Imagine your mind as an artist’s palette, where each basic emotion – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, and disgust – are the primary colors. Just like an artist can mix those colors together to create an infinite spectrum of hues, our emotions blend to form the complex feelings that color our world. If you remember that Pixar movie Inside Out (is there going to be a sequel?), it beautifully illustrates this with five emotions guiding a young girl’s experiences. That movie, and this article, are based on the same research, although actually there are two other basic emotional responses they choose to leave out: contempt and surprise. For this discussion, we’ll focus on the first five and briefly touch on contempt. Surprisingly enough, surprise is probably too obvious and too short in duration to discuss.

Happiness: The Double-Edged Sword

Happiness is the warm glow we feel when our needs are met and we’re fully engaged in life. But the sun can’t shine all the time, and there’s a danger: constant happiness is an unattainable goal. The pursuit of perpetual happiness is a kind of trap, where we try to force things to be fine, or feel like there’s something wrong because we’re not always at the very top of the mountain. We can also fool ourselves into thinking someone else out there somewhere is living a life that’s always happy; they’re not. It’s crucial to remember that happiness, in its pure form, is fleeting and should be cherished, not chased. It’s a much better strategy to look for its lesser form: contentment. It’s possible to be content even in difficult times or facing significant stressors, and that’s worth pursuing.

Sadness: The Necessary Pause

Sadness is the natural way a person pulls back from chasing a goal and signals that something hasn’t worked as we expected. It’s like a gentle rain that encourages us to take shelter, reflect, and regroup. This emotional time-out is crucial for evaluating what truly matters to us and whether what we’re doing will move us in the direction we want. However, the danger lies in the storm that never clears. When sadness lingers too long, morphing into depression, we find ourselves stuck in the mud, unable to move forward. Still sadness really does serve a necessary function, and we need to respect it as a means to build a full life. (It should be pointed out that this is separate from the deeper sorrow of grief that occurs when a loss is so deep it will require some re-creation of the self to recover.)

Fear: The Protective Alarm

Fear is our body’s alarm system, alerting us to danger and preparing us to fight or flee from threats. It’s our cave-dwelling ancestor’s adrenaline response that sharpens our senses to listen for a saber-tooth tiger in the bushes. The challenge here is when that alarm goes off and there’s no tiger, or when the alarm is so loud it paralyzes us.

Anger: The Defender

Anger is the most misunderstood feeling, and probably deserves a whole blog since it’s much more complex than it seems at first glance. I like to say “anger makes us briefly sociopathic.” While we certainly don’t want to stay that way, and others don’t want us to be sociopathic either, when confronting actual dangers, it may be needed. If we’re fighting that saber-tooth from earlier, we need our full attention on the fight and can’t spare any to worry about minor scrapes or injuries we might receive in the process. And if normally we might be too grossed-out to stab a finger in its eye, that disgust response might get us killed, so it gets turned off. The same is true of its effect on other emotions. Empathy is also something that gets turned off, and might allow us to create more conflict than we would otherwise, standing up for ourselves and others when needed. Yet it goes without saying, being sociopathic can come with many negative consequences for self and others. Without proper understanding and control, anger can lead to regrettable decisions or to over-reacting to minor irritations as though they were life-threatening, both will cause more harm than good.

Disgust: Keeping Things Out

Disgust is our body’s way of keeping toxins and diseases out of our body. Extending this to an emotional response, it protects us from harmful social and moral influences. It’s the instinctive recoil from rotten food or a lie that threatens our social fabric. The danger of disgust is perceiving dangers where there aren’t any. Worse yet, a person growing up in a toxic environment may see that as normal and perceive danger as safety, while responding with disgust to things that are actually healing.

Contempt: The moral impulse

Contempt plays a vital role in distancing ourselves from perceived moral errors. It can foster just systems by holding bad actors accountable, even ourselves. Although it’s been quite popular recently to attack the negative aspects of shame, it is essentially a form of contempt at our own behavior and is necessary for a moral conscience. However, when contempt protects the ego rather than the moral values, it leads us to view others as less valuable than ourselves on a broad scale. This fosters division and injustice, plus being one of the quickest ways to destroy a marriage.

Every feeling Has A Reason

Every emotion within our complex palette plays an essential role, crafted by nature to help us navigate every kind of situation life may throw at us. Yes, they may not always be the most pleasant experiences, but whether it’s the protective instinct of fear, the reflective pause of sadness, or the mobilizing force of anger, each emotion has its place and purpose. The challenges we often face when things are off-balanced or we’re trapped in one emotional state typically stem from one of two things: either not understanding the context of our feelings or not being able to discern the next steps to resolve our predicaments. Recognizing the value and function of each emotion is the first step toward using them as tools rather than letting emotions use us.