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Psychology
Why 'mood shame' is bad for you
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(Image credit: Getty Images)

By David Robson4th January 2022

It's sometimes tempting to beat yourself up for not feeling sunnier – but
there's good reason to embrace those grumps.
I

Imagine that you've just experienced something unpleasant – your friend has
forgotten your birthday, you've been rejected for a new job, or you've just
woken up on 4 January and remembered you need to go to work. How would you
typically respond to those feelings?

You might try to tell yourself that it doesn't matter, and not to let it get to
you. You might try to avoid thinking about the bad news, and when it does seep
into your consciousness, you’ll question why you're so thin-skinned.

This tendency to screen out and self-punish could be described as "mood shame":
the belief that having bad feelings is a personal failing.

Continually looking on the bright side of life might seem strong, even
courageous. But if it's taken too far, we may beat ourselves up for perfectly
reasonable responses to events. While it's natural that we might prefer to avoid
uncomfortable feelings like disappointment, worry, anger, or sadness, recent
psychological research supports the idea that they serve useful purposes in our
lives. By learning to see that value and accept those feelings without
judgement, we may enjoy better physical and mental health. 

You may also like:

 * Why it pays to be grumpy
 * How anger can be put to good use
 * A new way to look at emotions – and how to master yours

To be clear, when I write about our need to accept negative emotions, I'm not
talking about severe depression, anxiety – or any other chronic mood disorder
that needs professional help. There is nothing to be gained from prolonged and
unbearable suffering if you need and are able to seek medical treatment and
mental health support.

Instead, I'm referring to the temporary clouds that may gather over our lives
for a few hours or days. Those transient emotions don't really pose a threat to
our long-term wellbeing, but we often act as if they do – and it's tempting to
try to avoid them.

Plenty of negative emotions pass like transient clouds – but that doesn't mean
they should be ignored (Credit: Getty Images)

As the Italian philosopher Ilaria Gaspari notes in her recent book Vita Segreta
Delle Emozioni (The Secret Life of Emotions), our attempts to suppress our
emotions can simply add layers of "shame" and "fear" to what we are already
feeling, alongside an envy of those who appear to be happier in their life. The
resulting sentiment, she writes, is even "stronger and more tenacious" than the
thing we were trying to avoid.

"It took me a long time to understand that being emotional does not mean being
unstable or unbalanced, but being alive, open and vulnerable to the experience
of the world," she writes. 

Gaspari was writing from personal experience, but a series of scientific studies
confirm that our "mood shame" can be detrimental to our wellbeing. To get an
idea of that research, consider the following questions. On a scale of one
(never/very rarely true) to seven (very often/always true), how would you rate
these statements?

 * I tell myself I shouldn't be feeling the way that I'm feeling
 * I criticise myself for having irrational or inappropriate emotions
 * I think some of my emotions are bad or inappropriate and I shouldn't feel
   them

Questioning 1,000 participants, Iris Mauss at the University of California
Berkeley found that the higher people scored on this scale, the more likely they
were to report symptoms of depression and anxiety. They also tended to have
lower overall life satisfaction and psychological wellbeing. People who accepted
their thoughts and feelings without characterising them as "bad" or
"inappropriate", in contrast, tended to have better psychological health.

Seeing the good and the bad

My personal interest in the consequences of "mood shame" began as I researched
my book The Expectation Effect. There's enormous evidence that we can create
self-fulfilling prophecies in many areas of life. In medicine, for instance, we
know that people's interpretations of physical symptoms like pain can alter the
way they experience them, and this can even influence our physiological
response.


> DISAPPOINTMENT MAY FEEL UNPLEASANT – BUT YOU COULD RECOGNISE THAT THE EMOTION
> HELPS US TO LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES

I wondered if the same was true of our emotions. Rather than changing the
feelings themselves, we might be able to change the way we think about them –
and this might improve the experience itself and the long-term effects on our
health.

Disappointment, for example, may feel unpleasant – but you could recognise that
the emotion helps us to learn from our mistakes. And by assigning a more
positive meaning to the feeling and acknowledging its potential uses – rather
than feeling it is somehow "unhealthy" – you might change the brain and the
body's responses to an upset.

Searching the psychological literature, I soon came across a study from the Max
Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany that attempted to show
exactly that. The researchers asked their participants to rate various emotions,
such as nervousness, anger or feeling downcast, on their unpleasantness. They
also asked people about their appropriateness, their utility and their
meaningfulness – three dimensions that together captured how much the
participants "valued" each feeling.

