You're saying happiness and unhappiness exist on independent scales, should we plot them in an x-y graph then? Upper right quadrant: overexcitement, lower left quadrant: boredom. Not sure about the off-diagonals.
The PANAS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_and_Negative_Affect_S...) is a widely used measure of mood that's based on this model, as an example.
One axis is "negative mood" and the other is "positive mood", so it's closer to something like despair on on one end of one axis, and joy on the end of the other axis, and lack thereof on both ends of each axes.
So high negative emotion and low positive emotion is something like sadness or something; high negative emotion and high positive emotion might be like anxiety.
There's arguments about which model is right (another is negative versus positive mood on one axis [i.e., valence], and arousal versus lack of arousal on the other axis).
The issue is that depending on time frame, or what you're assessing, people can feel positive and negative emotion at the same time. But on micro timescales I think there's more arguments. It might just be a sort of descriptive thing without any "correct" answer.
When you ask people to rate their mood, you find two clusters of responses, roughly corresponding to negative and positive mood axes, but they're slightly negatively correlated, suggesting one overarching valence dimension, but not as dominant as you might intuit.
Euphoria is low unhappiness and high happiness.
Depression is high unhappiness and low happiness
I can't really come up with what it would mean to be high unhappiness and high happiness. Manic, maybe? It sounds like a very confused situation.
I rarely (if ever) comment on my mental health online, but I can totally relate to a X-Y quadrant as you describe. Many mental health professional debut their appointment with a dreaded question "how are you feeling today?".
If I had this diagram with me, it would save time and be way more descriptive of my state of mind.
As for the high unhappiness/high unhappiness quadrant: I'm not manic myself but know close ones who are. I think it fits.
Thanks for opening my mind about this.
I am happiest when I stretch past my limits, which not un-coincidentally means I am also always hitting my limits.
Would not change anything. Might change my mind at any time though.
(I am not manic, maybe an incurable optimist.)
It's like that.
Manic is kinda weird. The above makes it sound almost good, or kind of good. It is not. It is very dangerous. You do not want to be manic. (But you might, maybe, some of the time, want to be hypomanic.)
(Disclaimer: I have had contact with mania in my life but have never personally experienced a Bipolar I manic episode and I aim to keep it that way.)
Having both created a startup and worked a cushy job, I can relate