How to Deal with Feeling Bad About Your Feelings

If you feel guilty about your depression, anxiety, or another emotion, this article’s for you.

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You can probably recall a time when you experienced a meta-emotion or an emotion that occurred in response to another emotion. Perhaps you teared up while watching a sappy movie with friends, then felt embarrassed about feeling sad. Or perhaps when you were a child, you felt happy your sibling was reprimanded, then felt guilty about feeling happy.

Most people are familiar with meta-emotions, but very little is known about them. So, our team at the Emotion and Mental Health Lab at Washington University in St. Louis designed a to explore people’s meta-emotional experiences in their daily lives. Our hope was that understanding meta-emotions might ultimately help people become better at responding to them in a way that improves well-being.

We recruited 79 adults between the ages of 20 and 71 from the greater St. Louis community to fill out surveys, including questions about any recent feelings of depression. We also provided them with a description and examples of meta-emotions to make sure they understood the concept. For the next week, up to eight times per day, these adults were pinged (on their smartphones or devices we provided them) to answer questions about how much they were paying attention to their emotions, and which (if any) emotions they were feeling about other emotions.

We found that meta-emotions are somewhat common: Over half of the adults in our study reported experiencing meta-emotions at least once during the week of surveys.

Meta-emotions can be classified into four types: negative-negative (e.g., feeling embarrassed about feeling sad), negative-positive (e.g., feeling guilty about feeling happy), positive-positive (e.g., feeling hopeful about feeling relieved), and positive-negative (e.g., feeling pleased about feeling angry). In our study, negative-negative meta-emotions were the most common type. This indicates that many people get upset, nervous, or angry about their own negative emotions, in particular.

We found that people who had more frequent negative-negative meta-emotions also experienced greater feelings of depression. (Feelings of depression weren’t associated with any of the other types of meta-emotions.) Indeed, has also linked negative meta-emotions to feelings of depression; however, it did not distinguish between the two different kinds of negative meta-emotions. Our findings extend the literature by showing that negative-negative meta-emotions may be particularly problematic.

It is important to note that experiencing negative-negative meta-emotions does not mean you have, or will develop depression. The opposite could be true—feelings of depression could lead to negative-negative meta-emotions—or some other cause could lead to both. Future research is needed to determine what’s actually occurring.

People in our study were more likely to report meta-emotions during times when they were paying more attention to their emotions in general. This makes sense, since being attentive to our emotions may lead to more judgments and feelings about them. It could also be the case that meta-emotions pull for our attention, leading us to become aware of layers of feelings all at once.

Are meta-emotions more common for certain people? We found that people’s gender, age, and race/ethnicity did not predict how often they experienced them. In fact, researchers don’t know why certain people experience meta-emotions differently from others, but some think it has to do with how we are raised. For example, if you were raised by parents who taught you that emotions are a sign of weakness, you might feel more negatively toward your emotions in general.