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Key points
- We say things about negative emotions we would never say about positive emotions.
- The emotional double standard is unfair to negative emotions.
- There's no reason to treat our bad feelings differently.
“Don’t let your joy get the best of you.”
“Be careful: You might become a joyous person.”
“It’s OK to feel joy sometimes; you just have to manage it.”
You’ve probably never heard people say any of these things about joy, but you hear them about negative emotions all the time.
You’ve been warned not to let your anger get the best of you and that it’s OK to feel anger sometimes as long as you manage it well. You've probably heard people compare negative emotions to cancers, toxins, or monsters. They'll eat you up from the inside, and yet no one seems to worry about getting "eaten up" by positive emotions.
Sometimes negative emotions are treated like drugs that you’ll get addicted to if you feel them too much. If you can get hooked on positive emotions, we don't seem too worried about it. We treat negative emotions like weapons: you should either avoid them altogether or handle them with caution otherwise you’ll hurt yourself or someone else. Apparently we don't have to treat positive emotions with such caution.
Anger and joy are both emotions; they belong in the same psychological category. Why do we talk about them in radically different ways?
The emotion double standard
Negative emotions are the victims of what I call the emotion double standard. The emotion double standard assumes that negative emotions have powers that positive emotions don’t have. Negative emotions poison you and make you sick, but positive emotions don't. Negative emotions are always on the brink of getting out of control, but positive emotions always behave. You’re supposed to manage your negative emotions, yet no one tells you to do deep breathing exercises or count to 10 when you feel joy.
Here's an obvious example of the emotion double standard: We assume negative emotions are stronger than positive ones. We worry that our negative emotions will take us over like demon possession. They seem to be capable of overpowering us and yet no one assumes you can be "taken over" by joy or compassion. Of course, people will talk about being "moved" by compassion, but no one would ever say "I lost my mind. My joy took over and I just couldn't help myself."
Bad feelings aren't as bad as you think
The reason for this differential treatment is that negative emotions are supposedly dangerous in a way that positive emotions aren’t. Feelings like anger, envy, spite, and jealousy cause harm. The worst that joy could do is make you annoyingly chipper.
The assumption that negative emotions are dangerous and positive emotions are safe is actually another instance of the emotion double standard. Think about how often you’ve been angry in your lifetime. You’ve likely been angry at people you love-–maybe some of the people you love most. While you’ve probably ended some of your relationships in anger, you’ve probably mended most of them. You’re still standing and so are your loved ones.
If anger was as bad as people say, you’d think every angry person would be permanently bitter and friendless, but that just isn’t true. Negative emotions are with us all the time, every day. Most people feel them without doing any damage to anyone.
The extreme examples problem
When we think of the harm negative emotions do, we usually point to extreme examples. This is another place where the emotion double standard is at work.
If you think of envy, you might think of Iago from Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago is envious of Cassio because Othello promotes Cassio over him. Iago then spends the rest of the play ruining everyone’s lives out of envy. Iago is a brilliant literary villain, but what if he was just a regular person? He would probably just go out with his friends at happy hour to grumble about Cassio for a while. Eventually, he'd get over his envy. That wouldn’t be a very interesting play, but regular people don’t make great Shakespeare villains.
When we feel negative emotions, we usually feel them for a while and then stop—exactly how we feel positive emotions. Even when our positive emotions are strong, we don’t feel them forever and we don’t lose control of ourselves. Why can’t negative emotions work the same way? When we focus on the extreme rather than the mundane version of negative emotions, we’re applying the emotion double standard.
Good feelings aren't as good as you think
Once we stop thinking about the most extreme examples and we realize that negative emotions have been with us forever, their bad reputation looks overblown. And we might also realize that positive emotions aren’t exactly innocent.
If we want to be fair to negative emotions, let's look at the extreme examples of positive emotions. People have killed for love. We have all kinds of adages that warn against love’s power to blind us or cloud our judgment. Joy isn't always sunshine and rainbows. Sometimes our joy leads us to overlook things we'd rather not notice or engage in motivated reasoning. People who are joyful might be delusional or sucked into the culture of toxic positivity.
We tend to think that positive emotions can never do harm and never stem from bad motives, but there are plenty of examples to the contrary. Where does our unfounded faith in positive emotions come from? The emotion double standard.
Giving up the emotion double standard
If negative emotions aren’t as bad as they seem and positive emotions aren't all they're cracked up to be, why not treat negative emotions and positive emotions equally?
Negative emotions don't have dark magical powers. Positive emotions aren't perfect angels. It's unfair to our negative emotions to hold them to a double standard. They work the same way our positive emotions do.
Next time you hear someone telling you that it's OK to feel anger as long as you manage it or warning you that jealousy will eat you up from the inside, resist falling into the emotion double standard. Instead, let's aim for emotion equality. All of our emotions play important roles in our lives, and it's time we start treating them equally.
