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Emotions Make Sense is a class I started teaching five years ago at various rationality camps, workshops, conferences, etc. I’ve done it maybe 40 times in total, more than any of my other ~20 classes at this point, and in those 5 years I think I’ve only encountered a handful out of a few hundred teenagers and adults who really had a deep sense of what it means for emotions to “make sense.” Even people who have consumed media like Inside Out, and internalized its message about the value of Sadness as an emotion, still think things like “I wish I never felt Jealousy,” or would have trouble answering “What’s the point of Boredom?”
The point of the class is not to give a simple answer for each emotion, but to help internalize a model by which emotions, as a whole, are understood to be evolutionarily beneficial adaptations; adaptations that may not in fact all be well suited to the modern, developed world, but which can still help us understand what we want and need, even if we decide not to act on them.
Inside Out is a great film. It doesn’t go through the whole emotional understanding -> accepting -> integrating stack, but it effectively demonstrates how different emotions impact our behavior, and why even unpleasant or difficult ones can have value. The primary intuition pump it provides is showing something like, “What might go wrong if someone loses their ability to feel X emotion,” where X in the film is Sadness.
In the plot, when Sadness is missing, the protagonist Riley can’t express that something is wrong in a way that helps her family notice and help her. Once Sadness returns and is given control, Riley starts to cry on the bus, signaling to herself that she doesn’t actually want to run away from home. When she returns to her house, she starts crying more, no longer suppressing her loneliness and showing her parents in a visceral, hard-to-fake way that she’s actually in a really bad place, and needs help.
Before Inside Out 2 came out, I would ask students “If you were tasked with making an Inside Out sequel about another unpleasant emotion, what would you pick, and what would go wrong to show its potential value?” (Inside Out 2 decided to go a different direction with how it explored Anxiety, but we’ll get to that later.)
To prime yourself to use this question as well, try it with the other emotions in the movie. Inside Out doesn’t show what happens without Anger, but it does show it “taking control” when Riley feels like her preferences are being ignored or overridden. What would you expect in the film where it went missing?
Most people quickly realize something like, “Oh, she probably just gets walked all over by some bullies” or “She doesn’t protect her boundaries.”
Same for Fear: “She dies.” Or, more PG, “She does really risky things and gets hurt.” As a whole, society is actually pretty good about communicating around what fear is “meant for” and why it would be bad to lose it.
Disgust is the most complex and interesting of the emotions in Inside Out, because it’s the most environmentally trained and poorly calibrated. In the American version of the film, broccoli on pizza is the example used to show Disgust “keeping Riley safe,” and this sort of obviously fails to convey why Disgust “makes sense,” as opposed to if they’d shown Riley taking some food out of the fridge that’s grown mold or something.
But there’s still some obvious lessons people intuit about what might happen to Riley without Disgust: “She eats something rotten” is often the first answer people will give, but “She hangs out with sketchy people” is also one that comes up, and of course this is also very socially complex; we can model people well by noticing that their disgust (or “cringe”) reactions often map to things they expect would get them judgment, or even banishment, from their social circle if they did something similar.
Finally, we come to Joy. Most people can easily imagine what bad things happen without it (though I did have one student who seemed to genuinely think, at the start of the class, that removing Joy would lead to a “better” version of himself because he would be “more productive.”). So instead I ask what happens if someone only feels Joy, all the time, the way the Joy character wants.
Sometimes it’s hard for people to model why this would go wrong, but if you know anyone who has ever suffered from a manic episode, or gotten addicted to drugs, it might be easier.
If you only feel Joy, you can’t feel the other emotions, which is basically the same as losing all of them at once. No proper response to danger, or having your boundaries violated, or loss of something that matters to you. When you don't have any way to separate positive signals of doing something well from negative signals of doing something wrong, if you don't have any way to do this in your imagination when planning for the future, the way you act gets more and more divorced from reality.
So a state of constant high-energy Joy might result in dauntless excitement and overconfidence to make all sorts of risky decisions, because you deeply feel that everything is great and will continue to be great no matter what. A state of constant low-energy Joy might result in just lying in bed in a happy stupor.
So, that covers the emotions in Inside Out. Anger, Disgust, Fear, and Sadness are all geared towards keeping us safe or protecting us in some way, while Joy is meant to signal that whatever we’re doing, we want to do more of it.
