Aparna’s Weekend Musings on Life – Series 2 – Emotions and our connect with emotions

If you ask me what is an emotion Aparna? I would reply that it is a strong feeling – could be anger, joy, despair, sad, surprise, disgust or typically anything you feel. Emotions are strong feelings derived from one’s circumstances, mood or relationship with others.

Emotions are created by our brain. Different networks in the brain can create different emotions at various levels. It is through emotions our brain processes and gives meaning to bodily sensations, triggers, perceptions and past experiences.

When we begin to understand our emotions we can reflect and know that an emotional timeline exists. Any emotion begins with a trigger that starts an emotional experience and results in a response to the emotion.

Psychologists explain that we experience an emotional state of mind based on:

1.      Precondition: the context which influences the way we experience an emotion.

2.      Event : an event that happens in the world or in our mind

3.      Perceptual database : how we see the world and our experiences with life

While experiencing a particular emotion we may feel a combination of physical changes and mental changes. Physical changes are automated bodily sensations of our emotions. For eg: adrenaline rush, a shivering…etc. Mental changes are the immediately felt experience of our emotions – fear, disgust and accordingly we give facial expressions.

We respond to emotions with our actions. Our responses to the same emotion may differ depending on the circumstances. We can respond constructively, destructively or ambiguously.

When an emotion is triggered we are in the grip of that emotion, which limits our ability to think clearly and choose how we respond. As time passes, we gain some clarity and the ability to make a thoughtful choice.

Dr. Paul Ekman explains in detail on what causes an emotion => changes => our response with an example.

You are listening to a sad song (precondition) + a friend gets angry with you (event) + it reminds you of rejection (perception of world and life experiences). As a result of this you experience weakness physically (physical change) and you feel empty (mental change). Your constructive response would be to call a loved one and talk, your ambiguous response could be to ignore the feeling, and the destructive response could be to feel ashamed and embarrassed about rejection and loss.

Let us take a few minutes here to understand a little more about emotions!! Relax, take a deep breath and reflect each question one by one! Answer these in relation to the strong emotion you felt recently :

1.      Was it just because of what happened?

2.      Was it because of what your mood was when the event happened?

3.      Was it because of your misunderstanding or difference of opinions with the person?

4.      Were you focused on something that happened in past, present or thinking about the future when you felt strong feelings?

5.      What caused you these feelings?

Emotional awareness is learning to identify and describe how you are feeling and why you are feeling it. The goal is to gain control over what triggers your emotions and how you respond to it. Once we are aware of our own emotions, we can manage our emotions and start to understand others emotions and finally gain emotional balance or emotional intelligence - EQ.

Daniel Goleman’s  model of EQ focuses on 5 major areas:

a.      Knowing your emotions         

b.      Managing your emotions

c.       Motivate yourself

d.      Recognize and understand other people’s emotions

e.      Manage relationships (other’s emotions)

EQ goes hand in hand with leadership and resilience building. Leaders with emotional intelligence can be engaging and inspiring leaders, have a growth mindset, agility and effective relationship management.

As actor David Caruso says “It is very important to understand that emotional intelligence is not the opposite of intelligence, it is not the triumph of heart over head – it is the unique intersection of both”

Often we tend to build emotional walls after we experience rejection or humiliation or hurt deeply. Our walls are high because we are sooo tired of believing, following our heart yet ending up disappointed, hurt and broken inside out. So we keep raising our walls, keeping people at arm’s length, not trusting, not letting anyone. We are trying to protect our heart from the disappointment, rejection and hurt. But are we??

For many of us, it can be difficult to express our emotions. So we tend to keep our emotions bottled up – not show them to anyone or they burst, overflow and spill out in unhealthy or unexpected ways. In our society, showing or expressing emotions is seen as a sign of weakness and this stigma is a part of what makes it difficult for people to express their emotional self.

You could ask me why do you bother so much about emotions or emotional awareness, managing emotional intelligence or balance?

My answer is I strongly believe that emotions play a massive role in how we perceive the world, how we understand people, how we communicate and reflect our experiences.

Let us take the first step to connect with our emotions:

Step 1: Be aware of your emotional repressions and emotional walls we built up:

If we repress or suppress our emotions it will burst out or erupt unexpectedly.  When we don’t allow ourselves to express or release our emotions in a healthy way it may build up to a point where you can no longer control them.

Step 2: Self – reflection:

Spending about 5 to 10 minutes every day on our emotions, questioning our feelings can make a big difference. Some questions we could ask ourselves could be How and What am I feeling today?, when did I first notice this feeling?, what is the primary cause of this feeling, what are possible secondary causes of this feeling?, Am I tired or stressed? What physiological changes did I feel? How should I respond to this feeling? Should I just wait for this feeling to pass?

It is said that individuals with more connections between the thinking and feelings parts of their brain often have more emotional intelligence. This is because our ability to think about our feelings helps to create a buffer between our emotions and our responses, so that we don’t act impulsively all of the time.

If we just start Thinking and questioning our feelings, it helps us to detach from the heat of the moment. The more we question our feelings the more we can control them rather than let them control us!!

Step 3: Allow Yourself to Express or Release your emotions in a healthy way

You can release or express yourself through writing about it, through doodling, paint, photography, dance, song, music or typically anything you enjoy.

Open up about yourself to yourself – write  about why you built an emotional wall, what hurt or who hurt you. Make friends with your emotions. Get to know yourself better. Let people in.

Emotion hides behind behavior. Our behavior is driven by our emotions. In order to understand why we behave in a particular way at times need us to reflect and analyze what we feel and go back to our questions.

A quote that caught my attention was that of Mr. Deepak Chopra. He says “Everytime you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask yourself if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future”.

Think about it!!

Signing off,

Aparna Subramanian

PS:

For those of you who asked me whom am I writing these series for?

 My answer is "for all of us."

 That is the reason why I am picking topics that are common for all of us. I think, reflect my experiences, research and then write about it! Cheers, thank you for asking!