The brain reconstructs experiences
- For example, a churning stomach and flushed face can feel like you're in love in a romantic setting but will be interpreted as 'feeling ill' if you are in bed with a thermometer in your mouth.
- A stomach ache might signal a gut infection, or it might feel like homesickness if you are away from your family.
- A rushing heartbeat could be interpreted as excitement when you're on a rollercoaster, acute anxiety if you're giving a speech, or simply that you've drunk too much coffee.
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You can take steps now to influence your future emotional experiences.
Knowing your real emotion can provide a deeper understanding of the situation you are in, such as reframing your unhappiness, so it no longer feels so all-consuming. You may also reconsider the source of your discomfort. Eventually, you may be able to categorise a situation with precision.
States like hunger, fatigue, or illness produce the same signals as emotions like anger, anxiety, or sadness. This shows the importance of looking after your body as a way to stabilise your mood.
- A healthy diet and regular exercise can regulate your mood.
- Mindfulness meditation can encourage you to observe and deconstruct your bodily signals.
- A good emotion vocabulary is useful. Instead of describing yourself as 'happy', you may discern if you are 'blissful' or 'inspired'. Reading or watching films can increase your emotion vocabulary.
Although we think that we know how we feel, the sensations of anger, anxiety, hunger, or illness are more alike than we realize.
We may sometimes misinterpret those signals with grave consequences. But there are some practical ways to gain control of our feelings.
We learn interpretations from others. Your familiar emotion concepts come from your particular social context - your parents, friends, TV, and books, and your own past life experiences.
Other cultures will connect different kinds of meaning from the same sensory input. Utka Eskimos appear to have no clearly defined concept of anger, and Tahitians seem not to share our concept of sadness.
Charles Darwin popularized the theory of emotional fingerprints - that each emotion creates a specific combination of facial expression, body language, and other physiological cues such as a heart rate.
But recently detailed analyses suggest there is no such thing. Each emotion is represented by a whole range of reactions. The way we interpret our body's signals, such as excited or anxious, depends entirely on the context of the situation and can be easily framed by our expectations.
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- Fewer medical intervention needs.
- Better relationships with family & friends.
- Better able to choose correct actions in social situations.
- Less likely to stress drink.
- Less likely to relataliate aggressively.
- More flexible regulating emotions
- Simulation is the standard, default mode for all brain activity.
- Discovered in the 1990s, simulation is what psychologists and neuroscientists mistook as ‘reactions’ to what we see, hear, touch, smell or taste.
- We automatically use simulation for thinking, understanding language, feeling empathy, remembrance, imagination, dreams and the ability to perceive.
Ignoring feelings (like "stuffing your anger") is not the healthiest way to deal with them. generally speaking, that does not make them go away but can cause them to come out in different ways. That’s because your emotions act as signals to you that what you are doing in your life is or isn’t working.
Feeling angry or frustrated can be a signal that something needs to change. If you don’t change the situations or thought patterns that are causing these uncomfortable emotions, you will continue to be triggered by them.
Also, while you are not dealing with the emotions you are feeling, they can cause problems with your physical and emotional health.
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