In this interview, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman and psychologist Laurie Santos explore why humans are naturally resistant to having their emotions shifted and why negative emotions are not merely undesirable states but serve crucial adaptive functions. Huberman shares personal anecdotes about children’s instinct to decide how they feel and recounts a historic neurostimulation study by Robert Heath, where subjects repeatedly chose to stimulate brain regions that produced frustration and mild anger, suggesting an intrinsic reward in certain negative states. Santos critiques the cultural phenomenon of toxic positivity, explaining how society pressures individuals to maintain constant happiness, which can suppress valuable emotional signals. She likens negative emotions to a car’s dashboard lights, warning that feelings such as loneliness, overwhelm, or grief provide actionable information about social needs, workload, or loss. The conversation also touches on cross‑cultural attitudes toward happiness, noting British formal schooling’s suspicion of overt joy versus American celebration of gleefulness tied to wealth and celebrity. Overall, the dialogue argues that embracing, rather than eliminating, negative emotions can guide better behavioral choices and mental health.
Chapters
I've long been interested in shifting one's emotions and when that feels good, when it is good, and when it doesn't feel good. I asked our friend Ethan Kross about this too. I'm not gonna compare your answers as a template for who's right, who's wrong. I think there are a lot of differing opinions on this, but, I know from the time we are young kids, we don't like to be shifted. Like, we don't like people to impose an emotional requirement on us. In fact, my niece, when she was little, I was telling her this, she's 18 now, she was not amused, which delighted me that she was not amused. But when she was little, she was a pretty healthily stubborn kid. And you'd ask her to do anything, Hey, let's go downstairs for a walk. And she loved going outside for walks and she'd say, "No, push me." And then she would get her stuff and then you'd go for a walk. But I loved her like, "No, push me." I love this. It was also Costello was like a, "Don't push me." You couldn't. So there was this like immediate vocalization from the time she could speak really, was like, "No, I'm gonna decide how I feel." Such a healthy thing too. Such a healthy thing. You're not gonna shift me. I was like, "We're going out for a walk. It's gonna be fun." And she'd say, "No, push me." And then she'd go for the walk. Most of the times it was a fun walk. But I think that we don't like to be shifted. And in some ways, we don't really like to shift ourselves. Like when we're in a given emotion, when people are feeling upset, they don't wanna be told they should feel happy. And yet no one really wants to be upset. Although there's this, do you know this result? I don't wanna spin off into a long discussion about this, but Robert Heath, a very controversial neurosurgeon from the UK, like '70s and '80s, did these experiments of stimulating in different parts of the brain, allowing people to self-stimulate different parts of their brain. And there were only 3 subjects, 'cause it's an in vivo human neurostimulation experiment. All 3 subjects, by far, their favorite area to stimulate was this midline central nucleus, midline thalamic nucleus, rather. All 3 of them reported that the sensation that they would lever press the most for was, frustration, and mild anger. Humans like that shit. Excuse my language. Why?
Look, the horror movie industry would not exist if we didn't like fear, right? Honestly, like Twitter, X, whatever we're calling it now, would not exist if we didn't like outrage, right? These are kind of complicated negative emotions that have some positive benefit to us. And I think that this is something that people get wrong when they hear my line of research. You know, I tell people like, oh, I teach this class about happiness at Yale. And people will say like, oh, you just want everybody to be happy. You sort of embrace this toxic positivity. And I'm like, no, no, no, no.
Toxic positivity.
