Why Do Bad Feelings Have to Feel So Bad?

Unwanted emotions can be incredibly intense, often leading us to view them as threats. When they surge, the physical symptoms can feel overwhelming, prompting us to resist and fight against them.

This reaction is rooted in our primal instinct to avoid what feels bad. Even a single-celled amoeba knows to dart away from harmful stimuli. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how our unwanted emotions could be misinterpreted as threats.

However, when we break down why emotions feel so painful, we can begin to view them with greater objectivity.

Why Are Bad Feelings So Overpowering?

There is a crucial reason why some emotions feel so unpleasant: they are designed to be warning signals. Just like a fire alarm must be loud and jarring to ensure we react to a fire, our emotions must be uncomfortable to grab our attention. If a fire alarm sounded like ambient elevator music, no one would leave the burning building.

Since emotions are bodily signals, they function much like hunger or pain. Hunger makes it nearly impossible to focus on anything else until we eat, and pain can hijack our attention. Both are loud and overpowering because they have an important message to deliver; they alert us to address our physical health. Unpleasant emotions function similarly—they demand our attention because ignoring them can cost us our emotional health.

Source: Dall.e/OpenAI

Why Are Painful Feelings So Easily Triggered?

Our bodies are hard-wired to protect us from threats, both physical and psychological. This is why unpleasant emotions are so easily triggered and often overly sensitive.

This idea can be explained by something called "smoke detector theory." A smoke detector goes off whether there’s burnt popcorn or a raging fire, and it sounds the same regardless of the severity of the threat. This has parallels in the "false positives" in emotional signaling, where a strong emotional reaction is triggered by something relatively benign, or by a painful memory from the past rather than the current situation.

While this can be frustrating and confusing, it helps to think of our emotions much like an overprotective parent. They are so concerned with our well-being that they tend to overreact with the eternal motto: “Better safe than sorry!” Recognizing that our bodies are well-intentioned can help us better accept and work with our emotions.

Why Are Negative Emotions So Persistent?

Unwanted emotions often feel much more likely to stick around than pleasant emotions. Those good feelings are signaling that we’re moving in a fulfilling direction.

They do not grip us the same way unpleasant ones do since evolutionarily, it is more critical to be aware of dangers than to focus on what is going well. For example, it is not adaptive to focus on the feeling of the sun on our faces and the smell of flowers if a predictor is lurking in the grass. The unwanted emotions are therefore louder, clearer, and more persistent.

This negativity bias helps us survive by keeping us alert to threats. However, this can lead to an overemphasis on negative emotions, and a tendency to overlook or downplay the positive ones.

Decoding the Emotion

By acknowledging and understanding why unwanted emotions are so painful, we can respond to them more thoughtfully, instead of responding to them at face value: as a threat.

The smoke detector is not the threat; rather, it is signaling a potential threat. It has an important job to sound the alarm. Once we hear it, we can take a deep breath and use our minds to assess the situation: Are we dealing with burnt popcorn, or is the house on fire?

Finding The Signal in the Noise

It may feel like a stretch to suggest that painful emotions are helpful, especially when they feel so terrible. However, they can offer valuable information if we can find the signal in the noise and learn to decode our emotions.

Even if we determine that an emotion is overly sensitive or reactive, it still conveys a message—it highlights important values in our lives. And understanding what matters most to us is essential for living a fulfilling life. This clarity allows us to focus our energy on what’s truly important.