When We Feel Bad for Feeling Bad

Until I was about 20 years old, I had the unique feeling that suffering was twice as bad as it normally would be. I not only felt bad, but I felt bad for feeling bad. I thought I was supposed to be happy all the time, because that was the message I had internalized through societal messaging, Disney movies, Hallmark cards, and just not being told that suffering was normal. I thought feelings of unhappiness and pain were unnatural and wrong and did everything possible to suppress them.

I distinctly recall various phases during my freshman year of college where I resorted to drastic means of making sure I never felt unhappy. No, I did not constantly party and drown myself in alcohol. I instead tried my best to drink gallons and gallons of water and filled my water bottle about 15 times a day. I would drink water until I almost felt lightheaded or sick, and sometimes it would make me feel a lot better and cognitively “there,” like I could conquer the world and I would never run into any problems with not comprehending an academic task, not having trouble in social situations, and, above all, never feeling sad or unhappy. To an extent, it worked to clear my head, but naturally, too much water wasn’t the most healthy thing — I would go to track and cross country practice as an athlete and just not be able to run my normal pace at all, and be beset by lightheadedness and hyponatremia.

It would take me much more self-awareness and realizing that, well, everyone feels unhappy and suffers. The problem wasn’t the feeling, but the expectation. I bought into the narrative that you’re supposed to be happy all the time and I didn’t have any other framework or expectation. I would, like any teenager living in America, tell myself that other people had it worse, that I had nothing to complain about, that my parents had it worse when they grew up, that at least I never struggled with hunger.

I knew real life was more complicated than being happy all the time, but I still chased the feeling. I thought there was something wrong with me when I didn’t feel happy and didn’t perform up to par. I thought there was something wrong with me, that I wasn’t normal like other people just because I felt like I had mood swings and feelings of sadness more often than most.

It was hard to feel like there was something wrong with me just for normal human experiences and negative emotions. When I was younger, I suffered from social anxiety in middle school. I would overanalyze social situations and start freaking out over how loud I would breathe in quiet rooms, or how loudly my stomach would growl in quiet rooms. These sound so trivial today, but I would freak out. I once told my parents about how I worried so much about the noises my stomach would make. My parents rarely ever agree on anything, but they had a united response: “who cares?”

They meant that stomach noises were such a small and trivial part of the world, and meant to convey that no one would really judge me for them. But it seemed like most people did not freak out about these things. I would bring it up to friends once in a while and once I got them thinking about the volume of their breathing, they would overthink it too. It gave me solace to realize I wasn’t completely crazy at the time.

I always thought that anxiety was wrong in itself too. I felt like it was wrong to have these overthinking thoughts, and hence tried to dismiss them or push them away. Naturally, trying not to think those thoughts or feel those feelings only made me feel them more.

Over time, this feeling would ebb. I still sometimes wonder whether my breathing is too loud or get nervous that people hear when my stomach make noises. But, yes, over time I did internalize the fact that no one really cared, and if they did care, their opinion wasn’t one that matters that much. I started to realize there were more serious things to worry about. There was my brother who started struggling with his mental health and suicidal ideation. My parents never got along. My friends would go through their own ordeals with loss and mental health. I would have traumatic experiences myself that were the cause of situational bouts of depression.

Through some close friends, I learned it was not wrong to suffer. Yes, there is a certain point of diminishing returns in wallowing in that suffering. But sometimes, I just had to ride through the wave of emotion and feel it. I would at times feel like there was something wrong because there was no particular event or physiological reason why I was experiencing that sadness, but I learned that other people feel sad for no reason all the time, too.

Unsurprisingly, in my traditional Asian upbringing, my parents taught me to never talk about my emotions. After all, they never talked about their emotions — it was how they were raised, too. My non-Asian friends were a little more open about it, but mental health awareness and combatting stigma weren’t as much of a thing then as they are today. Without that education, of course I jumped to the conclusion that feeling negative emotions was just wrong.

It was in some Christian faith circles where I first learned that not only do other people experience the same type of meta-emotion I did. I was turned off from religion at a young age, thinking religious people as a whole were sanctimonious and hypocritical. However, the particular college classmates I surrounded myself with were going through similar emotions and experiences to me. They struggled with depression, anxiety, trauma, and grief, and they talked and prayed about it. I sensed that a lot of people came to religion and Jesus for these trials and tribulations in life because nothing else seemed to help them manage them. But I noticed they largely didn’t want to make the feelings go away, but only tried to find more sustainable and better ways of coping, which was a gamechanger for me and my mental framework.

