The emotion paradox: Why negative emotions hurt less in the East
What the West can learn from the East about emotion
Hi everyone,
A quick announcement before we dive into this week’s fascinating topic. Next week, we’ll be running Betwixt Circles - a four-session immersive (online) course in creative self-reflection, led by therapist, somatic experiencing practitioner, author and artist Ellen Clarke. If you’re interested in honing your self-awareness, cultivating presence and reconnecting with your imagination, you can find out about Circles and book your spot here.
Now, onto the story.
A few years ago, a team of researchers puzzled over a paradox that can be seen in cross-cultural data on mental health. They called it the “East-West divide”.
The paradox is that East Asians tend to report more negative emotions than European Americans and yet research suggests they have much lower levels of anxiety and depression.
Some argue that the paradox is not real, that it’s due to cultural differences when it comes to the willingness to disclose information about mental health issues. Yet increasing evidence from other studies shows that while negative feelings correlate with worse mental and physical health in the West, the link is significantly weaker in the East. And the key difference, it seems, lies in how emotions are understood and engaged in the different cultures.
For instance, research has found that negative emotions are associated with increased inflammation and elevated cortisol levels but only among US subjects and not Japanese participants. Another study showed that aversive feelings predicted worse health outcomes in both nations, but in the US they led to more chronic conditions, as well as greater decreases in wellbeing and self-esteem, than in Japan.
So, is there a difference in emotion perception between East and West that could explain why negative feelings affect the two cultures differently?
Acceptance of contradiction
Well, yes. There are a number of potential factors, but here I want to focus on one particular difference as it’s something we in the West can learn from: acceptance of contradiction.
In Eastern traditions, negative and positive feelings are not seen as mutually exclusive; rather, they're allowed to co-occur and co-exist as part of a natural cycle. As a result, people in these cultures are more likely to see the silver linings in challenging situations, and to experience the good along with the bad.
In the Western world, by contrast, we take a more binary perspective: things are either good or bad, and negative emotions threaten the experience of positive ones. This leads to denial or avoidance of upsetting feelings, which doesn’t make them go away but instead intensifies them. When we resist our monsters, we only end up feeding them — they grow bigger and scarier in the dark corners of our imaginations.
So if you want to take one lesson from these findings — something that Eastern culture has known for millennia — it’s this:
All of our feelings are allowed to co-exist peacefully and each one has its place in the story of our life.
You don’t have to run from the darker emotions — no matter how difficult they can be at times. If you choose to accept them, or even welcome them, you might find that there are other, softer, brighter thoughts and feelings waiting in the wings.
This, too, shall pass
Emotions in the West are often experienced as persistent and pervasive, and when you’re in their grip, it can be hard to imagine anything else, anything better. We get stuck in negativity and rumination, our present emotional struggles overwhelm and occupy all of our thoughts, strangling our self-efficacy and blocking our ability to look forward and move on.
By contrast, as you’ll probably know if you’ve practiced mindfulness in the past, the traditional Eastern take is that everything is transient, temporary. It’s taken for granted that negative emotions won’t last; that they’ll eventually be succeeded by positive ones — a perspective that makes them much easier to tolerate.
It’s a little like those expected train times you get on the London Underground: when we know our discomfort is coming to an end, it gets infinitely easier to tolerate.
So what can we do to switch to the Eastern view on emotions in time? It can help to imagine your life on a literal timeline, with today in front of you, yesterday to the left, tomorrow to the right, and to imagine the ups and downs of your feelings in that period as if on a graph.
Or, if you prefer words to images, you can fall back on a classic whenever you’re struggling. This, too, shall pass.
Emotions as shared, contextual experiences
In the West, emotions are viewed as internal. Even when we blame our feelings on other people or circumstance, the experience of the emotion itself is seen as a personal, individual, internal thing.
So, if you’re feeling bad, it's easy to see the emotion as a fault or a failing, and this can lead to a further sense of guilt or shame, which, of course, only adds fuel to the original negative emotion.
There's a tricky balance here because taking responsibility is a good thing, but it’s easily conflated with blaming yourself for feeling a certain way or being unable to control powerful feelings. Responsibility is different from blame, but they're close cousins, and it's easy to slip from one to the other, especially when you’re already in the grip of a challenging experience.
In the East, by contrast, emotions are seen not as merely belonging to you, but as part of the larger context of your life, including your relationships and the bigger social and cultural environment you’re in. This makes it easier to distance yourself from negative emotions and allows you to regulate them more effectively.
As a westerner, I find this perspective really hard to process – emotions as internal is so ingrained that considering this more connected, contextual take is like trying to make one of those Magic Eye pictures come into focus. But the more I think about it, the easier it is to get a glimpse of the alternate image – of a world in which emotions are shared, and where feelings connect us to other people and the world around us.
Thank you for reading!
We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.