The title of this post is a claim, strongly stated and regularly defended, that all emotions make sense in ways like this. They all serve some purpose that, theoretically, can help you survive or thrive compared to the counterfactual “you” that doesn’t ever feel them, and I believe understanding them better will both reduce your suffering through life, and help you make decisions that achieve your goals.
There’s more to say on this, caveats and nuance and clarifications, but first I think it’s valuable to demonstrate the point more thoroughly.
This is the point in the class where I ask participants to pick an emotion that they feel is bad, or wish they didn’t have, or think the world would be better off without, and spend 3 minutes trying to generate the reason it exists, and might be worth having after all.
You don’t have to set a timer and try it yourself first if you don’t want to, but as I said, my goal with the class (and by extension this article) is to help people internalize the model, and I think actually spending some minutes trying it helps a lot with that. Without the limits of class time, I think 5 minutes lets you really think through each of the following steps:
Step 1) Pick an emotion you find confusing or wish you could erase from yourself or others.
Step 2) What would a movie where a person loses the ability to feel that emotion do to show its potential value?
Step 3) If that emotion was a person, what would it want?
Step 4) If that emotion evolved to give you information about yourself, what would it be?
Step 5) If that emotion evolved to tell you something about the world, what would it be?
If you're not finished, feel free to spend more time on it, but I think that should be enough to give you a sense of the thing I'm pointing at.
Obviously I can’t check how you did, but what I can do is list the emotions that come up the most often in all the classes, and hope they cover whatever you wrote, or help build the intuitions in a way that generalizes.
Imagine you’re going on two dates with two different people over the course of the next week. If you feel anxious about one, but not the other, what does that say about how you feel about the two people you’re dating? Or imagine you have two job interviews, and you feel anxious about one but not that other?
Anxiety is the emotion that signals that you care about the outcome of something, and/or that you feel underprepared for it. If you feel either no attachment to any particular outcome, or fully confident in it, anxiety has no purpose.
Inside Out 2 doesn’t depict Riley losing her ability to feel anxious, but instead shows it going out of control in its attempts to improve Riley’s life. In practice, it is the emotion that drives “rumination.” Rumination is your mind’s attempt to try to problem solve things before they happen, or after they've already happened such that they don't go badly again in the future.
Like any emotion, rumination can be overtuned or undertuned. Sometimes we get into anxiety spirals because we don't really have anything concrete that we can think of to solve a problem, or prevent it from happening again. But the anxiety itself is still a signal to yourself that something is wrong. Nicky Case made a fantastic interactive story that uses some Narrative Therapy principles to help people understand and integrate their anxiety.
Go ahead and grab a handful of salt to hold onto for this next part, because it’s time for some evolutionary psychology.
Imagine two ancient tribes, A and B, each with access to the same resources. They’re getting by okay, subsistence hunting and gathering, living in peace with each other.
Tribe C nearby invents a way to fish well; they weave nets and use them to gather many more fish each day. They start to spend less time gathering food and more time building new huts, raising more children, crafting better equipment. The benefits compound.
Tribe A and B can observe all this happening, but there’s a difference between them: Tribe A has very few people in it that feel any sort of jealousy. They see what C is doing and just think “good for them, none of our business.”
Tribe B, on the other hand, feels Jealousy, here defined as “wanting what someone else has.” Whether they act on that by going over to steal what Tribe C makes, or more prosocially, studying their methods to imitate them, either way, which Tribe is the most likely to get outcompeted?
But wait, there’s more. Jealousy can have a much more destructive form, “wanting to destroy what someone else has if you can’t have it.” This is sometimes referred to as Envy, though the two words are often used interchangeably to refer to both concepts.
This may be a risky strategy for B. But it also increases its chances of survival and flourishing by minimizing the chances it gets outcompeted by Tribe C.
There are subtle variations of these emotions that can motivate a wide range of different actions. The point is not that all are equally good or moral or effective, only that the absence of any of them would make the village less “fit” in an environment where others do have those motivations.
This works on an individual level too, of course. If you see someone in your tribe doing impressive things and being praised and rewarded for it, your genes are more likely to spread if they include some emotional motivations to be just as good... or, conversely, to tear them down.
