The Surprising Benefits of Negative Emotions | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | I've long been interested in shifting one's emotions and when that feels good, when it

00:00:11.240 | is good, and when it doesn't feel good.

00:00:15.860 | I asked our friend Ethan Cross about this too, I'm not going to compare your answers

00:00:20.600 | as a template for who's right, who's wrong, I think there are a lot of differing opinions

00:00:25.300 | on this.

00:00:26.300 | I know from the time we are young kids, we don't like to be shifted, we don't like people

00:00:33.460 | to impose an emotional requirement on us.

00:00:36.140 | In fact, my niece when she was little, I was telling her this, she's 18 now, she was not

00:00:39.980 | amused, which delighted me that she was not amused, but when she was little, she was a

00:00:46.460 | pretty healthily stubborn kid and you'd ask her to do anything, like, "Hey, let's go downstairs

00:00:53.820 | for a walk," and she loved going outside for walks and she'd say, "No, push me."

00:00:58.100 | And then she would get her stuff and then you go for a walk, but I loved her like, "No,

00:01:01.300 | push me."

00:01:02.300 | I love this.

00:01:03.300 | Costello was like, "Don't push me," you couldn't.

00:01:06.160 | So there was this immediate vocalization from the time she could speak really, I was like,

00:01:12.100 | "No, I'm gonna decide how I feel."

00:01:13.940 | Such a healthy thing too, such a healthy thing.

00:01:15.780 | You're not gonna shift me, I was like, "We're going out for a walk, it's gonna be fun,"

00:01:18.780 | and she'd say, "No, push me," and then she'd go for the walk.

00:01:22.020 | Most of the times it was a fun walk.

00:01:23.540 | But I think that we don't like to be shifted, and in some ways we don't really like to shift

00:01:30.060 | ourselves.

00:01:31.060 | Like when we're in a given emotion, when people are feeling upset, they don't wanna be told

00:01:37.660 | they should feel happy.

00:01:40.580 | And yet no one really wants to be upset, although there's this, do you know this result?

00:01:45.060 | I don't wanna spin off into a long discussion about this, but Robert Heath, a very controversial

00:01:49.960 | neurosurgeon from the '70s and '80s, did these experiments of stimulating in different parts

00:01:55.400 | of the brain, allowing people to self-stimulate different parts of their brain.

00:01:59.080 | And there were only three subjects, 'cause it's an in vivo human neurostimulation experiment.

00:02:04.520 | All three subjects, by far their favorite area to stimulate was this midline central

00:02:10.040 | nucleus, midline thalamic nucleus rather.

00:02:13.840 | All three of them reported that the sensation that they would lever press the most for was

00:02:19.200 | frustration and mild anger.

00:02:22.100 | Humans like that shit.

00:02:23.100 | Excuse my language.

00:02:24.100 | Why?

00:02:25.100 | Look, the horror movie industry would not exist if we didn't like fear, right?

00:02:30.320 | Honestly, like Twitter X, whatever we're calling it now, would not exist if we didn't like

00:02:34.320 | outrage, right?

00:02:35.440 | These are kind of complicated negative emotions that have some positive benefit to us.

00:02:42.120 | And I think that this is something that people get wrong when they hear my line of research.

00:02:45.880 | You know, I tell people like, "Oh, I teach this class about happiness at Yale," and people

00:02:49.480 | will say like, "Oh, you just want everybody to be happy.

00:02:52.040 | You sort of embrace this toxic positivity."

00:02:54.160 | And I'm like, "No, no, no, no."

00:02:55.160 | Toxic positivity?

00:02:56.160 | Toxic positivity.

00:02:57.160 | Yeah, it's this idea.

00:02:58.160 | I mean, you kind of see it in our culture right now.

00:03:00.360 | It's this sort of good vibes only, right?

00:03:02.600 | It's this idea that anything that feels mildly frustrating or hard to do, it's like, "Oh,

00:03:08.640 | no, no, just don't do that."

00:03:09.640 | It's like good vibes only, right?

00:03:11.520 | And there's this idea that if you're experiencing negative emotions, if you feel sad or you

00:03:15.400 | feel a little lonely or you feel a little upset at politics, whatever it is, that something's

00:03:19.840 | wrong or you got to take a pill or you got to do something to fix it, right?

00:03:23.520 | I think that's a really dangerous idea, right?

00:03:26.960 | Because it's getting rid of this signal that we've been built to experience evolutionarily

00:03:31.060 | that's really important, right?

00:03:33.360 | If you're experiencing outrage, that's telling you something super crucial.

00:03:37.280 | If you're experiencing kind of frustration, overwhelm is a big one.

00:03:41.200 | If you're kind of feeling, "Oh, I'm so overwhelmed at work and I'm burned out," that's a really

00:03:45.120 | useful signal about behavioral changes you should make.

00:03:49.120 | In class, I often tell my students that negative emotions are like that dashboard on your car.

00:03:54.040 | You go in your car and you're like, you know, sometimes you're driving, the tire light comes

00:03:56.680 | on or the engine light comes on.

00:03:58.880 | And that's a pain in the ass, honestly, because you're like, "Oh, I got to deal with it."

00:04:01.920 | So it's not fun when these lights come on, but it's super useful information that if

00:04:05.760 | you actively ignore it for months and months, it's going to cause a much bigger problem

00:04:09.420 | later on.

00:04:10.420 | And I think this is how all of our negative emotions work.

