MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors

Nothing Drains You Like Mixed Emotions

Five takeaways:

1. Well into the 20th Century, many psychologists believed that mixed emotions existed on a continuum. Which was to say: Researchers didn’t think you could feel good and bad at the same time. Evidence soon mounted that positive and negative emotions can co-exist, and often switch in and out of prevalence very quickly.
2. Last year, a study by the Journal of Happiness Studies measured the relationship of wellbeing to positive, negative, and mixed emotion. The study showed that mixed emotions plummeted overall wellbeing far more than negative emotion.
3. A commonly used “solution” to the pain of mixed emotions is to force oneself to view everything as either 100% positive or 100% negative. Scientists have found that this kind of “Dichotomous thinking” is unhealthy. They instead urge “Dialectical Thinking,” which boils down to viewing everything through the prism of acceptance: the knowledge that mixed emotions are natural and not a cause for alarm.
4. To become more dialectical in your thinking, start by consciously acknowledging your conflicting feelings, as opposed to letting them battle away in your subconscious. Accept that life does not present itself in black and white. This will provide a sense of relief and control over decisions and emotions.
5. Seeing the true complexity of relationships or decisions or experiences takes us beyond the superficial “great” or “horrible” descriptions that do more to confuse/frustrate us than to add any clarity to our lives. By embracing mixed emotions, we not only control them, we enable deeper understanding and experience.

From Arthur C. Brooks at The Atlantic:
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