Finally, relationship jealousy is much more simple. Whether it's about a friendship, a family connection, or a romantic (or potentially romantic) partner, relationship jealousy is an effective signal of what you want, what you think is scarce, and what you think is at risk. One reason many people dislike jealousy is that it feels painful to them, but another is that the intuitive actions it results in are often controlling behaviors, or behaviors that reveal insecurity or vulnerability. Some of the controlling behaviors probably used to be quite effective at securing relationships when people didn’t live in particularly equal societies, but are somewhat less so in the modern world.
Though not always! Some people do actually enjoy their romantic partner being jealous, which makes sense; enjoying signals of desire and protectiveness would have been a valuable trait to have had in an environment where it happened a lot!
It's worth keeping in mind that a lot of these emotional experiences, on every end of their spectrums, are just the result of different survival and mating strategies of genes competing against each other to propagate more of themselves. The wide variance in human behaviors and preferences is a reflection of how many different strategies work in different contexts, for different reasons.
Guilt and Shame are another pair of emotions that people have uncomfortable, often confused, relationships with. More than almost any other emotion, culture and upbringing play a big role in determining what people feel guilt or shame about, so it's no wonder that these emotions often come up in classes, and were requested in the comments of earlier versions of this post.
They're also another pair of emotional words that are sometimes used interchangeably, but we can delineate them to point at two distinct, but related, concepts in emotion-space: the first, which we'll call Guilt, is a feeling of discomfort someone has due to judging themselves, and the second, which we'll call Shame, from the perceived or predicted judgement from others.
Everyone, sooner or later, does something that hurts someone, whether intentionally or not. If Person A feels no particular discomfort about it, while Person B feels deep discomfort that motivates them to genuinely apologize, make amends, and carefully examine their behavior to avoid repeating the mistake... which of them, over a lifetime, is more likely to have supportive, positive relationships?
From an evolutionary perspective, Guilt would have been crucial for maintaining cooperative relationships. Humans are intensely social creatures whose survival depended on functioning within groups. While people sometimes will admire others who are devoid of guilt for their antisocial acts, this usually doesn't hold if they're the ones that were hurt... which was much more likely in the ancestral environment. Outgroups were rarer, back then, and those who could recognize when they'd damaged relationships and feel motivated to repair them would have been far more successful than those who couldn't.
While guilt can be incredibly uncomfortable, so much so that people often reject or suppress it rather than accept the signal of having fallen short of their own moral standards, a positive reframe that directly highlights its source is that guilt is actually related to empathy. Specifically, you can think of guilt as the dissonance that comes from empathizing with someone whose hurt you were the cause of: accepting guilt is a sign that you want to be a better person, and proof that the compassion you have for others means more to you than your ego.
Shame served a similar evolutionary purpose as guilt, but without relying on an internal sense of moral dissonance. Again, humans are social creatures. In ancestral environments where banishment from the group was effectively death, particularly death for your genetic line, shame was the emotion made people more susceptible to social control and norm enforcement. Maybe guilt was often enough to keep people from behaving so badly that they got exiled, but why put all your eggs in one basket? Evolving a sense of shame over violating community standards adds a safety net to ensure that people were motivated to either change their behavior to regain social acceptance, or hide it to avoid detection.
Shame also signals submission and acknowledgment of wrongdoing to the group, which can prevent escalating social punishment. Visible shame—blushing, avoiding eye contact, shrinking into yourself—tells others "I recognize I've violated norms and accept my lower status," which often leads to forgiveness rather than expulsion. Shame over failing to live up to the standards of your peers can drive people to hide weaknesses or deviations that would make them less attractive friends or mates.
Unfortunately our modern society, for all its many advancements, was built on generations of memetic warfare that weaponized these powerful emotions (and others). Every culture has inherited some set of norms that are socially punished if not observed, many of which have nothing to do with actual harm. Shame gets weaponized to control people over their sexuality, hobbies, or even just incorrigibility that undermines parents' or teachers' status or authority. It's also often just a purely arbitrary method of punishing non-conformity; in a world where we know that diversity of interests or behaviors aren't by default harmful, I personally consider shaming others to be a dangerous tool to use even with good intentions, and far from the ideal way to encourage prosocial behaviors. Meanwhile, guilt often gets twisted by abusers who convince their victims that normal boundary-setting or self-care is actually selfish and harmful.
