How Your Emotions Work
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Learn how your emotions work, the emotional pressure cooker, suppressing and identifying feelings, and dealing with an emotional backlog.
Hi, I'm Graham. I had 18 years of formal education - that's 12 years of primary and high school, and then another six years at university studying engineering - and during that time, I learnt a lot about how to think but very little about how to feel or how my emotions worked.
In fact, I can't remember in that entire time a single class where I sat down and had a teacher teach me how my emotions work.
Now, possibly maybe in art classes or in music classes or maybe even in English they might've come close, but really nothing all that direct and concrete.
And that's a shame because, fundamentally as humans, we're all driven by our emotions. All our behavior is an attempt to either move towards pleasure or move away from pain.
So emotions are absolutely key to getting what we want in life. They're also the key to a successful relationship, especially with women.
So in the rest of this article, I'm going to give you a quick introduction into how your emotions work.
Emotional mastery researchers come up with all sorts of lists and categories for different kinds of emotions, but I like to keep it really simple. So for the purpose of this video, I'm going to suggest that we break it down into eight basic emotions:
Peace
Love
Joy
Anger
Sadness
Fear
Guilt
Shame
There are lots of different combinations of these emotions that can happen to us and other people categorize them slightly differently. But, really, if you just get a handle of these basic eight, you'll be streets ahead of all the other guys out there.
So where do emotions come from? Well, emotions arise in the primitive part of our brain. Us humans arise to the top of the food chain because of our ability to think and make long-term plans and our analytical thinking abilities.
But, really, that's a relatively late evolutionary development. Most of the action that's really driving us is still in the primitive part of our brain, and that's all driven by our emotions.
What happens basically is that we have thoughts and we have feelings all at the same time, and it is possible for our thoughts to kind of subvert our feelings for a short period of time.
But in the long run, emotions are way more powerful and will always win out at the end of the day.
So why do we have emotions? Well, I don't really know for sure. Obviously they've got some kind of evolutionary benefit, but I'll give you three basic reasons.
Firstly is they tell us what's really important to us on a very deep level. Without even thinking about it, emotions arise from our unconscious mind and get our attention. They tell us about things that are threats in our environment or things that we really want to move towards. So they're key to telling us what's really important to us.
They're also the basis of close connection and trust with other people. So feelings are really important in relationships.
And, finally, feelings play a very key role in memory and our ability to remember things that happened in the past. Often traumatic memories or events that have been quite painful for us can still have a very emotional charge attached to them. That's a topic for another day.
It's not all that widely recognized in our society that feelings also have physical sensations associated with them in our body. They're not just something that happens in our head.
If you were to ask me to differentiate between what's a feeling and what's an emotion, I would say it's kind of splitting hairs. I often use the two words interchangeably. But one way to look at it is that feelings have a physical sensation associated with them in the body, whereas an emotion is more of a label that we attach to what's going on in our mind.
So with fear, for instance, you might find your heart racing and your body kind of shaking. That will be the feeling. Whereas fear might be the description of the emotion that we're experiencing associated with that.
But really, it's kind of splitting hairs and I don't really think that's all that important to distinguish between the two a lot of the time.
When we were an infant, we were freely self-expressed and emotions just came and went and we were hit with waves of feelings all the time, often feelings that felt quite overwhelming.
When we were sad, we would cry. When we were angry, we would rage. When we were joyful, we would smile and goo. When we were happy, we would smile.
Over time, what happens is we freely express ourselves and then we start encountering the reactions of other people. Now, babies learn to regulate their emotions through interactions with other people, particularly our mothers and our fathers, our early caregivers.
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