00:04:13.520 | If you're feeling that, you know, negative emotion of loneliness, it means you need more

00:04:17.400 | social connection.

00:04:18.400 | If you're feeling overwhelmed, it means you probably got to take something off your plate

00:04:21.440 | before you burn out or get sick.

00:04:23.040 | If you're feeling sad, like that's probably because of some, you know, stimulus that matters

00:04:27.920 | that is like kind of you're not there anymore, if you're feeling grief and so on.

00:04:31.320 | I think too often we just like want to get rid of those.

00:04:34.160 | We don't like them, so we want to suppress those emotions.

00:04:37.600 | But suppressing our emotions is giving up useful evolutionary information that probably

00:04:41.700 | means we can take action to fix and feel better.

00:04:45.840 | Americans might be surprised to hear this, but I learned this from my father who's from

00:04:49.800 | South America.

00:04:50.800 | He's from Argentina, went to British schools when he was young.

00:04:54.000 | And he told me when I was probably 10 or 12, I can't remember exactly how old, he said,

00:04:59.360 | you know, in the British formal school system, if you act too happy, people accuse you of

00:05:06.560 | being stupid.

00:05:07.560 | You know, to be gleeful or happy.

00:05:11.900 | And I said, now I would say, well, they're perfectly fine being happy when they're drinking.

00:05:15.820 | I will say that the after work alcohol culture in London.

00:05:20.000 | The 5 of 14 p.m. crowd.

00:05:22.260 | I don't know if it's still the case, but they drink a lot.

00:05:24.440 | And then they get very like outwardly happy.

00:05:27.720 | But there's this idea, and this was true when I came into academia, that if somebody wasn't

00:05:34.020 | super serious, that they might be stupid.

00:05:38.400 | And I think in the United States now, we tend to celebrate more expressions of glee.

00:05:44.680 | But that's usually in the context of like celebrity and wealth, like these people getting

00:05:48.980 | on their private planes or something.

00:05:51.100 | But I think there's still some elements to this that we internalize, that if you're happy,

00:05:56.780 | that you're not worrying about something.

00:05:58.420 | If you're not worrying about something, then you're ignoring the woes of the world.

00:06:01.340 | Maybe even the threats that are all around you.

00:06:04.540 | And so in some ways, we are conditioned to always want to be happy, that does seem to

00:06:08.300 | be one message.

00:06:09.300 | But then we also get the conflicting message that to be happy is to be ignorant of what's

00:06:15.020 | really happening, if not to you, then to other people, and therefore you're not fulfilling

00:06:18.260 | your role in society.

00:06:19.340 | So who are you to be happy all the time?

00:06:20.940 | There's a lot of judgment written into this thing around happiness, I'm realizing.

00:06:24.500 | Yeah, totally.

00:06:25.500 | And I think you're bringing up something that I actually worry about a lot, which is, is

00:06:29.020 | that hypothesis correct?

00:06:30.740 | Is it the case that if you're feeling happy, you just ignore the woes and all the terrible

00:06:34.820 | stuff in the world?

00:06:35.820 | Because then I'm creating a whole generation of Yale students who are going to not fix

00:06:38.540 | the bad problems of life.

00:06:39.740 | And so it turns out there's a researcher at Georgetown, Konstantin Kushlev, who's tested

00:06:43.500 | this.

00:06:44.500 | He actually asked the question, is it the case that people who are experiencing more

00:06:47.620 | positive emotion, more satisfaction with life, do they ignore the problems of the world and

00:06:51.580 | not act?

00:06:52.580 | Or are they the ones kind of going out and doing stuff?

00:06:54.660 | And so he did this in a couple different contexts.

00:06:56.740 | He looked for social justice causes, I'll tell the climate version.

00:07:00.460 | So he looked at how many people are taking climate action.

00:07:03.500 | So do you go to a protest?

00:07:04.500 | Do you put solar panels on?

00:07:05.620 | Are you donating money to climate causes?

00:07:07.900 | And he finds that the people who are really climate anxious, they tend to have less positive

00:07:11.980 | emotions.

00:07:12.980 | You're really worried about climate change.

00:07:14.060 | You tend to be more on the depressed, anxious side.

00:07:16.220 | But if you're doing stuff about it, then you tend to have more positive emotion.

00:07:21.340 | I think he assumes the causal arrow goes in the other way, that if you're happier, if

00:07:25.300 | you're experiencing lots of delights and positive emotion, you kind of have the bandwidth to

00:07:28.980 | do stuff, right?

00:07:29.980 | You can go to that protest, where if you're super depressed, you're just going to like

00:07:32.700 | lie in bed with your duvet.

00:07:34.060 | You don't have the bandwidth to do this stuff.

00:07:36.100 | And so this whole kind of like Pollyanna-ish hypothesis about happiness, it makes complete

00:07:40.980 | intuitive sense.

00:07:41.980 | But if you look at the data, it's actually the opposite, which is a good thing because

00:07:45.740 | I think it gives us a mandate not to stay depressed about everything in the world, pissed

00:07:50.300 | off about what's happening.

00:07:51.500 | Yes, those negative emotions are good to notice and experience and act on, but like we can

00:07:56.140 | take care of ourselves and it's okay.

00:07:58.100 | It doesn't mean we're going to stop doing good stuff in the world.

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The Surprising Benefits of Negative Emotions | Dr. Laurie Santos & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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