Both Guilt and Shame, when functioning properly, are temporary and action-oriented. But there's a third pattern that deserves separate consideration, one that I think is even more developed by people's upbringings rather than being mostly inborn, then trained. It's often called "Shame" as well, but for clarity I'm going to identify it as Self-Loathing. Self-Loathing is different from Guilt and Shame because it's not about specific, plausibly harmful actions, but considering yourself, or some part of yourself, fundamentally bad.
Self-Loathing is, I think, the reason people have such confused relationships with Guilt and Shame, and often fail to see their value. People raised in particularly strict or judgmental environments will often learn to pre-emptively shame themselves to avoid external judgment, or experience crippling, self-flagellating guilt as a way to pre-empt punishment. It can be adaptive in the sense that it can help people survive hostile environments, but I think it deserves its own, separate evaluation from Guilt, or even Shame, given how toxic and corrosive it is.
The emotions of Guilt and Shame themselves made perfect sense in our ancestral environment. They evolved as means to help maintain strong social bonds in small, tight-knit groups that were stronger together if they could cooperate well. But of the three, Guilt is the cleanest. In a world of competing and arbitrary moral frameworks and sophisticated emotional manipulation, Shame is too often a tool of oppression, and the less Self-Loathing people develop, I think, the better a sign that the society is a healthy one for everyone in it. It's something I'd consider more of a "pathology" form of an emotion, which I go over later when discussing emotions like Hate, Panic, and Depression.
Imagine two people stuck in jobs they don't particularly enjoy. Person A never feels bored—they can sit at their desk doing the same repetitive tasks day after day, year after year, feeling perfectly content. Person B feels increasingly bored and restless, constantly thinking "there has to be something better than this." Who do you think is more likely to develop new skills, seek better opportunities, or discover something that genuinely fulfills them?
Boredom is your brain saying "this activity is not rewarding enough to justify the time and energy you're spending on it." It's the emotion that motivates exploration, novelty-seeking, and learning. When you're bored, you're being pushed to find something more stimulating, more challenging, or more meaningful to do with your time.
From an evolutionary perspective, boredom would have been a huge boon for survival and flourishing. Imagine an ancestor who never felt bored—they might spend all day every day picking berries from the same bush, never bothering to explore whether there might be better food sources over the next hill, or new tools to craft, or more efficient hunting techniques to develop. Meanwhile, their more easily bored neighbors would be driven to explore new territories, experiment with different foods, and innovate new technologies, and been overall more prepared for new challenges that may have arisen, as well as outcompeted the others.
A close cousin to Boredom is Frustration. When your current approach to something isn't working, frustration is the emotion that says "stop banging your head against this wall and try a different strategy." It's what prevents you from getting stuck in ineffective patterns and motivates you to step back, reassess, and find new approaches.
Without frustration, you might keep trying the same failed method indefinitely—like an ancestor who keeps trying to crack nuts with a rock that's too small, never feeling motivated to find a bigger rock or try a different technique. Frustration is the uncomfortable feeling that pushes you away from what isn't working and toward innovation and problem-solving.
Frustration also serves as a valuable signal about what's realistic versus what isn't. When you feel persistently frustrated with something, it might be telling you that your expectations are unrealistic, your approach is fundamentally flawed, or that this particular goal isn't worth the effort it would require.
And then there’s "Laziness"—though this arguably isn’t a single emotion, but rather a collection of feelings that all point toward energy conservation. I think it's important, in general, to separate laziness from just not feeling motivated to do something; I go into a lot more detail on that in my Procedural Executive Function series. Instead I think Laziness is best viewed as the feeling of "this feels too effortful," independent of how important or valuable you think the action normally is.
During times of abundance, when immediate needs were met, laziness could have prevented our ancestors from taking unnecessary risks or wasting energy on low-value activities. Back when securing more food and resources almost always came with some risk, "don't exhaust yourself climbing trees or hunting animals when you already have enough food" can be a valuable trait to have, in contrast to the (also valuable) urge to overprepare for the next potential famine.
