Today’s post asks an interesting question: Can we have too much good emotion? 

Yesterday, we discussed how the Big Five primitive emotions causing so much pain in today’s world are actually useful in smaller doses.

Does something similar apply to the Great Five positive emotions? Let’s take a look…

Inspiration

When Inspiration is taken too far, it turns into something called Obsession. This is a tricky situation because Obsession can lead to extraordinary results, but it can also do serious harm to health and family life. 

Not many people manage to really cultivate a creative obsession, so it’s probably not necessary to get all philosophical about it. But if you ever find yourself in this position, just be aware that excessive inspiration can be dangerous. 

Altruism

It can certainly be problematic to become so selfless that we forget to look after ourselves. In fact, we can only reach the position of strength needed to really help others if we help ourselves first.

Altruism therefore also requires a healthy balance. Enough to get that healthy motivation to really contribute to the lives of those around you (or even society as a whole), but not so much that you neglect yourself. 

Flow

This wonderful state of effortless productivity is very hard to criticize. But too much Flow can lead to an unbalanced life in terms of health and social interactions. 

Personally, I tend to operate quite close to that edge, so I had to put in some conscious planning to ensure that my life does not go too far out of balance. This awareness is all that’s needed to guard against too much Flow.   

Tolerance

As discussed yesterday, life will be no good if you allow yourself to become a doormat. It’s therefore not good to tolerate bad things you can actually do something about. 

However, Tolerance of things outside of your control and Tolerance of the time and effort required to solve important problems in today’s complex world are all good. 

Excitement

Excitement is the positive emotion we should be most careful of. An excessive positive bias can lead us to take risks that end up exploding spectacularly in our faces. And when this happens, we can easily swing the other way and become excessively pessimistic.

As always, a balance is key: enough Excitement to generate the motivation to move forward, but enough Worry to remain sensible. 

So ultimately, I do think that one can have too much good emotion. But this is not a very common problem today. 

Even so, this post illustrates the importance of balance in our mental wildlife reserve. We don’t want the Big Five to overrun our ecosystem, but we don’t want the Great Five to take over completely either. 

We need balance – something we’ll talk about more tomorrow. See you then!