You Don't Need to Understand Hundreds of Emotions, Just Focus on Winning in Life

Psychologists Are Focusing on the Wrong Thing and Making Your Life Complicated and Miserable

Today I was scrolling through Instagram when I stumbled upon a post that caught my eye. It was from Nawal Mustafa, a psychologist with the handle “thebraincoach”, and it was titled “What Difficult Emotions Are Trying to Tell You.”

The post listed a slew of emotions, each paired with a supposed underlying message: angry means something feels unfair or your boundaries have been crossed; guilt suggests you may have violated your own values; insecure indicates you’re comparing yourself or chasing unrealistic standards; discouraged implies your effort doesn’t feel like it’s paying off; overwhelmed signals too much is happening at once; lonely means you’re craving meaningful connection; sad shows you’ve lost something that mattered; self-doubt is your brain trying to protect you from failure; anxious reflects your mind scanning for danger or uncertainty; embarrassed points to a fear of social judgment; empty means you’ve been disconnected from purpose, joy, or self; resentful suggests you’ve been self-sacrificing too long; regret means you wish you’d chosen differently; jealous indicates you fear losing something important; shame reflects a fear of being unworthy or unlovable; and envious means you see something you want or value.

The post went on to talk about a concept called "Affect Labelling," which Mustafa described as a revolutionary way to manage negative emotions. Intrigued, I dug deeper. She referenced a scientific paper on the topic, claiming that naming your emotions—labeling them—can help regulate their intensity and give you clarity on how to address them. I tracked down the paper and gave it a read. But instead of feeling enlightened, I felt overwhelmed. The paper was dense with scientific jargon—terms like "amygdala downregulation," "prefrontal cortex activation," and "emotional granularity." It felt like I needed a PhD to even begin to understand what they were talking about.

That’s when it hit me: we don’t need this level of complexity to deal with our emotions. Psychologists like Mustafa might have good intentions, but they’re focusing on the wrong thing. By encouraging us to dissect every emotion and assign it a label, they’re making our lives more complicated and, frankly, more miserable. What if, instead of getting lost in the minutiae of our feelings, we focused on something simpler—something more actionable? What if we just focused on winning in life?

What Is Emotion? Why Do We Feel Them?

To understand why this shift in focus makes sense, let’s take a step back and look at what emotions actually are and why we feel them. At their core, emotions are a product of evolution. Our brains are wired to ensure our survival, and they’ve been doing this for millions of years. Long before we were worrying about raises, relationships, or the state of the world, our ancestors were focused on staying alive in a dangerous environment—hunting for food, avoiding predators, and finding shelter. To help us survive, our subconscious mind evolved into what I like to call a "reward optimization algorithm."

This algorithm is constantly scanning our environment for rewards—things that will keep us alive and thriving. In ancient times, that might have been a ripe piece of fruit or a safe cave to sleep in. Today, it’s more abstract: a promotion at work, a loving relationship, or a sense of purpose. The subconscious mind tracks these rewards and pushes us toward them. When we’re making progress—when everything is going smoothly—we feel positive emotions like joy, excitement, or contentment. These feelings are the brain’s way of saying, “Keep doing what you’re doing; it’s working.”

But when the subconscious mind detects an obstacle—something standing in the way of those rewards—it perceives it as a threat to our survival. In the modern world, that obstacle might be your boss denying you the raise you think you deserve, or your romantic interest not giving you the attention you crave, or even a more existential frustration, like feeling helpless about the messed-up state of the world and your inability to change it. When the subconscious mind gets stuck, it triggers negative emotions to alert us to the problem.

Those negative emotions can take many forms—anxiety, guilt, insecurity, discouragement, overwhelm, loneliness, sadness, self-doubt, and so on. According to Mustafa’s post, each one has a specific message. Anxiety means your mind is scanning for danger or uncertainty. Guilt means you’ve violated your own values. Loneliness means you’re craving connection. But here’s the thing: you don’t need to know the specific label for every emotion you feel. All negative emotions, at their core, are signaling the same thing: there’s an obstacle in your life, and your subconscious mind is worried about your ability to overcome it. Whether that obstacle manifests as anxiety, guilt, or shame doesn’t really matter. What matters is the obstacle itself—and what you do about it.

What to Do About This?

