Thought 1: Breakdown as breakthrough
A phrase I came across and keeps bubbling up in my thoughts (but I cannot for the life of me find the source for it anymore!) is ‘breakdown as breakthrough’, the idea that a breakdown is not primarily a symptom of illness or failure, but a mechanism that allows our negative emotions to effect much-needed change in our lives. Breakdowns and what we would often think of as dysfunction (depression, anxiety, addiction, physical symptoms etc) actually have a very functional role - they are an unmissable signal from the mind that something is wrong and change needs to happen.
One area where breakdown as breakthrough has become an accepted popular narrative is in stories of burnout, where the experience of burnout and the unavoidable enforced rest often leads people to question their previous ideas of what it means to succeed or to be happy or functional, and they end up re-evaluating their goals and restructuring certain aspects of their lives. Burnout and the associated negative emotions become a powerful agent of change. (although sometimes that change doesn’t always go in the best directions in my opinion…)
The power of breakdown is elegantly illustrated in a lovely video from School of Life.
Thought 2: Does positivity prevent change?
An intriguing theory that some of you may be familiar with is depressive realism - this theory states that depressed people may have more accurate predictions (a more ‘realistic view’) of the world. I think this is most interesting perhaps not in the world of laboratory task performance (always so enticingly measurable!) but in a much broader way - do negative emotions and attitudes like anger, dissatisfaction, pessimism, sadness and anxiety guide us to a more potent view of the future i.e. viewpoints and beliefs that have the capacity to effect more radical or interesting change?
The flipside of this is the idea of ‘toxic positivity’. Much has been said about how mandating positive emotionality in others (whether family, friends, colleagues or others) is profoundly judgmental and unaccepting, and leads people to suppress and bury negative emotions. I think another aspect of this is how positivity and optimism could potentially suppress the capacity for radical change (this concept underlies ideas like ‘tone policing’, where anger is viewed as a necessary motivational factor to effecting social change, and positivity and niceness as a way that these impulses for change are neutered).
An angle on this which I found interesting when reading a couple of reviews on optimism (here and here - as always go to Sci-hub for full text) are the associations between optimism and approach/avoidance styles of coping behaviours - optimism is positively associated with approach coping behaviours, and negatively associated with avoidance coping behaviours. So having a positive view of the future drives you towards engagement and approach whereas a negative view of the future drives you towards disengagement and avoidance.
But surely sometimes disengaging and avoiding systems, people and things that are harming you is a rational choice and a much-needed precursor to change.
I think this is one of the great dangers of toxic positivity and a lot of the positive psychology self-help writing out there that focuses on building up more positive emotions, a more optimistic outlook, contentment and acceptance of how things are and so on. While it may be healing for the individual, it brings internal experience of emotions to the fore in a way where cultivation of the internal state becomes a goal in itself, rather than considering how emotional states are drivers for action.
Ideally, we should be able to have both the internal experience and the functional role.
Thought 3: Emotions as indicators
One metaphor which I find quite personally productive and interesting is the idea of emotions as indicators, like instruments on a pilot’s dashboard. Emotions are signals that deserve attention, and interpretation, and give us important feedback in the same way a pilot’s flight instruments tells them about important things going on both on how they are currently relating to the external world (altitude, radar etc) and their own internal state (hydraulics, autopilot status, etc). However, because these instruments are sometimes faulty (your altimeter or airspeed indicator might malfunction), there is also an important secondary area of evaluation - not just what your instruments are telling you, but also whether those instruments are helpfully and accurately reflecting the actual state of things.
This is how an excessive focus on maintaining a positive emotional state (getting the instruments to have readings within range) can sometimes be harmful, because the secondary evaluation, of whether the positive emotional state is actually justified given the outside conditions, gets forgotten about.
Future thoughts
Something I’d also really love to get into more, and has a strong and unpleasant relationship with toxic positivity, is the idea of resilience, grit, perseverance, delay discounting etc. There is much more in goal-directed behaviour and the exploitation/exploration tradeoff that I think fits very neatly on top of optimism/pessimism and all this approach/avoidance stuff, but for the sake of post length I’ve deliberately tried to not write about this here!
I think there is also a lot more to dig into in this idea of what we lose and gain when we make an internal emotional state like ‘wellbeing’ a goal to strive towards. What goes unexamined when we go for the greatest happiness for the greatest number? (Going back to exploration/exploitation, do we just we end up in local maxima?)
There’s also much more to be said about the social role of emotions and the two-way aspect of this, both internalising external judgements e.g. having an internal censor and self-blaming, and how our internal experience, when expressed, elicits responses from others (facial expressions, the social function of crying etc).
This was a slightly longer post today! I hope you find it interesting.