Sadness and Anxiety: Incompatible Emotions?

Are there emotions which are “incompatible”?  In other words, could experiencing one emotion make it harder to experience another emotion?  It seems like we have anecdotal evidence on both sides.  On one hand, it can seem very difficult to get someone who is feeling sad or depressed to enjoy anything – feeling one emotion (sadness or depression) seems to make it harder to feel another emotion (happiness).  On the other hand, we’ve probably all had experiences where we felt multiple emotions at the same time – such as feeling sad and happy at the same time about something (and we even have the word “bittersweet”).

Emotions are complicated, and both of these views are probably right to a degree – we can experience more than one emotion at a time, but there are also likely to be situations where feeling certain emotions makes it less likely to feel other emotions.

This is more than just a theoretical question – it is relevant to understanding ways of regulating our emotions, ways of changing our emotions when they are unhealthy.  For example, when we are stressed out and worried about something, it would be nice to be able to get rid of that anxiety.  Similarly, if we are angry or depressed, we might like to change those feelings.

Could the intensity of a negative emotion be reduced by getting ourselves to feel a different, “incompatible” emotion?  In particular, could sadness be incompatible with anxiety?  Recently, when I have been especially anxious about something, I’ve been trying to imagine that “the worst possible outcome” (my fear) has already happened, and then to get myself to feel sad about it.  Sometimes this has had little effect on the anxiety, but more than a few times the resulting sadness has been accompanied by my anxiety going away and a sense of calm.

My guess about this is that there are differences between the emotional “circuits” responsible for dealing with things you can do something about vs. things you can’t do anything about.  Once there is “nothing that can be done”, the “sadness circuits” take over, and the “anxiety circuits” stop being active.  The truth is probably more complicated than this, but there might be something to it.