Laziness is your brain saying "this isn’t worth the energy cost.” Sometimes what we call laziness is actually your body's wisdom about when you need rest and recovery, or your mind accurately assessing that a particular task isn't worth the effort it would require.
It also serves as a motivator for efficiency. When you feel lazy about doing a tedious task, that discomfort often drives you to find a better, easier way to accomplish the same goal. From this frame it's kind of obvious how many labor-saving inventions came from someone who was "too lazy" to keep doing things the hard way.
Together, these three emotions form a kind of optimization system: Boredom pushes you to try new things, Frustration motivates you to change tactics when your current approach isn't working, and Laziness helps you conserve energy.
In modern, developed societies, they’re often maligned for keeping you from doing productive work… but it’s worth reminding ourselves that we didn’t evolve for this environment, or these types of work, or this level of abundance.
Things our ancestors cared about were finding food, finding water, finding warmth or shade, watching and preparing for danger. If your belly is full, your body is comfortable, and your environment is safe… is it any wonder that you might just feel like lying back and relaxing, instead of expending effort on something that doesn’t have any immediate, tangible benefit to you?
Imagine a dragon flies by your window right now. What would you feel?
Surprise first, probably. Something you didn’t expect just happened.
Wonder next, probably? Disbelief? Fear?
At the end of a few seconds at most, I expect confusion to set in. Confusion, to paraphrase a wise man, is one of the most powerful emotions to understand the purpose of. It’s an unmistakable sign that something you just experienced is false, or that something you believe about the world is false.
Probably it wasn’t a dragon. Mabe it was a really intricate kite. Maybe it was a hologram. Maybe someone slipped you some drugs and you’re hallucinating.
If none of that is true… maybe dragons exist?
Because that’s where the confusion would come from. You (presumably) believe dragons don’t exist. Yet you also believe you just saw a real dragon. Both can’t be true.
Or both might be false! Maybe dragons do exist somewhere, and also that wasn’t a dragon.
But both can’t be true. And if you feel confused, and notice the confusion, and attend to it, follow it, investigate… you will learn something new. Always, every time; either the thing you experienced was not what you thought it was, or a belief you had was wrong.
Confusion is the emotion that tells you that you don’t understand something. It’s the emotion that says something doesn’t make sense, and if you never felt it, you’d just go through life never noticing that some of your beliefs are in direct contradiction to others, or believing you understand things you don’t actually understand.
This is particularly important if someone is trying to explain something to you, or if you're being told something, and you notice yourself feeling confused. Without confusion, we might just accept whatever information we're given, even if it contradicts information we already have.
One thing Inside Out 2 didn't do, sadly, is describe what Ennui is for; it just kind of hangs around being something like apathy, which I claim is an emotion that points at a different thing.
Imagine two people facing a crisis they have very little control over—say, a natural disaster approaching their village. Person A feels intense fear and anxiety about it that drives them to frantically try to prepare. Person B feels relatively little about the situation—they take reasonable precautions but don't waste emotional energy on outcomes they can't influence. When the disaster passes, who do you think is more likely to have preserved their mental resources for actual recovery and rebuilding?
Apathy is often misunderstood as "not caring about anything," but few people are apathetic about everything, or else they're likely suffering from some form of depression. Apathy is, specifically, a lack of emotional investment in a situation reaching any particular outcome. Why invest emotional energy in something without clear effect on you, or where your actions would have no effect in changing the outcome? It's another way your brain tells you "save your energy for situations that actually matter.”
From an evolutionary perspective, apathy would have been crucial during periods of extreme hardship, loss, or powerlessness. Imagine ancestors facing a harsh winter where several community members have already died and resources are nearly exhausted. Those who could emotionally detach enough to focus on practical survival—rather than being overwhelmed by grief and fear—would be more likely to make it through. This is particularly true if they need to avoid empathizing too much with the suffering of others, such as neighboring or rival tribes.
In today’s world, there’s an overwhelming amount of things that people might care about and invest their time and energy in. You can’t prioritize all of it equally, and apathy is a signal that you don’t yet see the reason why something should matter to you, even if others say it should.
Apathy can also serve as emotional protection during traumatic or overwhelming situations. When caring deeply would lead to psychological breakdown, apathy might step in as a circuit breaker, allowing you to function until you're in a better position to process and feel.
