Sometimes you feel positively about your romantic relationship in the morning, and negatively in the afternoon, for no clear reason. Today, many emotion researchers believe that mixed emotions happen to just about everyone. Read: Sit with negative emotions, don’t push them away Neuroscience added support for this hypothesis when scholars found that positive and negative emotions largely correspond to activity in different hemispheres of the brain (for many people, negative emotions align with activity on the right, positive on the left). In the 1960s, new psychological research began to collect evidence that positive and negative emotions were in fact separable, and as further research observed, could be felt simultaneously, and also in rapid succession. Even today, people often talk about happiness and unhappiness in this way- as if the presence of one means the absence of the other. If you felt “less bad” as time passed after a loss or trauma, that simply meant you felt “more good.” Researchers didn’t think you could feel good and bad at the same time. Well into the 20th century, many psychologists believed that positive and negative emotions existed on a continuum. T he idea of being able to experience truly “mixed” feelings is quite new. You might think that purely negative emotions are the most unpleasant ones in truth, a cocktail of negative and positive can be worse. They are one of the most complex psychological phenomena we are capable of, and bring us a great deal of distress. Mixed emotions drain your emotional batteries, like a phone connecting to multiple networks simultaneously. Perhaps your childhood was both good and bad, not fitting into a neat frame, and thus feels impossible to explain to others or even yourself. Or maybe some of your memories are painfully mixed and hard to interpret. Maybe your ambivalence is instead directed toward your employer, and you can’t decide whether to stay and work to make things better, or go someplace else. Romance isn’t the only part of life in which mixed feelings can cause pain. But mixed feelings leave you confused about the right thing to do. Even purely negative feelings would be better, because the course of action would be clear: Say goodbye. If your feelings were purely positive, of course, the relationship would be bliss. If you’ve ever had mixed feelings about someone you love, you know the intense discomfort that results. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am tortured.” “Ō dī et amō,” the Roman poet Catullus wrote of his lover Lesbia about 2,000 years ago. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life. “ How to Build a Life ” is a column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness.
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