Mind Your Body: The Perks of Feeling So-So

Can you feel happy and sad at the same time? It may seem counterintuitive, but it's not unusual to celebrate the birth of a baby while worrying over finances or to recall cherished memories in the midst of a funeral. Some emotions—nostalgia, for example—gain all their power by being mixed experiences, with positive and negative feelings activated simultaneously.

Researchers have long linked negative emotions to increased risk for illness and positive emotions to health and longevity. Now, a 10-year study published in Social, Psychological, and Personality Science reports that the greater the frequency of people's mixed emotional experiences over time, the slower their age-related health decline. Another paper in PLoS One reports that patients who experienced concurrent happiness and sadness in a psychotherapy session had the greatest boost in mental wellness at the next session—more so than those who felt only good or bad.

In the SPPS study, participants were paged at various points throughout the day and asked to assess their feelings. People in the second study kept journals to document their emotional states. One example of a narrative that was classified as mixed: "I feel, 'What more can I take?' But in reality I also feel reasonably confident and happy." The researchers suspect that such balance—remembering positive things during challenging times—may be a key to good mental health, even when an immediate benefit is not apparent.

"When we face difficult events in our lives, we can choose to suppress negative emotions and ignore them, express them, or take the good with the bad," explains Hal E. Hershfield, a co-author of both papers and a psychologist at New York University's Stern School of Business.

Letting in the good is not the same as plugging your ears and pretending everything is fine. "The ability to withstand the tension of feeling both positive and negative emotions may represent an important human strength," Texas Tech psychologist Jeff Larsen observes.

Emotional ambiguity can be difficult in the moment, but embracing it over time reaps greater rewards than a blanket "think positive" approach. Negative experiences are inevitable, and a coping strategy that accommodates nuance can mitigate the physiological damage of sadness and help people find meaning and value in life—even at the worst times. "We don't walk around feeling happy and sad all the time," Hershfield notes, "but the more we can approach life with some balance, the better."