What fear, frustration, anger and sadness mean

5th October 2009

Most of strive to be free from negative emotions. "If only I didn't feel so sad all the time, I'd be happy".

But really, you need them - in fact, you should be grateful they're there. And if you understand why, you can make them work for you.

Emotions are the sole motivating force in our minds. Without them, we'd have absolutely no incentive to do anything. An emotion is just pre-wired circuitry for punishing and rewarding our brain's behaviour. Every single action we take stems from us trying to avoid bad signals, and receive good ones.

Emotions all exist for a good reason, even if that reason seems galactically stupid.

Fear

Fear can range from faint anxiety to outright panic, but carries the same message: get ready.

You might be getting ready for a driving test, speaking on-stage, or a drunken bear who stumbled home to find you in his bed with Mrs Grizzly. Our fear identifies something bad heading our way, and demands our attention. You can relieve the fear by either getting prepared - if you felt confident about your driving test, you wouldn't fear it as much - or by changing course to avoid it entirely.

Fear evolved to keep us safe: avoiding things that could harm or kill us, and preparing for potential risks in advance. In the modern day, we rarely need to avoid anything we fear. Our lives are incredibly safe (barring sexual indiscretions with wild bears). So the correct response is nearly always to prepare. If public speaking scares you, find a way to practice it safely - say in a mirror, or privately to a camcorder. Your fear is probably justified on some level, because you simply don't believe you'll be very good at public speaking. So take the time to learn and convince yourself otherwise.

Of course you won't always have that luxury. The very first time you try something new, it is natural to be fearful, and if you can't overcome that fear you'll never try anything. Simply understanding this can help, but one trick is to override this emotion with another so you go ahead regardless. Replace one fear - say public speaking - with another, say looking like a total wuss for quitting. Give yourself insanely positive emotional motivation: imagine your new, successful self afterwards and make that image stronger than your fear.

Frustration

Frustration simply means your approach isn't working.

It's extremely useful, because without frustration we'd keep trying the same failed approach endlessly and never question why. If you feel frustrated, you need to look at your approach: should you keep doing this, or change your technique? Sometimes you need to battle through frustration, but usually it means you need to try something different.

Anger

Anger signals that one of your standards is being violated.

Anger evolved to stop us from being walked over by other people. It is a crucial part of an implicit social contract: treat me with respect, or I will become angry. If I become angry, I will likely do stuff in retribution. Because everybody expects this behaviour in others, we all try - to varying degrees - not to anger others by violating their standards.

Some standards are pretty obvious: most people would get angered by being burgled. Others are very subjective, and can cause a lot of people to get angry at each other without understanding why. Perhaps you expect someone to care for you as much as you do for them? Maybe it's really important to you that your kitchen is kept clean, that text messages are spelt properly, or that your kid works really hard at their homework.

Curiously anger evolved to deal with people, but as our brains have a tendency to personify lots of things so they're like people (the weather, fate, computers, your remote control ...) we can get angry at 'stuff' as well.

We can get angry with ourselves, and the meaning is just the same: we've failed our own standards.

When you get angry, consider what standard is being violated and whether that standard is reasonable. If you anger is justified, it serves to empower you (storming out on a cheating spouse, for instance). More commonly, you'll probably realise your standards haven't been made clear to the other person. Use this as a chance to explain your standard - "I work hard to keep this house clean, and I expect you too as well" - or acknowledge and discard it.

Sadness

Sadness is telling us we need to change. It can misfire on a few occasions.

Most of the time it works. Say you suddenly see yourself as badly overweight, sadness will follow. The intensity of this feeling can range from mild depression to suicidal self-loathing. Usually, you'll know why you feel sad, and this reason will be foremost in your mind. You'll likely think, talk and read endlessly about diets, exercise and weight loss.

The intention of this sadness is to focus your mind on a problem, and keep feeding your brain negative feedback for whatever it is doing at the moment. You're telling yourself off on purpose. We have two ways of dealing with this: we adopt new behaviour, or we divert the sadness by tricking our own minds.

Ideally, you will change your behaviour - perhaps starting a diet. Simply starting proactive action significantly relieves sadness in itself. Eventually this new behaviour will fix the original cause, and the sadness disappears.

Or we'll excuse ourselves. Humans are brilliant at making excuses. "I can't lose weight, because there's no gym nearby and I'm so busy". Essentially we rewire our brain to accept something bad as outside of our control, letting us off the hook.

There are times when excusing ourselves is a good thing of course. Staying sad forever would be more harmful than acceptance, and some sadness is caused by things we genuinely can't control, like the death of a loved one. In these cases, we often take time to persuade ourselves: "there's nothing I could have done", "it was their time" etc. But for 99% of situations, we let ourselves off too easy.

Often sadness is coupled with anger, as you feel sad and angry that you haven't met your own personal standard.

So the best response to sadness is to evaluate the cause, and determine if there's anything you can do about it. If so, taking positive steps will help immediately, and ultimately can fix the problem and improve your life.

Overriding emotions

All this is fine, but sometimes our emotions just play dumb.

Understanding that our emotions exist for a reason, you can look at what your emotions are telling you and learn from it. On the rare occasions when your emotions are genuinely 'wrong', you can understand why and what their motivation is. From here, it's a lot easier to bring them under control.

Mastering your emotions can keep you in touch with what truly makes you happy, as well as helping motivate you to do what really matters in your life. What are yours telling you?