Overall, the participants who saw a positive value in their "bad" moods tended
to fare much better on measures of mental and physical wellbeing, including
their risk of illnesses, such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease, and even
their muscle strength (which was considered a general indicator of fitness).
Indeed, a capacity to see value in unpleasant emotions almost eliminated any
link between a participant's health and the actual number of upsets the person
reported experiencing over a three-week period.

Fuel for growth

I've since discovered a wealth of evidence demonstrating how a recognition of an
emotion's potential benefits can powerfully influence its effects. 

Consider anxiety. We may assume that anxious feelings wreck our concentration
and reduce our performance on difficult tasks – that we can only succeed on an
exam or in an interview if we learn to relax. Alternatively, we can see the
feelings as a source of energy. The actor Robert Pattinson apparently uses this
strategy to deal with his nerves on a film set – and recent scientific studies
suggest that this kind of attitude can improve our performance on short-term
challenges, such as difficult exams or public speaking. In the long-term, it
even reduces the risk of burnout and exhaustion.

Bad moods need not deplete us (Credit: Getty Images)

A similar expectation effect applies to angry emotions. We may believe that
frustration quickly depletes our self-control, but we can alternatively see it
as a galvanising emotion that steels our resolve and empowers us to demand what
we're due. Those mindsets will determine your performance in tasks such as
negotiations.

Scientists are still exploring the ways that our perceptions of emotions can
influence physical health, as observed in the Max Planck study – but the growing
body of research on the physiological effects of emotion appraisal already
suggests some plausible mechanisms. When we face a stressor that feels
personally threatening, we are more likely to experience exaggerated
fluctuations of hormones such as cortisol, and inflammation. Such physiological
changes could help to prepare the body for short-term danger, but if they are
sustained over a long time they can lead to bodily wear and tear.

If we have the view that each bad mood is inappropriate, shameful or potentially
damaging to us, that will compound our sense of vulnerability and isolation,
which can exacerbate and prolong the physiological effects. Reappraising our
emotions – so that we recognise their inherent value – can remove those
additional layers of stress. It could even give us a sense of empowerment and
autonomy. This may moderate the physiological response as we come to terms with
the feelings, and help us to recover more quickly, with overall less strain on
our bodies.


> THE START OF THE NEW YEAR MAY BE THE PERFECT TIME FOR US TO PUT THIS MORE
> NUANCED UNDERSTANDING OF EMOTION INTO PRACTICE

Our interpretations of our moods may have important long-term consequences,
according to one intriguing longitudinal study of more than 28,000 people. The
participants were asked to report their levels of mental tension and anxiety,
and whether they thought that stress would harm their health. Those expectations
appeared to shape their risk of death. People who suffered from high stress and
believed that the stress would cause them damage had much higher mortality over
the study period than those who felt stressed but lacked the negative
expectations of its effects.

The scientists had controlled for a host of other lifestyle factors, such as
income, education, physical activity and smoking before coming to this
conclusion. That cannot prove causality, of course, so the finding needs to be
taken with some scepticism – but it certainly fits the same overall pattern as
the shorter-term studies, which all suggest that our interpretations of emotions
are as important as the feelings themselves.

Shades of grey

The start of the new year may be the perfect time for us to put this more
nuanced understanding of emotion into practice. For those in the northern
hemisphere, it's colder and wetter, and the return to work can be a painful jolt
after a week of festivities. Some of us may find that we're caught in the
January blues while simultaneously yearning for a better life – creating
feelings of boredom, frustration and sadness.

Rather than judging yourself harshly for those feelings, you might lean into
that bad mood, and allow yourself the self-care you need to get through it.
Without fighting the emotions themselves, you could start to question whether
those feelings have value. Perhaps they'll help you to identify an important
change you can make in your life, for instance.

We will sometimes experience periods of despair with absolutely no silver lining
– and we'll need all the support we can get to move through them. In general,
however, our moods are neither black nor white, good nor bad, but instead come
in many shades – and by paying attention to those nuances, we may find it a
little easier to weather life's storms.

* David Robson is a science writer and author based in London, UK. His next
book, The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life will be
published in the UK by Canongate on 6 January, and in the US by Henry Holt on 15
February. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.

-- 

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