Probably everyone
feels some emotions and probably those emotions can have big influence on your life and your decision
making process, that is why you should learn something more about them. There are
many different representations of emotions, here I will present two of them. Below
you can see the first diagram which represents the most basic human emotions:
As you can
see in the presented diagram there are 8
basic emotions and 24 derivatives of them. In total 32 emotions, but below you
can see a more complicated diagram of human
emotions:
As you may
see in two diagrams there are many different types of emotions and each emotion
can have influence on your life. I think that the biggest influence on your
life from all the mentioned above has fear, because I have seen a lot of people
who were afraid to make a decision to do what they like and they wanted to do
or to talk to someone who they like. They were afraid that they would lose
something and usually fear was unfounded, but they were unable to make a decision. That is why I decided to present some method
of controlling your emotions:
- Name what you feel at the moment. Usually if you find out what emotion you are feeling at a particular moment it may help to decrease the impact of this emotion.
- When you are angry imagine you are breathing out all your anger.
- Imagine what you could do being someone else. Try to take a step back and change your perspective. Eliminate the selfish beliefs which give rise to your disturbing thoughts and negative emotions. Create opinions on deep logical analysis of causes and effects of each reaction
Comments
If anyone seeks a method to deal with certain emotions, like anger, anxiety or sadness, I would recommend a book called "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy" by David Burns, and cognitive-behavioral methods you can find on the Internet, as these are the most scientifically accurate and proven to be working.
I've knew only one method from 3 ones that you presented - the first one: "Name what you feel at the moment. Usually if you find out what emotion you are feeling at a particular moment it may help to decrease the impact of this emotion.". Sometimes people don't even realize that they are controlled by their emotions.
I would agree that fear is often the reason why people do or don't do something. I'm not really an impulsive person so I don't find myself so angry or so emotionally unstable that I would have to calm myself down but maybe your advice will became useful one day ;)
Cezary thanks for your presentation. Great and really important topic I think. You specified the most important thing in that area.
You were totally right when you wrote about fear and its influence for people's behaviour.
I must admit that sometimes I feel like there is much more types of emotions than described on both of those diagrams. It's hard to control them, or even to focus on one of them an "take step back and think about it".
For example cortisol is associated with fear like endorphins with happiness.
I'm not an expert in this domain but it seems to me that environment in which we grow up has a big impact on how our emotions are formed.
I agree 'breathing out all your anger' is helpful just like any sport activity.
There are a lot of quotes about fear in books, movies and other media. There is one that helped me understand the world and fear better - in one of books of Malloreon series by David Eddings one of the characters says that possibility can make much more impact than actuality. Fear of something bad happening can have much more impact on peoples lives than it actually happening to them.
In my opinion controlling emotions completely is not good for people. You need to express yourself - otherwise you will get frustrated. And sharing emotions with people you care about is good because it may help you deal with your feelings. And these people will feel better being a part of the process and not being pushed aside. I know it from my personal experience - I've been in a relationship with a guy who kept all his emotions to himself and it felt really weird when he was just empty-faced everytime he got angry or sad. He wouldn't express any positive feelings either, his self-restraint drove me crazy. So - sharing is one thing and the other is learning how to deal with them. I think there is no method that would suit everybody - some want to talk through their emotions, some try to keep themselves distracted. I am more of a talker - I like to share my emotions, it makes me feel that they're somehow "cut in half". It helps me a lot and keeps my loved ones on track with what's going on.
Your methods of controlling the emotions are also interesting. In particular, the first of them may be useful.
I think that emotions are influent our lives very very much. It is everywhere! Damn, I have just imagined a life without any single emotion, everything super neutral, that would be the worst thing ever!
Funny fact is that we put emotions into our everyday -internet, sms - world with emoticons. How awkward it is to get message from a friend without any emoticon - emotion? it seems so weird, so unnatural. I always use so many emoticons, when I am happy, when angry, sad... It helps sharing emotions in the written way of communication :)
Here is a very short but interesting video describing in a nutshell, what they are and where do they come from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=junA60oeanA
Surprisingly, we feel emotions with our whole body not only the brain! So the traditional symbols like heart for love isn't as inaccurate as many would think in this day and age.