We are all wary of the power of negative emotions, while treating positive emotions as good without qualification. That's a mistake. Positive emotions can be just as dangerous as negative ones. And negative emotions often have the same source as positive emotions, caring about something, writes Krista Thomason.

You’ve been warned not to let your anger get the best of you and that it’s okay to feel anger sometimes as long as you manage it well. Negative emotions get compared to cancers, toxins, or monsters – they eat you up from the inside if you keep feeling them. But you’ve probably never heard people say any of these things about joy. No one ever warns you that joy will eat you up from the inside.

Sometimes negative emotions are treated like drugs that you’ll get addicted to if you feel them too much. We treat negative emotions like weapons: you should either avoid them altogether or handle them with caution – otherwise you’ll hurt yourself or someone else, or maybe both.

No one seems too worried about whether you can get hooked on positive emotions, or whether they can be dangerous to yourself and others. There’s apparently no reason to treat positive emotions with such caution. Anger and joy are both emotions; they belong in the same psychological category. So why do we talk about them in radically different ways?