So, what do most people do when they feel negative emotions? They try to control them. They read posts like Mustafa’s, learn about affect labelling, and spend hours analyzing their feelings, hoping that understanding them will make them go away. But here’s the problem: you can’t win a fight against your subconscious mind. It’s far more powerful than your conscious mind because it developed earlier in our evolutionary history. The subconscious has been fine-tuned over millions of years to keep you alive, and it’s not going to be silenced by a few deep breaths or a labeled emotion.

Trying to suppress or control your negative emotions is a losing battle, and it’s also a dangerous one. Negative emotions are like alerts for an impending cyclone. If you turn off the alerts, the cyclone doesn’t go away—it just hits you unprepared. Ignoring or shutting down your emotions doesn’t solve the underlying problem; it only leaves you more vulnerable to it. Instead of wasting your limited conscious energy on fighting your feelings, you should redirect that energy toward something more productive: identifying the obstacle causing the emotion and figuring out how to overcome it.

Here’s how to do that. When you feel a negative emotion—whether it’s anxiety, guilt, or something else—ask yourself two questions: What are my expectations, and can I achieve them? Your subconscious mind is throwing up red flags because it perceives a gap between what you want (your expectations) and what you’re capable of achieving (your current power). That gap is the obstacle, and closing it is the key to moving forward.

There are two ways to close the gap: reduce your expectations or increase your power to meet the challenge. Let’s break that down with an example. Imagine you’re feeling like a failure. According to Mustafa’s framework, this might be labeled as “self-doubt,” with the message that your brain is trying to protect you from failure. But getting caught up in that label doesn’t help you. What’s really going on? Most likely, you’re feeling pressure from your peers or family to do better—to achieve more, to be more successful, to live up to their expectations. That pressure is creating a gap between what you think you should be (your expectation) and where you actually are (your current power).

Now, you could spend hours debating whether you’re truly a failure or not. You could try to logic your way out of the emotion, telling yourself, “I’m not a failure; I’ve accomplished X, Y, and Z.” But logic won’t help. Your subconscious doesn’t care about your rational arguments—it’s operating on a deeper, more primal level. Instead, focus on the obstacle: the pressure from your peers and family. What can you do about it? One option is to reduce your expectations. Stop trying to live up to their standards. Stop explaining yourself to them. Reduce your dependency on their validation, whether that’s emotional, financial, or otherwise. When you no longer feel the urge to appease them, the pressure—and the feeling of failure—will start to fade.

The other option is to increase your power. If the pressure is coming from a real gap in your achievements—if you genuinely want to be more successful—then focus on building the skills, resources, or opportunities you need to get there. Take a course, network with new people, or start a side project that moves you closer to your goals. The point is to take action that directly addresses the obstacle, not to get lost in the emotion itself.

Everything else—analyzing your feelings, labeling them, or trying to suppress them—is a distraction. Psychologists might call this distraction “wisdom,” but it’s not. It’s a complication that keeps you stuck in your head instead of moving forward in your life. You don’t need to understand hundreds of emotions. You just need to win.

Let’s look at another example. Say you’re feeling anxious because your boss hasn’t given you the raise you think you deserve. According to Mustafa, anxiety means your mind is scanning for danger or uncertainty. But knowing that doesn’t solve the problem. The real issue is the gap between your expectation (getting a raise) and your current reality (not getting one). You can either reduce your expectation—maybe decide the raise isn’t as important as you thought and focus on other aspects of your job—or increase your power by having a direct conversation with your boss, improving your performance, or looking for a better-paying job elsewhere. Either way, you’re addressing the obstacle head-on, not getting lost in the emotion.

Conclusion

In a world obsessed with overcomplicating emotions, the path to a better life is surprisingly simple: stop focusing on your feelings and start focusing on winning. Negative emotions—whether they’re anxiety, guilt, insecurity, or anything else—are just signals that there’s an obstacle in your way. You don’t need to label them or understand their every nuance. You just need to identify the obstacle and take action to overcome it, either by adjusting your expectations or increasing your power to meet the challenge.

Psychologists might be well-meaning, but by encouraging us to dissect our emotions, they’re making our lives more complicated and miserable. We don’t need more complexity—we need more action. So here’s your call to action: today, identify one expectation that’s causing you to feel a negative emotion. Maybe it’s the pressure to be perfect at work, or the desire for approval from a friend. Then decide: can you adjust that expectation, or do you need to build your power to meet it? Take one concrete step in that direction, and you’ll be on your way to winning in life—no affect labelling required.