Feeling Bad Is Actually Good 155
on a continuum rather than categorically (that is, either
accepting or not accepting your emotion). Following are
strategies, or ways of thinking about your emotions, to help
you nurture an attitude of acceptance and to reduce your
emotional distress.
Emotions are more than feelings. Emotions, at least from
a Western cultural perspective, are often thought to be most
valuable when they are subjectively pleasant. Indeed, if you
were to informally poll your family, friends, and work col-
leagues, you would likely find that most people generally
want to feel good. More specifically, they purposefully try to
cultivate experiences that generate positive emotions (joy,
contentment, love, and so on) and avoid unpleasant experi-
ences that produce negative emotions (worry, anger, shame,
and so on) (see, for example, Larsen 2000). However, emo-
tions are more than mere feelings to be enjoyed or tolerated.
Instead, emotions are thought to cohere and interact to serve
some function or purpose, whether it’s to survive, thrive,
communicate, or validate internal experiences. Everyday
life is fairly complex, and rarely, if ever, do people experience
a single emotion in isolation. People can strive for pleasant
experiences, but pleasant experiences are never guaranteed.
A critical skill in learning to regulate emotions is learning to
accept both the good and the bad.
Although the view that emotions have a hedonistic
basis is generally true, it tends to oversimplify the com-
plexity of the human emotional experience. Feelings are
only one component of emotions. Emotions have the follow-
ing functions:
- To help you construe or interpret what’s happening
in your environment