Forget toxic positivity. A top neuroscientist explains how even ‘negative emotions’ can help fuel your success
“Negative emotions,” like envy, regret, and guilt, can be motivating, or help you avoid mistakes, respond to a threat, correct an injustice, or sharpen your awareness—as long as they are experienced in the right proportions. Always looking for the positives can sometimes prolong suffering.
Good vibes only. Look on the bright side. Just change your perspective. Everything happens for a reason. It could be worse! Stay positive.
Part overcorrection to a mental health epidemic, part understandable impulse to distance ourselves from what feels bad, positivity is everywhere. But positivity taken to its extreme—and at the expense of hearing what our negative emotions have to say—can quickly have the opposite of its intended effect.
Whether it’s a solutions-focused work culture that makes employees hesitate to give constructive criticism or a well-meaning colleague who urges you to forget about your negative feedback and focus on your next assignment, the pursuit of positive emotions isn’t always adaptive. Case in point: A 2013 study scrutinized the common practice of positive reframing. What the scientists leading the study discovered was that desperately seeking the silver lining could hurt or help, depending on the circumstances.
When the problems bothering you aren’t something you have a lot of control over (let’s say you get laid off), it helps to reframe the situation positively. But when the sources of your stress are within your control (let’s say you work in a toxic environment), looking for the silver lining can be harmful and predict greater levels of depression. When you can fix what’s wrong (leave the demoralizing job) recasting the negative emotions into positive ones can prolong suffering.
What the “good vibes only” mantra misses is that “dark emotions” have a light side when they’re experienced in the right proportions—not too intensely and not for too long: Envy can motivate us to work harder to obtain what we want. Regret helps us avoid making the same mistakes twice. Guilt guides us to recognize the harm we caused and prompts us to make amends. Anger can help us respond to a threat and correct an injustice. Fear is a response to a specific danger and sharpens our awareness and compels us to act.
Emotions aren’t good or bad; they are just information.
There is an essential place in our lives for anger, sadness, guilt, grief, and a host of other “negative” emotions when they’re experienced in the right proportions. The absolutist view that to live your best life, you need to rid yourself of negativity is a dangerous myth. Each of our emotions, however unpleasant in the moment, contains a powerful wisdom, shaped by evolution and experience.
Of course, experiencing too much of these emotions can have a profoundly negative effect. When they become overwhelming, they can mislead us, undermine us, make us miserable, and cut us off from the very things we long for. The key challenge we face is to understand how to manage our emotions skillfully, without letting them completely take over. And that’s a critically important insight because experiencing emotions for humans is like breathing air: Our emotions are both unavoidable and crucial to our survival.
No matter how painful and overwhelming our emotions can sometimes be, it is essential to remember that we evolved our capacity to experience them for a reason: They help us navigate the world, which is why all emotions are functional, even the ones we don’t like. Understanding that both good and bad vibes are part of a healthy emotional life gives us the capacity to accept and embrace our bad vibes with respect, instead of trying to shove them away in panic.
Our emotions are our guides through life. They are the music and the magic, the indelible markers of our time on earth. The goal is not to run from negative emotions, or pursue only the feel-good ones, but to be able to shift: experience all of them, learn from all of them, and, when needed, move easily from one emotional state into another.
Adapted excerpt from Shift: Managing Your Emotions—So They Don’t Manage You by Dr. Ethan Kross, to be published on Feb. 4, 2025, by Crown, a subsidiary of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2025 by Ethan Kross.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
