The other morning, I was walking along the Cairns Esplanade feeling genuinely grateful for my life.
The water was calm, the air was warm, and people were out walking dogs that appeared considerably more cheerful about exercising than some of their owners.
At the same time, I was worried about someone I love.
Both feelings were present. Neither cancelled out the other.
I wasn’t happy one minute and unhappy the next. I was grateful and concerned at precisely the same time.
We tend to imagine our emotional lives as a thermometer. Happiness is at the top, unhappiness is at the bottom, and every feeling moves us a little farther in one direction or the other.
If we are worried, we assume we cannot also be content. If we are grieving, happiness can feel almost inappropriate. If we have a good life, we may even feel guilty admitting that part of it is painful.
But what if the thermometer is the wrong instrument?
What if happiness and unhappiness are not opposites fighting over the same small piece of emotional territory?
Research into emotion suggests something more complex and, I think, much more human: positive and negative feelings can operate as partly separate dimensions. They can rise and fall independently, which means both can be present in the same life—and sometimes in the same moment.
The brain is not simply moving between happy and unhappy
Brain-imaging research does not show that we have one neat “happiness centre” and another equally tidy “unhappiness centre.” The brain is rarely that obliging.
A large meta-analysis drawing on hundreds of functional MRI studies found that positive and negative feelings involve overlapping, distributed brain systems rather than two isolated emotional switches. At the same time, researchers were able to distinguish broader patterns associated with positive and negative affect. In other words, the distinction appears real, but it is much more nuanced than one brain region lighting up for joy and another for misery.
That is why I find the image of two instruments useful.
They may share the same orchestra. They may sometimes respond to the same event. But one does not have to become silent before the other can be heard.
Psychologists have been exploring this idea for decades. Measures of positive and negative affect often treat them as partly independent. A person may experience plenty of positive emotion and relatively little distress, but they may also experience high levels of both.
This explains an emotional state many of us recognise but rarely know how to describe.
You can feel proud as your adult child builds a life far away and ache because you miss them.
You can feel relieved to retire and unsettled by the loss of your professional identity.
You can love your partner deeply and still feel lonely within parts of the relationship.
You can be grateful for your health while frightened by the changes you notice with age.
Life is quite capable of playing the violin and the tuba at once.
We often make ourselves suffer twice
The problem is not always that we feel something difficult. It is that we decide the difficult feeling should not be there.
We tell ourselves:
“I have so much to be grateful for. Why am I unhappy?”
“This is what I wanted. Why don’t I feel happier?”
“Other people have much bigger problems. I shouldn’t be upset.”
“I’m retired now. These are supposed to be the best years of my life.”
I remember experiencing something similar a few months after I retired.
On paper, I had achieved what many people long for. I had freedom. I no longer had to rush into work, manage a large team or spend my days responding to other people’s priorities.
There were many things I appreciated about that freedom.
But underneath it was a deep sense of unease. The structure of my working life had disappeared, and with it went some of my identity, direction and sense of usefulness.
I kept thinking I should be happy because I was free.
It took me some time to understand that gratitude for my freedom and grief for what I had lost could coexist. My uncertainty did not mean retirement was a mistake. My appreciation did not mean I had to deny the uncertainty.
I was not moving wildly up and down an emotional thermometer.
Two instruments were playing.
Mixed emotions may be a sign of depth, not confusion
There is a temptation to regard mixed emotions as evidence that we do not know what we want.
Sometimes, of course, we genuinely are undecided. But emotional complexity is not necessarily indecision.
Research on mixed emotions across adulthood describes the simultaneous experience of positive and negative feelings. Some studies suggest that the capacity to experience this complexity may become more common, or at least more recognisable, as we grow older.
That makes intuitive sense to me.
By our sixties and beyond, few important experiences feel completely good or completely bad. We have lived long enough to understand that gain usually carries some loss and that endings can contain beginnings.
A child’s wedding can bring joy and a sudden awareness of time passing.
Selling the family home can feel liberating and heartbreaking.
Retirement can offer spaciousness while removing the structure that held a life together.
Even a long-awaited trip can contain excitement, exhaustion and a small argument about whose idea it was to take the scenic route.
Emotional maturity may not mean choosing the correct feeling. It may mean becoming spacious enough to hold more than one.
Reducing unhappiness is not the same as creating happiness
This two-instrument idea has another important implication.
We often assume that once a source of unhappiness disappears, happiness will automatically take its place.
Sometimes it does. But often what arrives first is simply the absence of distress.
Think about leaving a difficult job. The relief may be enormous. Yet six months later, it can become clear that removing stress has not automatically created meaning, connection or excitement.
The painful music has stopped, but no new melody has begun.
I saw this in my own retirement. Leaving work removed deadlines, pressure and constant responsibility. What it did not automatically provide was a new purpose, a new rhythm or a compelling reason to get up in the morning.
Those things had to be created.
This distinction matters because we can spend years trying to become happy primarily by eliminating what makes us unhappy. We try to solve every problem, remove every worry and organise life so efficiently that nothing unpleasant can get through the front door.
It is an understandable ambition. It is also unlikely to succeed.
A meaningful life will still contain disappointment, worry, illness, conflict, uncertainty and grief. The aim cannot be to silence the entire negative section of the orchestra.
Perhaps the more useful question is whether we are also giving the positive instruments something to play.
A small pleasure does not have to solve a large problem
Once we stop expecting positive feelings to erase negative ones, small pleasures begin to matter differently.
A walk does not have to remove our worry to be worthwhile.
Lunch with a friend does not have to resolve our loneliness forever.
Gardening does not have to cure grief.
Dancing in the kitchen does not have to prove that everything is fine—although it may prove that nobody is watching.
These experiences can add interest, warmth, connection or delight to a day that still contains difficulty.
That is not avoidance. It is allowing more than one emotional truth to exist.
Some research into mixed emotions has explored whether positive feelings experienced during difficult periods may support coping and meaning-making. The findings are not a simple instruction to “look on the bright side.” Forced positivity can make people feel more alone, particularly when it dismisses genuine pain.
The point is gentler than that.
We do not have to wait until every problem is resolved before permitting ourselves to experience something good.
Happiness may be something we add rather than uncover
This has changed the way I think about wellbeing.
I once imagined happiness as the natural state that would emerge when I finally got everything right. When the work was finished, the family was settled, the house was organised, and my mind had kindly agreed to stop inventing things to worry about, I would arrive at happiness.
It was a beautifully efficient plan. Unfortunately, life had not read it.
Now I think happiness is often something we add alongside the unfinished business of being human.
We add a walk, a conversation, a project, a moment of curiosity, a small adventure or a reason to feel useful. None of these guarantees that sadness, worry or frustration will disappear.
They simply give another part of us a voice.
This may be especially important during retirement and other major transitions. A new life is not built only by removing pressure. It grows as we deliberately create structure, connection, purpose and experiences that make us feel engaged with the world.
Perhaps emotional wellbeing is not a single note we finally learn to hold.
Perhaps it is the growing ability to hear the whole orchestra—to acknowledge the instrument playing sorrow or uncertainty without allowing it to become the only sound in the room.
And perhaps, on a difficult day, we do not need to force that instrument to stop.
We might simply ask: what else could I allow to play beside it?
If you are moving into retirement and wondering what will give this stage of life greater structure, purpose and enjoyment, my free guide, Thrive in your retirement, offers a gentle place to begin.