Toxic positivity, yeah. It's this idea, I mean, you kind of see it in our culture right now. It's this sort of good vibes only, right? It's this idea that anything that feels mildly frustrating or like hard to do, it's like, oh no, no, don't do that. It's like good vibes only, right? And there's this idea that if you're experiencing negative emotions, you feel sad or you feel a little lonely or you feel a little upset at politics, whatever it is, that something's wrong or you got to take a pill or you got to do something to fix it, right? I think that's a really dangerous idea, right? Because it's getting rid of this signal that we've been built to experience evolutionarily that's really important, right? If you're experiencing outrage, that's telling you something super crucial. If you're experiencing kind of frustration, overwhelm is a big one. If you're kind of feeling, oh, I'm so overwhelmed at work and I'm burned out, that's a really useful signal about behavior. Behavioral changes you should make. In class, I often tell my students that negative emotions are like that dashboard on your car. You know, you go in your car and you're like, you know, sometimes you're driving, the tire light comes on or the engine light comes on, and that's a pain in the ass, honestly, because you're like, well, I got to deal with it. But so it's not fun when these lights come on, but it's super useful information that if you actively ignore it for months and months is going to cause a much bigger problem later on. And I think this is how all of our negative emotions work. You know, if you're feeling that, you know, negative emotion of loneliness, means you need more social connection. If you're feeling overwhelmed, it means probably got to take something off your plate before you burn out or get sick. If you're feeling sad, like, that's probably because there's some, you know, stimulus that matters that is like kind of you're not there anymore. If you're feeling grief and so on, I think too often we just like want to get rid of those. We don't like them, so we want to suppress those emotions. But suppressing our emotions is giving up useful evolutionary information that probably means we can take action to fix and feel better.
Americans might be surprised to hear this, but I learned this from my father, who's from South America. He's from Argentina, went to British schools when he was young, and he told me when I was probably 10 or 12, I can't remember exactly how old, he said, you know, in the British formal school system, if you act too happy, people accuse you of being stupid. You know, to be gleeful or happy. And I said, now I would say, well, they're perfectly fine being happy when they're drinking. I will say that the after-work alcohol culture in London—
5:00, 14:00 PM crowd.
I don't know if it's still the case, but they drink a lot, and then they get very like outwardly happy. But there's this idea, and this was true when I came into academia, that if somebody wasn't super serious, that they might be stupid. I think in the United States now, we tend to celebrate more expressions of glee, but that's usually in the context of like celebrity and wealth.
Yeah.
Like these people getting on their private planes or something. But I think there's still some elements to this that we internalize that if you're happy, that you're not worrying about something. If you're not worrying about something, then you're ignoring the woes of the world. Maybe even the threats that are all around you. And so in some ways, we are conditioned to always want to be happy. That does seem to be one message, but then, we also get the conflicting message that to be happy is to be ignorant of what's really happening, if not to you, then to other people, and therefore you're not fulfilling your role in society. So who are you to be happy all the time? There's a lot of judgment written into this thing around happiness, I'm realizing.
Yeah, totally. And I think you're bringing up something that I actually worry about a lot, right? Which is, is that hypothesis correct? Is it the case that if you're feeling happy, you just ignore the woes and all the terrible stuff in the world? Then I'm creating like, you know, a whole generation of Yale students who are gonna not fix the bad problems of life. And so it turns out there's a researcher at Georgetown, Constantine Kushlev, who's tested this. He actually asked the question, you know, is it the case that people who are experiencing more positive emotion, more satisfaction with life, do they ignore the problems of the world and not act, or are they the ones kind of going out and doing stuff? And so he did this in a couple different contexts. He looked for social justice causes. I'll tell the climate version. So he looked at, how many people are taking climate action. So do you go to a protest? Do you put solar panels on? Are you donating money to climate causes? And he finds that the people who are really climate anxious, they tend to have less positive emotions. You're really worried about climate change, you tend to be more on the depressed, anxious side. But if you're doing stuff about it, then you tend to have more positive emotion. I think he assumes the causal arrow goes in the other way, that like if you're happier, if you're experiencing lots of delights and positive emotion, you kind of have the bandwidth to do stuff, right? You can go to that protest. Where if you're super depressed, you're just gonna like lie in bed with your duvet. You don't have the bandwidth to do this stuff. And so this whole kind of like Pollyanna-ish hypothesis about happiness, it makes complete intuitive sense. But if you look at the data, it's actually the opposite, which is a good thing because I think it gives us a mandate not to stay depressed about everything in the world, pissed off about what's happening. Yes, those negative emotions are good to notice and experience and act on, but like, We can take care of ourselves and it's okay. It doesn't mean we're gonna stop doing good stuff in the world.
