Mixed Emotions Don’t Need to Be So Exhausting
Strategies to better manage them and live better.
When I look back across my life, it’s clear that relationships are the epitome of mixed emotions. I can see the beautiful moments: holding hands while we walked on the beach, nights spent at restaurants, talking and laughing. And then I remember the bitter fights and the prolonged periods of silence — before it all came crashing down.
God forbid you have mixed emotions with a pending decision: staying or leaving, buying or selling. I’m going through that now with my house, which I thought would be my forever home, but, like a relationship, has soured in my eyes in recent months. The commute to work is brutal for my partner. There’s loud construction at all hours around us with no end in sight. The list goes on.
The problem is that mixed emotions can both nag at and sap us all of our energy. They leave us questioning what exactly we should do or how we should reconcile old memories. Even beyond that, they’re quite bad for our wellbeing — if we look at them the wrong way. So how should we think about and contend with mixed emotions?
The challenge we all face
Dr. Peter Totterdell and his team at the University of Sheffield found that we can have mixed emotions about any person or subject, and that how we handle these emotions is intensely connected to our mental wellbeing. In fact, it’s much rarer to have pure and unadulterated singular emotions. Even in our angriest moments, there can be a hint of compassion, and in our most grateful, a lingering question of “What if I’d done this instead. Would this outcome be better?”
For example, I’ve never had a job that I thought was perfect. But I’ve had terrible jobs, that gave me perspective to appreciate a good-enough job when I had one. I need only look back to doing hard labor for minimal dollars under bad supervision to realize, “Hey, work is work, but this isn’t half bad.”
This is actually a good approach in dealing with mixed emotions. Because trying to zone in and say a situation is either great or horrible leads to dichotomous thinking, which is linked to poor mental health and lower wellbeing. It’s also common with borderline personality disorder, where a person is constantly making up and breaking up with friends, talking about them as either the best person in the world or as a complete villain.
A more helpful way of approaching emotions is using dialectical thinking. You embrace that emotions are often conflicting, rather than battling with yourself over the inability to reach a conclusion. You realize that most of life exists in an expansive grey area rather than black and white.
For example, my sophomore year of college was one of the best years of my life — and also the worst. I was on a great swim team, had amazing friends, and good teachers. I was dating beautiful girls on campus and having the time of my life. But later that year I also got terribly injured and would be out of school and work for two years.
It can hurt to look back and see how something that started so wonderfully could all go sideways on a dime. But I choose to look back and remember the good times, and appreciate that sometimes life just happens, for better or worse, and the good just comes with the bad at times. Thinking about it as it happened works better than letting reality crash my pipedream every time.
Part of the issue is cultural
Here in America, it often feels like we’re expected to chase happiness and find idealized lives. Wealth, beauty, achievement, are at the forefront of our psyche, thanks in no small part to social media.
During an experiment, researchers compared reactions between Chinese and American students when reading an emotionally conflicting statement.
It read, “I have been dreading this moment, but it has finally arrived. A chapter in my life is ending, and the future is still uncertain. I’ll miss the neighborhood and the friends I’ve made. I really do not want to leave. It’s a sad and nostalgic time.”
When reading this, American students felt 50% more discomfort than the Chinese students because they focused more on the feeling of losing friends rather than realizing the beauty of having made those friends in the first place. Moreover, there’s place for gratitude in most sullen moments — but that doesn’t mean one should ignore the loss that’s occurring.
It’s better for coping too
Psychologist, Dr. Anna Braniecka and her team, found that experiencing both positive and negative emotions accelerates the healing process after a death.
Allowing yourself to remember positive things, rather than wallow only in sadness, can help you find peace and comfort in that difficult time. One study found that bereaving spouses who made jokes and engaged in humor, coped much better than those who didn’t.
In essence, you perform better by embracing that conflicting emotions can and do run concurrently. It doesn’t mean something is wrong, or that you are a bad person. Trying to crowbar emotions in one direction is when the actual problems occur. The tendency to forcibly make emotions swing in one direction or the other is more common with independence oriented cultures like the United States, and less common in interdependent countries like China. So it’s not entirely your fault.
The counterbalancing challenge
You can also have too many mixed emotions. A study led by Dr. Raul Barrios found that people who had conflicting goals tended to have far more mixed emotions than others. For example, if your goal was to get promoted at work, but also to have more recreational time — than you might easily get heartburn over your job. Or if you are running a company and have a goal of increasing your employees pay but also have a goal of keeping payroll costs down, you may well be struggling.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t find a way to make things work. When I was a budget manager, we found ways of doing exactly this — by finding cost savings in other portions of the company, and allowing employees to make more money based on those savings.
The same is true with conflicting emotions. You can rightfully resent how you were treated by a partner, but also be grateful for the amazing times you had together, and what you learned from a person. Both things can be true.
I find that it’s at the edges between things — that we can learn the most about ourselves. Famed comedian and writer, Hari Kondabolu, said, "I like playing with that space between laughter and discomfort where your discomfort can also make you laugh, and you’re confused about the mixed feelings. That’s challenging, and I think that’s what makes for some of the best art.”
And to all of you, and myself, this is a reminder that sometimes we are supposed to be sad. Sometimes we are supposed to feel lonely. Even if we derive something positive out of these dark moments, that doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong, or that you should be confused.
Make sure you don’t have conflicting goals, and if you do, look for ways of accommodating both of them before forcing yourself to cancel one.
Stay flexible, mentally and physically, and you’ll be better prepared to deal with the complexity life provides, and avoid the exhaustion of attempting to put every facet of life into a neat and labeled box.
Mixed emotions don’t need to be so exhausting. They are affirmation that you are human, and living a complex life like the rest of us.
I'm a former financial analyst turned writer out of sunny Tampa, Florida. I began writing eight years ago on the side and fell in love with the craft. My goal is to provide non-fiction story-driven content to help us live better and maximize our potential. My content has many anecdotes and stories from my own life. This is intentional. I do this to show how these topics have impacted my daily living, and to share some vulnerability and mistakes I've made, and also to avoid being too preachy. I have skin in the game as much as you do in learning about these topics. I try to anchor my content in credible sourcing. Online writing has become too much of a free-for-all that lacks credibility, so I lean on the halls of academia, and on science that stands up to scrutiny. My goal is to have an ongoing relationship with my readers, to respect your time, and make my content worth revisiting. I'd also like to see a world where people are kinder and more empathetic towards each other. Writing is my small effort to help in that fight. Outside of writing, I live a fairly regular life, spending time with my spouse Laura, exercising, listening to podcasts, eating good food.