Ennui, on the other hand, is more nuanced. It's a particular kind of world-weariness that often emerges when your life feels meaningless despite being comfortable or successful. If boredom says "this activity isn't rewarding enough," ennui says "nothing is rewarding enough.”
Imagine two successful hunters in an abundant environment. Person A feels satisfied with their success and settles into a comfortable routine. Person B, despite their success, feels a growing sense of emptiness and restlessness—nothing seems to matter, achievements feel hollow. Person B might be more likely to become a leader, explorer, artist, or innovator, driven to find deeper sources of meaning and challenge.
Ennui might be the emotion that pushes people beyond basic survival and comfort toward creating culture, meaning, and legacy. It's what motivates humans to ask "what's the point?" and then go out and create them—art, philosophy, family, culture, spiritual practices.
Without ennui, we might be content to just meet our basic needs indefinitely. Ennui is the restless dissatisfaction that drives humans to build civilizations, philosophize about the world, and push beyond mere survival toward sources of flourishing.
In modern contexts, both apathy and ennui can become problematic when nothing around you actually triggers your passions or senses of meaning, and are especially dysfunctional if everything feels unimportant or meaningless. But as temporary signals, they provide valuable information: apathy tells you when to conserve emotional energy, and ennui tells you when your current lifestyle and actions aren't sufficient for who else you could become.
Sometimes people ask about emotions that, sort of definitionally, are “dysfunctional.” Words are just labels for concepts and phenomena we’re trying to gesture at. Sometimes there’s a concept we want to name that’s definitionally bad, and we come up with a word for it that has that clear connotation of badness, like “wound.” In those cases, it doesn’t make much sense to try and say “when is a wound useful?” Maybe there are some twisted circumstances where it is, but by default, the label was meant to point to something that’s simply bad.
There are a number of emotion-labels that might fit this sort of description; fear keeps you safe, but what about fear so strong it leads you to do something harmful, like panic? Sadness can be a useful signal, but what about suicidal depression? Anger can help you protect yourself, but what about rage so strong it causes you to start unnecessary fights?
To the extent that we want to understand why humans evolved or kept the ability to feel emotions this strong and potentially self-defeating, it’s important to remember that evolution isn’t intelligent; what we ended up with is just whatever worked well enough to ensure our ancestors survived and propagated enough for us to be here to wonder about it.
But, so long as we still have salt in hand, we can come up with plausible just-so stories that help us gain insight into how these extremes, and others, might still be adaptive in theory, even though they so often aren’t in our modern context.
Imagine two ancient tribes competing for the same territory. Group A gets angry when Group B attacks them, fights back fiercely in the moment, but then returns to normal emotional baseline once the immediate conflict ends. Group B, on the other hand, develops a deep, sustained hatred for Group A—not just anger during conflicts, but a persistent, consuming opposition that motivates them to plan, strategize, and work tirelessly to eliminate the threat even during peacetime. Which group is more likely to ultimately prevail in this existential competition?
Anger is immediate and reactive—it flares up in response to specific incidents and typically subsides once the immediate threat is addressed. Hatred is sustained and strategic. It's the emotion that says "this isn't just a temporary problem to solve, this is a fundamental threat that requires persistent, long-term opposition."
Hatred can be self-destructive, but from an evolutionary perspective, it could have served crucial functions when facing persistent enemies who wouldn't be deterred by a single confrontation, resource competitors who couldn't be negotiated with, or individuals who could otherwise manipulate their way out of the consequences of short term anger.
Hatred also serves group cohesion functions. Shared hatred of an external threat bonds people together and motivates collective action in ways that individual anger cannot. It creates the sustained motivation necessary for long-term conflicts and coordinated defense even without an immediate reason to maintain vigilance.
Additionally, hatred might have evolved to deal with moral violations that threaten group survival. It makes sense for some behavior to inspire qualitatively different emotional reactions: hatred is generally much harder to satisfy with apologies or restitution, which makes actions that inspire it more costly and disincentivized... especially given the risk of false remorse.
At this point in the class there's often some question or objection to the idea that hatred is "necessary" for any of this. And sure, there are definitely other emotions that can motivate us to do those things too… but if something is important enough for survival, we should expect some redundancies in our emotional motivation systems!
