Bad Feelings

We spend so much of our life trying to deny, judge, or banish negative feelings. What would happen if we just tried to listen to them?

Co-written with George Loewenstein, the behavioral economist whose most recent book is The Opposite of Happiness, from which this essay is adapted.

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Photo by Ryan Parker on Unsplash

How much of life is spent feeling bad about feeling bad? We often don’t just feel anxiety; we feel sadness about our anxiety. We don’t just feel envy; we feel guilt about our envy. It’s no wonder, really. Think of the countless books, podcasts, and short videos devoted to positive psychology and the secrets of happiness. One by one, they might seem innocuous. But they collectively train into us an automatic assumption that we ought to feel happy most of the time.

One of us, George, is a behavioral economist. He has spent decades researching how feelings shape decisions. While classical economics assumes that people act like utility-maximizing agents who are constantly seeking happiness, the hard work of truly understanding people at the most profound level requires that we understand the opposite of happiness. So what if, instead of constantly judging ourselves for feeling bad, we simply tried to understand negative emotions for what they are, where they come from, and what they’re trying to tell us?

The Roach Effect

The most fundamental truth about negative emotions is that they overwhelm us. They take us over and transform our minds.

We mean this literally. In one brain-scanning study of Carnegie Mellon actors, a group of researchers used fMRI to map the neural signature of nine emotions, including anger, disgust, sadness, and pride. Of the nine feelings that actors were asked to self-induce, it was the negative ones—such as anger, disgust, and sadness—that produced the most distinct patterns of activation. The positive emotions, by contrast, were fuzzier and almost impossible to tell apart.

The psychologists Paul Rozen and Edward Royzman have a rather gross description of the power of negative emotions, which they call the “roach effect.” Drop a cockroach into a vat of wine, and the whole thing is ruined. But pour fine wine onto a cockroach, and it does nothing to improve the insect. One reason that it is impossible to avoid feeling bad much of the time is that this roach effect is a lifelong condition. If you’re in acute pain, it won’t much help if a loved one brings your favorite treat; you might even feel bitter that you can’t enjoy it. But if the same person insults you during a fine meal, it might be hard to enjoy your dessert, no matter how delectable.

Because negative emotions transform our minds, they also transform our selves. In different emotional states we are effectively different people. Rather than see yourself as a single unified individual, it might be more helpful—and, indeed, more scientifically defensible—to think of yourself, along with every other individual, as a crowd of people existing within a single thread of memory and experience. Bad feelings, such as jealousy and anger, turn us into people that we don’t like. And we judge these versions of ourselves with surprising cruelty. We often struggle to empathize with the negative experiences of others, but, just as profoundly, we often fail to empathize with ourselves. When depressed, we cannot imagine ourselves being happy; conversely, in moments of triumph and bliss, we often fail to imagine the possibility of our own suffering. Perhaps the deepest and most important empathy gap is the one we experience within ourselves.

One way to deeply understand the power of, and the message of, negative emotions is to focus on one negative feeling. Let’s make it a really nasty one. Even a deadly sinful one. So let’s talk about envy.

The Pain of Wanting

To inform his research book on negative emotions, George conducted what he morbidly called a Misery Survey. He asked several hundred people to say what made them sad, anxious, depressed, and envious. He heard that envy is often directed at qualities that people feel inadequate about, such as intelligence, attractiveness, and charisma.

Take, for example, the mother who said that watching moms of other kids “meeting up for coffee and inviting each other and their kids to go on outings together” made her feel that “I am in some way deficient” at being likable or interesting. Another respondent said she was envious of people who can tell stories that “draw you in and hold you with their ability to weave tales from personal experience.”

Envy is very different from admiration. We may admire champion athletes, Nobel laureates, billionaire businessmen, and other paragons of achievement. But unless we are clipping at their heels, their success does not unsettle us. What provokes the sharpest feelings of inadequacy, and therefore envy, are the people, often personal acquaintances, who are just ahead of us—the ones whose success feels close enough that it could have been ours.

The notion that envy emerges from proximity is an old one. In 1739, David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, wrote that “a common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him.” Two centuries later, Bertrand Russell echoed this idea, observing that envy is a function of competition within a set of comparison. “We do not envy a good fortune which we conceive as quite hopelessly out of our reach,” he said. “Beggars do not envy millionaires, though of course they will envy other beggars who are more successful.”