I also learned that sometimes, my negative emotions were trying to tell me something. Physically, as a runner, feeling a lot of physical pain meant one of two things: (1) I needed to slow down, or (2) I was injured. I used to think running was inherently always supposed to be painful, that if there was no pain, there was no gain. But this is only true to an extent, and pushing myself to that feeling every day only meant I would burn out and get worse.

Eventually, I came to see that negative emotions were also trying to tell me something. If I always felt down or bad about myself hanging out with a particular group of people, maybe I wasn’t always the problem — maybe that group wasn’t one I wanted to hang out with. Feelings of strain or simply being unhappy usually meant I had some need that wasn’t met — it could have been as being hungry or needing to sleep, or something as trivial as not having been invited to a party. As a teacher, sometimes feeling like I should have handled an interaction with a student differently or done something different or better to reach a particular student was a normal reflective emotion that I needed to feel to become a better teacher.

Because I was so in tune to my emotions, I did learn, however, how to label them, and how to label my own response to them, too. I started to embrace the first emotion I felt instead of resisting it. The act of resisting instead of feeling, I realized, was the cause of compounding despair, and once I gradually learned how to stop feeling bad about feeling bad, normal life became much more bearable without the amplification of suffering.

Natasha Bailen, Renee Thompson, and Haijing Wu Hallen at the Greater Good Magazine call feeling bad about feeling bad a “meta-emotion,” and it is a larger, unstudied phenomenon that many of us experience: feelings about feelings.

The authors, who worked at the Emotion and Mental Health Lab at Washington University in St. Louis, found that half of respondents from the greater St. Louis community reported feeling meta-emotions. Meta-emotions were classified into four types: negative-negative, positive-negative, positive-positive, or positive-negative. Here are some examples of each type of meta-emotion:

• Negative-negative: “I’m sad that I’m feeling sad.”
• Positive-negative: “I’m happy that I’m feeling sad.”
• Negative-positive: “I’m sad that I’m happy.”
• Positive-positive: “I’m happy that I’m happy.”

The researchers found, however, that negative-negative meta-emotions led to greater feelings of depression and are particularly problematic. They also found that feelings of depression could lead to negative meta-emotions. The researchers also found that people who are more likely to experience strong meta-emotions are those who were raised to see emotions as a sign of weakness, or who struggle with emotional awareness. Inherently, meta-emotions are a value judgment of emotions and aren’t always a bad thing. The researchers point to an example of feeling guilty at feeling angry at your spouse, or, by extension, feeling guilty about being angry at your kids. This can lead someone to explore whether that anger is justified and choose how to respond instead of just exploding.

I will say that I have also had positive experiences with meta-emotions, namely in dealing with anger. I grew up around people who struggled with their anger, namely my father. It was the one emotion I never wanted to show to others and I promised to never be an angry person. Naturally, I, like anyone, would get angry when inconvenienced or at a perceived injustice.

But instead of just snapping and not having any impulse control the moment I felt that anger, I instead thought about that anger and thought about how to resolve it internally. I would sometimes think that anger was wrong, and I would wonder whether I was justified in feeling it or if I was at all at fault, too. But I would try to manage anger by walking away or doing something else instead of exploding at the situation because of the instinctive meta-emotions I developed around anger.

I have toned down the negative-negative meta-emotions, though. I’ve learned to accept who I am as a normal person who goes through the normal range of human emotions, rather than an abnormality or freak. It sounds like a trivial distinction, but for me, it has made a huge difference. Now, when I feel despair or suffering, I tell myself “anyone would feel the same in this situation” or “you’re not the only one struggling.” During my first year of teaching, when I went through experiences like getting put in a headlock by a student or struggling to manage a classroom as a young, inexperienced teacher. These positive-negative meta-emotions and affirmations helped me survive.

I think a lot of us have meta-emotions. They don’t make or break our emotional experience or how we process our life events. But they can make amplify our negative emotions if we invalidate them or freak out over them.

I don’t know how I got here, but I have finally gotten to the point where my meta-emotions help me cope instead of sending me into freefall. It’s been nice to know meta-emotions aren’t always a bad thing.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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