Struggling to be positive? RAW emotions are useful: Researchers

CHENNAI: Psychiatry, which uses medical and biological methods to treat mental disorders has been head-on-head to psychotherapy which relies on non-biological approaches such as conversation and counselling. As psychiatry has largely overtaken psychotherapy, psychotherapists have sought alternative challenges. One common approach is to focus on enhancing the happiness of mentally healthy people, rather than relieving the mental pain and trauma of those who are suffering.

This is known as “positive psychology” and has recently expanded to accommodate not only psychologists, but also social workers, life coaches and new age therapists. But there is evidence to suggest that the approach has a negative side.

“Seize the day and live in the moment” is the frequent advice shed by these positive psychologists. Doing so helps us be more positive and avoid three of the most infamous emotional states, which can be acronymic as RAW emotions: regret, anger and worry. Ultimately, it suggests that we avoid focusing too much on regrets and anger about the past, or worries about the future.

It sounds like an easy task. But human psychology is evolutionarily hardwired to live in the past and the future. Other species have instincts and reflexes to help with their survival, but human survival relies very much on learning from past experiences and planning for the future. You can’t learn without living in the past, and you can’t plan without living in the future.

Regret, for example, which can make us suffer by reflecting on the past, is an indispensable mental mechanism for learning from one’s own mistakes to avoid repeating them. Worries about the future are likewise essential to motivate us to do something that is somewhat unpleasant today but can create gain or spare us a greater loss in the future. Similarly, anger is an instrumental emotion, which protects us against being abused by others and motivates people around us to respect our interests. Research has even shown that a certain degree of anger in negotiations can be helpful, leading to better outcomes.

Research has shown negative moods in general can be quite useful – making us less credulous and more sceptical. Studies have estimated that a whopping 80% of people in the West in fact have an optimism bias, which means we learn more from positive experiences than from negative ones.

There is a misleading conjecture that one can measure happiness by simply asking people whether or not they are happy. Owing to positive psychology marked its place beyond limits through capitalist interests. Researchers say while questionnaires about happiness measure something, it is not happiness per se, but rather the readiness of people to admit that life is quite often difficult, or alternatively, their tendency to arrogantly boast that they always do better than others.

We don’t have full control over our happiness, and societal structures can often create adversity, poverty, stress and unfairness – things that shape how we feel. To believe that you can just think yourself better by focusing on positive emotions when you’re in financial danger or have gone through major trauma is at the very least naive. This shows that we don’t have full control over our happiness and that striving for it can make people quite miserable rather than happy.

Studies don’t conclude positive psychology to be a conspiracy promoted by capitalist companies. Rather, instructing a person to be happy is not much different than asking them not to think of a pink elephant – in both cases their mind can easily go in the opposite direction. In the former case, not being able to fulfil the goal to be happy adds substantial frustration and self-blame.

And then comes the question of whether happiness is really the most important value in life. Is it even something stable that can last over time? The study quotes the answer to these questions were given more than a hundred years ago by the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honourable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”