Emotional decomposition
Life improves when we can transform unproductive feelings into useful ones.
Life improves when we can transform unproductive feelings into useful ones.
By the time we recognize a feeling, our thinking mind assigns it a name based on what it’s experienced before. If we’re aware of it at all, the label is usually simple: good, bad, angry etc.
When we can notice how we label our feelings, we can choose to rename them. When we do this, we can transform them into forces that help us accomplish, connect and grow.
Emotions are nuanced, but our ability to understand them is not well-developed. The trick is to act a bit like a chemist and understand the different elements involved in something you’re feeling.
Every “negative” emotion serves a positive purpose in the right context. The challenge becomes isolating out the productive elements from the negative ones. In chemistry, this is known as decomposition:
An infusion of energy is needed to break down chemical bonds. The same is true for emotions: it takes purposeful effort to break through the discomfort of examining a difficult emotion.
Take envy, which is particularly nefarious. It feeds on comparison and contains inferiority, the sense that we are less than or we have less than another. We’re wired to compare ourselves to others, yet also to disguise and hide this from ourselves.
But it is possible to untangle the positive element of the envy (inspiration) from the negative (resentment).
We can train ourselves to practice what Nietzsche called Mitfreude — “joying with” — to help transform envy into something more positive. Having a purpose and knowing that you’re capable of improving in that direction enables us to look at someone who is doing what we want with admiration.
Then we can take responsibility for what we haven’t yet done, and what we can do, to move closer in the direction of our goals. Derek Sivers puts it beautifully in his post on stealing hours from comfort to make genius work happen.