Of course, in modern contexts, hatred often becomes maladaptive and destructive, especially when directed at entire groups, or potential threats rather than established ones. But understanding its evolutionary function helps explain why this emotion exists and why it feels so consuming: it evolved for situations where half-measures weren't sufficient for survival.
Maybe our ancestors didn't need hatred to properly punish those who continually defect in a prisoner’s dilemma until they made proper restitution... but it probably helped a lot, especially before game theory was invented.
Panic is characterized as extreme reaction that precludes the ability to think; whether you engage in fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, the experience of those who recall panic is that they couldn’t reason through their options or circumstances, and felt “stuck” in one mode.
It’s obvious why this can go wrong in so many situations, but without it, our ancestors may well have died to decision paralysis from that big, powerful frontal lobe they evolved to plan their actions on something besides basic emotional reactions.
We don’t usually call something “panic” if we’re in an emergency situation and our instinctual, unthinking reflexes are correct. We only tend to use the word if we make a mistake… which is a bit unfair to the concept-cluster we’ve applied the “panic” label to.
As for Depression, the first thing that has to be said is that there are many different reasons people might be depressed. Even setting aside things like grief, some causes of depression involve the material conditions of a person’s life, while others are the result of biological dysfunctions. There are depressed people who, if removed from their home or school or work environment and sent to a beach resort with friends, would see their symptoms abate.
And there are depressed people with good lives and supportive family and friends who, if sent to a beach resort, would just be depressed on a beach.
With that in mind, imagine two people whose ambitious life plans have completely fallen apart. Person A maintains their optimism and energy, continuing to believe their original goals are achievable and pursues them with the same strategies. Person B sinks into depression—low energy, anhedonia, and a pervasive sense that their efforts are pointless.
Person A might seem better positioned, but consider this: what if Person B's grim assessment is actually more accurate? What if their goals really were unrealistic, their strategies genuinely flawed, and their previous optimism was preventing them from seeing the situation clearly?
Depression might (in theory) serve as a cognitive recalibration system that forces brutally honest reassessment when previous strategies have failed catastrophically, or an environment that is actively hostile and will punish you for the actions you naturally want to take. While normal sadness responds to specific losses, depression creates a prolonged state where positive predictions become nearly impossible. There's a speculative field of "depressive realism" research that suggests that mildly depressed people might sometimes make more accurate predictions about their control over situations and their social standing than non-depressed people… though by default, depression is an overcorrection that leads to inaccurate pessimism across the board.
From an evolutionary perspective, depression also signals to your community that you're in extreme, prolonged, and genuine distress, and in need of drastic support, in a way that's hard to fake and typically evokes caregiving rather than avoidance. Normal sadness may be chalked up to a temporary difficulty, but ongoing depression might signal “something needs to change.”
Of course, again, depression is often maladaptive and self-perpetuating. But understanding its potential function as a reality-checking mechanism might help understand why this condition evolved, and why it can feel so reasonable to those experiencing it.
Let's assume you now deeply understand what individual emotions mean. You can independently derive the potential value from any feelings you have, even while they’re making your life difficult. Now what?
Before we get to that, it's important to note that most people don't experience themselves only ever having one emotion at a time. Emotions can blend into more complex feelings, but also, much of human behavior is better explained by multi-agent minds rather than as monolithic ones.
And that means that navigating our emotional landscape requires more than just abstract understanding, but tools for explicit knowledge and integration.
But first, let's go over where this model breaks down, and how to make sense of emotions as a whole, instead of individually.
It's worth emphasizing again that emotions are a biological phenomenon before they’re anything else. We experience them due to neurotransmitters, hormones, and neural activation patterns that create both physical sensations and psychological experiences. When you feel fear, for instance, your amygdala triggers a cascade of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol, your heart rate increases, your muscles tense, and your awareness and attention shift to exclude some things and focus on others.
This is important to note in part because sometimes emotions arise from complex biological or chemical dysfunctions—depression caused by neurotransmitter imbalances, anxiety triggered by thyroid disorders, mood swings from hormonal fluctuations, or emotional side effects from medications. In these cases, the emotion isn't serving any adaptive purpose; it's more like a false alarm from malfunctioning equipment.
