How Emotions Work
Hi there!
Welcome back to the MoodiNews. Every Thursday, we discuss a variety of matters related to mental health and self-improvement.
I’m so glad you’re here.
In today’s post, we will continue to discuss: EMOTIONS! YAY!
Last week, we defined ‘emotion’ from a technical perspective. This week, we are going to further explore how emotions work.
In therapy, I often have to teach my clients how emotions work before they can learn how to regulate their emotional reactions. When I am first explaining the basics of emotion to my clients, I like to share with them the following analogy:
Emotions are like the indicator lights on the dashboard of a car. They are signals. In the same way that indicator lights flash (or don’t) to warn you about potential issues within a car’s operating system, your emotions cue you (the mental ‘driver’) into the state of your well-being at any given moment.
If you are feeling bad (i.e. sad, angry, nervous), it’s likely because something is potentially wrong. On the other hand, if you are feeling great (i.e. there are no indicator lights, and you feel good to go-go-go!), then you are likely perceiving yourself as making progress in a positive direction.
People who have a hard time regulating (i.e. controlling or managing) their emotions often fail to understand how emotion works. Typically, I find that people who have never been taught to regulate themselves struggle in two main areas:
1) They have difficulty decoding what their emotions are communicating (i.e. they ‘misinterpret the indicator light’ or misdiagnose their emotional cues)
2) They respond inappropriately to whatever emotional cues they do interpret (i.e. they ‘fix’ the wrong problem—usually because they have misdiagnosed what they need)
Let’s look at these two points a little closer:
1) Let’s say that you get angry when someone cuts you off on the highway. A person who is very emotionally attuned to their feelings might notice that they were first surprised —> then fearful—> then angry. But someone who is less self-aware probably would just notice the anger.
When people misinterpret (or altogether miss) their emotional cues, they can develop a misinformed perception and consequently misjudge how to respond to a situation. This leads to a second problem:
2) In the example above, if you were to get angry, it would probably be for good reason—someone put you in danger, and unnecessarily so. But emotions are not facts, and not recognizing this is also where people go astray. Just because someone cuts you off in traffic, it does not mean that anything bad actually happened—it just means that something terrible could have happened, had you not been watching the road.
In order to properly self-soothe (i.e. calm down in the moment—not after five miles of tailgating that person and shouting insults at them through your windshield), most of us would probably benefit from some validation (i.e. acknowledgment) that we felt surprised and scared by getting cut off like that. Validating our primary emotion allows us to soothe whatever pain or discomfort we felt in the moment, so that we can then proceed to take care of ourselves skillfully (i.e. perhaps confirming that we could have been hurt, and then taking a deep breath and driving on carefully—rather than ruminating on our road-rage and prolonging our own suffering.)
As you might imagine, when people are unable to regulate themselves emotionally, it can create a whole host of problems. Living from a place of heightened emotional reasoning can cause a person to become overly sensitive or reactive in response to insignificant, everyday-life situations.
In summation, it is important that we learn how to accurately identify and respond to our emotions—and we do this by first understanding how emotions work. But merely knowing what we feel and why does not necessarily inform us of what to do next. That requires a whole different skillset called problem-solving, and we will dive further into that topic next week.