Emotions can be confusing. On the one hand, they rapidly shine a light on important information, such as challenges to our safety, sources of joy and connection, and causes of harm and injustice. On the other hand, they can disrupt our progress toward important goals, interfere with our ability to communicate skillfully, and distract us from what is important to us. And while they often provide accurate information, they also rise and fall, they can be distorted due to lack of sleep, past history, or future worry, and they can interfere with our attention to nuance and the changing nature of our experience.

It’s easy to fall into binary thinking about our emotions (and many other areas of our lives!), seeing them as either good or bad, useful or problematic. This approach can cause even more confusion: it can lead us to ignore or suppress or deny our emotions, making them even more distressing and diffuse (Hayes-Skelton & Eustis, 2020; Tyrus, Fergus, & Ginty, 2024), or it can lead to emotions subtly or not-so-subtly driving all our actions without awareness leading us to either do things that aren’t consistent with our values, or to fail to do the things that are.

Recognizing the simultaneous bothness of emotions can open a clearer path to intentional, meaningful actions. Rather than choosing between whether our emotions are potential conveyors of information or merely ephemeral arisings, we can recognize that emotions are both of these things. Recognizing this gives us space........

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