No Bad Feelings

Let me state this as clearly as possible: there’s no such thing as a “wrong” feeling, despite the title of this post.

However, there are clearly times when the emotion we’re experiencing does not rationally align to the situation we’re in. This is what I call an “emotional misfire”: the emotion has been fired off by your brain inappropriately, and it’s a mismatch for the contextual situation you’re in.

This is oversimplifying things a bit, but just to make the point, here’s what emotions are basically for:

Sadness: processing loss.

Anger: dealing with resistance.

Happiness: enjoying good times.

Confusion: making space for learning.

Guilt: preventing a repeat of bad behaviour.

Fear: identifying and responding to a threat.

What is a misfire?

An emotional misfire is when one of these emotions arises but does not match their function – the situation doesn’t call for it. You’re sad but you haven’t lost anything. Your angry but nothing harmful is happening. You feel guilty but you’ve done nothing wrong by your own standards.

Most people have an innate subconscious belief that emotions are always relevant and must be happening for a good reason, so they tend to assume whatever they’re feeling must be valid and they start looking to justify their feelings.

If they’re feeling sad, they’ll ruminate on what they’ve lost or don’t have. If they’re angry, they’ll look for evidence of injustice. If they’re guilty, they’ll assume what they’re doing is wrong.

But if it’s true that emotions can misfire, you might seriously damage your interpretation of reality when you start looking for evidence to justify your feelings. You’ll essentially gaslight yourself into believing something that isn’t true.

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Why do emotions misfire?

I think there’s a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly, the brain is a complicated organ and it’s incredibly naïve to assume it functions perfectly. From the obvious cases of severe mental illness to the more subtle experience of forgetting why you got up from your chair, it’s clear the brain sometimes makes mistakes in processing information and aligning with reality.

Spend some time studying cognitive biases and logical fallacies, and you’ll quickly learn that the brain has a hard time keeping track of reality at the best of times.

It’s only logical to assume that it will at least occasionally fire off an emotional response randomly, without good cause. We can’t expect such a complex organ functioning in an even more complex world to not occasionally have a bug in the code.

Secondly, we are all living in and reacting to two separate realities, each overlapping the other. There’s “out there” – the “real” world where everything exists in a verifiable way (e.g. you can touch a tree to confirm it is hard and that it exists). And then there’s “inside your mind” – a fictional space where only you know what’s happening and there’s no way to prove it to anyone else (e.g. you can dream of a tree made from hotdogs).

Your emotions react to both of these worlds with equal intensity.

Ever notice how you get anxious from imagining something scary, and yet nothing even remotely threatening is happening to you in the real world in this moment? Notice how you can get angry imagining that someone is disrespecting you, only to discover later they didn’t even know you were there?

My coaching clients will tell me that they are “often” rejected by others, but when we investigate we find they rarely even ask for anything, let alone hear a hard “No!” Yet they feel as if they’re rejected often because they so often imagine being rejected. Emotionally, they can’t tell the difference. Their imagined rejections end up becoming memories of real rejection!

Your emotions are responses to whatever you’re focused on, and they’re not fussy about how real that thing is. As Jim Carrey once said, we don’t know the difference between a dog in our minds trying to eat us, and an actual dog trying to eat us, and so we spend a lot of time pointlessly experiencing a fight or flight response.

So can we just agree that it’s inevitable for you to regularly experience emotional reactions to things that do not exist in the real world, and even to have feelings for absolutely no reason at all?

How to know if you’re misfiring?

Good question to ask yourself, and I recommend getting into the habit of asking yourself this question any time you experience intense emotions. You’d be surprised at how often you misfire.

I believe the key is creating some helpful rational questions that will force you to accurately measure reality during emotional times. Here are some examples.

If you’re feeling sad, ask yourself to point to the space where the thing you lost used to be. Whether it’s a possession, a friend, a sense of love – try to identify it’s former location in the real world. If it’s still there (e.g. your partner is sleeping next to you in bed), then you haven’t lost it, so you’re misfiring. If it never was there (e.g. you’re yearning for a life you’ve never had), then you haven’t lost it and you’re misfiring.

If you’re feeling angry, point to the injury. Where’s the actual, measurable damage being done to you, your loved ones, or your property? If you can’t point at injuries, damage and pain, then the anger is about something you can’t prove exists and therefore is likely to be a misfire (e.g. feeling anger about being ignored even when your life is continuing fine as usual).

If you feel happy, you probably won’t question it. However, even happiness can be a misfire – sometimes we can be blissfully unaware of danger, or be manipulated into loving someone who means to harm us. Happiness can’t be trusted either. So ask yourself, where’s the evidence that my quality of life has improved? Just because someone is love-bombing you via text message doesn’t mean your life has gotten any better since you met them.

If you feel scared, point to the immediate threat. Notice the difference between mental catastrophizing and actual danger. If you can’t show it to someone else, or you have to explain what might happen sometime, then you’re misfiring – there is no immediate threat. Even if you are reasonably predicting danger, if it’s not happening right now then fear is not an appropriate response, so you’re misfiring regardless of how rational your expectation may seem.

You get it?

Don’t confuse challenging your feelings with looking for proof. That’s the problem you’ve had in the past – looking to validate the feeling. Instead, assume most feelings aren’t really warranted or helpful, so make them fight to prove their validity.

Let’s say you’re angry because someone cut you off on the highway… did they actually cause you harm? Or are you just mad about the story in your head – the one saying they’re an asshole who’s trying to ruin your day? Because that story isn’t real. In real life, nothing bad has actually happened. Your car is fine, you’re fine, you’ll still get to where you want to go. So there’s nothing real to get angry about.

If, however, that person then got out of their car to come attack you, that is real, and anger will help you be courageous enough to defend yourself.

What should I do with a misfire?

I want to be careful here: I am NOT recommending you suppress, ignore or dismiss your emotions. They may be misfiring, but if you don’t process them in a healthy way then you’re in for a bad time further down the track.

The only thing to keep in mind is that you should not obey their suggestions. If a guilt misfire suggests you should apologise, but you’ve done nothing wrong, then don’t say sorry. If sadness says life is unfair, but you’re healthy and life is going well, then don’t give in to the temptation to complain.

You can have a feeling without acting on it. However, you cannot suppress it.

So the healthiest response I’ve been able to come up with is to express the feeling while also identifying that it’s a misfire. This way you acknowledge the emotion as being faultless – it just showed up because it was called to do so, it didn’t know any better and it’s not trying to trick you – but you also acknowledge that acting on this feeling would be detrimental.

It might look like this:

“I’m mad at you but you’ve done nothing wrong, so it must be something else that wound me up”.

“I got a sense of guilt when you said that, but I’m actually ok with what I did there so I won’t apologise”.

“I’m getting really anxious about that test next week, but it must be a misfire because I scored 93% in the trials so it’s highly unlikely that I’ll fail”.

In other words: talk about it but don’t act on it.

Make it normal to identify feelings as inappropriate without trying to get rid of them or punish yourself for having them. Treat them more like eyesight – sometimes your eyes are tricked into thinking they saw a friend but when he turned around it wasn’t him at all. This doesn’t mean you become ashamed of your eyesight; you just misfired. No big deal.

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Thanks for reading

Hope to speak to you soon

Dan Munro