think a lot of trauma can be viewed as mostly having learned an inappropriate set of emotional reactions - usually it was the best you could do in the environment you learned it in (cf. Your emotions are valid but probably wrong).

In particular even a flat emotional profile can arise this way. In my case, it was at least partly the result of learning that a lot of emotions were unsafe and that it was better to steer clear of them (it was not).

One particular special case of this is that your emotions should generally be harmonious with each other. One way people often end up in emotional trouble is with “I can’t get myself to do the thing I want to do”. This often manifests as an accelerator/brake clash, where you want to do the thing but also want to not do the thing, and feel conflicted as a result.

Emotional Skill

Another part of integrating emotions with your practical experience is that you need to actually get good at the behaviour corresponding to that emotion. Some of that is about choosing whether or not to act on it (e.g. do you lash out as soon as you get angry or do you respond in a more measured way when necessary?), but even once you decide to act on it this is a thing that you can practice a lot.

I suspect the question of “What does skillfull practice of this emotion look like?” is an interesting and underexplored area. For example, back in self-curiosity I talked about the importance of being comfortable with being stuck, and it feels like this is the skillfull practice of frustration.

Regardless of the specifics though, this seems an integral part of emotional health: When you experience the emotion, you should respond skillfully in a way that improves your life in the direction the emotion is pointing you towards.

Paying Attention

To some degree the above can all be satisfied by just deciding to be a Vulcan (though Spock is a lie) and never having any emotions: That way your emotions will never be inappropriate and you won’t have to worry about the intensity problem at all, you don’t have to be skillfull if you never put yourself in the situation of needing that skill.

This doesn’t go very well. It’s mostly impossible, and you’ll hurt yourself trying. You can ignore emotions, but this tends to result in them becoming dysregulated and confusing rather than going away. I can’t recommend the experience.

It’s also not a great plan. Emotions are very useful. Even if you somehow figure out how to have goals without having emotions about those goals, emotions tend to be very important for helping you achieve those goals by making the experience along the way rewarding (e.g. the fact that food is delicious is fairly helpful for the goal of not starving), and emotion is important even for the “purely rational” bits of making decisions (cf. Intuition as search prioritisation)

So I think the starting point for emotional health has to be to accept that you’re going to have emotions and that’s a good thing, and to start paying attention to what they are. This is not remotely sufficient, but it’s probably necessary.