Why do people have negative feelings?

All week you have been overwhelmed by all kinds of chaotic emotions. You are sad, you are angry, you are happy, you are worried. By the end of the day, you are tired both physically and mentally because of what happens in your head.

It's easy to understand when we have positive emotions. Happy people will have happier lives and create happier couples. Other positive emotions such as love and cohesion are essential to raising children. But love always goes package, you have to accept the good and the bad, the love must go with hatred and happiness is always parallel with sadness.

Randolph Nesse, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan, USA, thinks that these individual feelings are actually a selective adaptation of nature to deal with each specific situation. Nesse calls emotions like software of the mind . When faced with a sad situation, the brain will lead to a sad program to cope with, and when the situation gets better, the brain will jump to a fun program.

With Nesse, it is not only related to each emotion or case, because many emotions have similar physiological effects. When faced with a situation, our feelings rise, and any emotion can cause the body to be alert, defend, change the model or the action engine. The important thing is not the name of the emotion but what the body and mind do with it.

It is essential that over time, these emotions help people survive, motivate them to breed and nurture their children. These emotions are deeply embedded in the brain, whether we like it or not.

And because humans are basically social animals, we have social emotions embedded in our nature. We are animals so in some profound sense we need to rely on each other to survive. Therefore, people not only have personal feelings, we have emotions that are affected by the behavior and emotions of others.

"If you intend to do something that makes others angry, you will feel guilty," Nesse said. That's why we can trust others and also feel betrayed.

The fact is that without those complicated social emotions, people will still lurk in the forests, living alone on tree branches. And according to Nesse, all emotions are good, in the sense of evolution. They are there to help us, bring hope. Even when you are in sadness, you know that joy is still somewhere. And we only realize happiness when we have experienced suffering.