The social psychologist Leon Festinger argued that we envy those we resemble, because our inclination to compare ourselves with another person—and thus our capacity to envy them—requires that we see ourselves in the same comparative set. By contrast, the less someone resembles us, the less their successes feel like our own failures. This is one of the most profound truths about envy. Although it seems to be based on a perceived difference (“he is rich, and I am not”), it is actually triggered by a feeling of similarity (“if he and I are so alike, why is he so much richer?”)

Like many negative emotions, envy doesn’t have a perfect positive counterpart, at least in English. The asymmetry is not just linguistic; we rarely feel an equivalent surge of spontaneous gratitude for the things we have as intensely as we feel envy for the things we lack. In a study conducted by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers wanted to see how employees’ feelings about their own salaries changed when they learned how much their colleagues earned. UC workers were given access to a new website listing the salaries of all university employees, allowing them to see exactly how their pay stacked up against others in similar roles. Employees who discovered that their salary fell below the median of their peer group suddenly felt much worse about their jobs. Learning that their peers earned more bred resentment and dissatisfaction, and made them significantly more likely to look for another job elsewhere. Tellingly, however, those employees who found themselves above the median didn’t suddenly feel significantly more satisfied or loyal. Their attitudes remained largely unchanged. The knowledge of being “ahead” hardly provided much of a lasting boost.

These findings underscore an important truth about life: It’s unfair, not only materially, but psychologically. The bad we feel about small disadvantages is greater than the good we feel about small advantages. The envy that may arise from being a little less successful than a friend feels heavier than the pride that comes from being ever-so-slightly more successful than that friend. (In fact, small advantages can even provoke anxiety: God, I hope I stay ahead!)

The good news about envy is that it is very often a delusion. Envy often makes us fixate on people’s most visible markers of success, wealth, or status while overlooking the broader reality of their lives. We assume that excelling in one area— especially one that we’re personally insecure about—translates into an enviable life overall. But as psychologist Ed O’Brien and his colleagues have shown, this is a focusing illusion, a cognitive bias that leads us to overestimate how much someone’s most conspicuous advantages shape their overall well-being. When we envy someone, we zoom in on a single, obvious advantage—a bigger house, a higher salary, a more attractive spouse—while ignoring the fuller picture of their daily lives. To test how this distortion plays out in the real world, O’Brien and his colleagues recruited two groups of individuals: those with relatively high incomes and those with relatively low incomes. They asked both groups to track how often they experienced everyday joys (small pleasures, moments of peace) and everyday annoyances (stressors, irritations). Meanwhile, a separate group of observers predicted how often these high- and low-income individuals encountered such ups and downs. The researchers found that the actual daily lives of high- and low-income individuals weren’t nearly as different as observers imagined. Observers significantly overestimated how pleasurable the lives of enviable individuals were, neglecting the regular annoyances they faced. Conversely, they exaggerated how relentlessly negative life was for pitiable people, ignoring the small joys they frequently experienced. In short, life is challenging, even for—and sometimes, especially for—the objects of our envy.

Envy is also delusional when we combine cherry- picked traits from different people. We end up comparing ourselves not to real people with strengths and weaknesses but to a monstrous composite-person who has one friend’s professional success, another’s financial security, and yet another’s perfect family life. Rather than recognizing that none of these individuals is enviable across all aspects, we stitch together their best features into a single, unforgiving standard that we can never possibly meet.

The feeling of envy is real, but the image that it paints in our heads is often a fictional pastiche. We envy people whose lives we would not want. We envy outcomes (say, a young hedge funder’s salary) whose necessary process we do not want for ourselves (say, a 90-hour work week). And then, believing that to fall short of happiness is a personal failure, we feel guilt about our envy, piling suffering upon suffering.

The point is not that envy is always useless or often useful. The point is to look past the heavy and sickly feeling of envy to make peace with the fact that envy exists. Like sadness, jealousy, anger, and anxiety, it’s there. It is a piece of information, made by our bodies and for our bodies. We are sending ourselves a signal, even when we don’t want to pay attention to it and torture ourselves by trying to ignore it. If we have the courage and clarity to look our worst feelings straight in the face, we can see them for what they are and feel a bit better about the fact that life is not, cannot, and will never be a project to banish bad feelings. Bad feelings are common. That’s not a tragedy. It’s life.