So when I say "all emotions make sense," I'm referring to the baseline emotional system working as designed, not to every single emotional experience regardless of underlying health conditions. If you’re struggling with some form of ongoing emotional experience that feels far in excess of what seems justified by your situation, like chronic panic attacks, agoraphobia, suicidality, or other things that can be the result of some trauma, it is probably worth going to a doctor and getting some tests run, or a psychiatrist to discuss medications, especially if you’ve tried a few therapists and nothing seems to be helping.
Beyond the chemical reality of emotions, we can psychologically understand them as the things that motivate our actions. Everything that we do that's not habitual, reflexive, or instinctive is motivated by some emotional drive. They're essentially your brain's way of saying "pay attention to this situation” and “respond in this particular way."
But again, there’s that problem where society has developed in many ways since we lived in hunter-gathering tribes, let alone from the social structures of even more distant homo erectus that we evolved from. The immediate impulses our emotions push us toward are not nearly as adaptive as they used to be, like with the disgust-of-broccoli-pizza example.
As children, we’re taught to control our emotions through rewards and punishments, all for the general goal of being better behaved at home, in school, and in general society. But there’s often a moral layer added, a frame of shaming that makes people turn against their own natural drives, rather than understand and integrate them cooperatively.
Many people learn, sooner or later, that getting angry at a teacher or cop who gives you an unfair punishment, like detention or an undeserved speeding ticket, just doesn’t work. Instead your anger needs a new outlet, one modulated by your understanding of the world.
That’s, ultimately, what we evolved our neocortex for: modeling reality, predicting outcomes, and choosing between one emotionally desired action for another that might lead to better results. Take the ticket and, if the anger persists, use that anger as motivation to get through the bureaucracy of challenging it in court (where many speeding tickets are thrown out if the cop doesn’t show up).
So on one hand, we can say that the value in understanding emotions is that it gives you some information about the world or yourself. But even further, we can see that emotions act as signals and motivators to help you know what you want, with reason as the guide for what actions to take to best get it.
Integrating emotion and reason means accepting that our emotions are doing what they think is best for us on a naive biological, evolutionary level, without judgement or shame, and then linking those urges to our knowledge of which actions make sense in the modern world to satisfy our desires and values. This lets us accept conflicting emotions/motivations about what we want to do and why, and still use our imagination and reason to examine the full range of potential actions and take one that’s best, rather than just follow whatever emotion feels strongest in the moment, or trying to constantly squash our emotional responses down into what we’ve been told they should be.
Even if we don’t feel something strongly in the moment, we still often act due to predicted emotional states. If you imagine doing something and you imagine it going well and making you feel happy, it will be easier to do it. If you imagine it going poorly, causing pain or sadness or boredom of some kind, you're going to feel less motivated to do it. We can use something like “willpower” to override these things, but this usually results in using one emotion to combat another such as fear of something going badly overriding a disgust response, or expected social embarrassment to overcome temporary discomfort.
There’s a much broader conversation to be had, of course, about the disparity that often exists between what we feel strongly about, or what our body wants, and what we think is best from a logically reasoned level. To better understand why we do what we do, and how emotions affect our executive functioning, I wrote the Procedural Executive Function series.
To wrap up and be extra clear, the title of this article is not “Emotions are always good.”
It’s also not “Emotions are always calibrated,” or “Emotions are better truth-detectors or guides of morality than logic,” or any number of ways people might try to push emotions as a thing that you should always listen to or validate.
They often are! But by default they are just distillations of information combined with evolved sensations. Sometimes following what they compel you to will lead to the best outcome, other times it will not.
My goal has been to help understand why emotions make sense in principle, as adaptive motivators to help humans survive and flourish. Even if you toss out all the speculative evo-psych, I hope it’s clear that there’s always some situation you could imagine where any given emotion “makes sense,” either as a reaction to our experiences, a signal of our preferences and desires, or a motivator to achieve some goal.
The end result of good emotional integration, from my perspective, is:
Things like IFS and Focusing can help with that, but I hope the first step tool of being able to check what emotions are “for,” maybe by asking yourself what might go wrong in your life without it, can be helpful too.
