Emotions, Moods and Reactions

Learning to feel, understand, and use our emotions is central to mastering the complexity of life. Our emotions become much clearer and easier to use the more we pay attention to the physical sensations that go with them.

For many of us, emotions are something of a mystery. On the one hand, they can be delightful; they give life meaning and depth that would be impossible without them. On the other hand, they can be uncomfortable; they can hinder and disturb us; and anger in particular can sometimes cause a whole lot of very big trouble.

How do you know you feel afraid? Is your breath more shallow, your chest tight, your belly vibrating?

For many of us, the first sense we have of fear is when we’re already overtaken by the emotion, uncomfortable with the need to avoid or endure something that feels threatening.

In the case of panic attacks, the physical process leading to the emotion of panic can start much earlier than the panic itself. A tightening of our chest, a constriction in our breathing, can lead to a change in CO2 levels in our blood as early as 40 minutes before we feel anything! By the time we’re actually panicking we’re already in trouble, with an intensity of emotion that can be genuinely disabling.

Often, panic is not about an external fear at all, it’s a physical response to feeling like we’re suffocating – because the CO2 levels in our blood are telling us that we are.

If we’re prone to panic attacks, and we’re aware of when our breathing initially becomes shallower, at that point we can gently deepen our breathing when we notice it. Doing this can quite possibly avert the panic attack entirely.

How do you know you feel angry? Do you feel tension in your muscles, tightening in your jaw, an intensity of physical energy in your body? For those with anger issues, it can feel like a switch just got thrown, and the anger floods in, becoming overpowering, and leading to potentially dangerous consequences.

That’s because overwhelming anger is a function of the fight branch of our sympathetic nervous system, and it can kick in within about a 10^th of a second to protect us from mortal danger. At least that’s its function – but we can get lost in it for a variety of reasons when there is no such danger.

Part of the solution to anger that is out of control is to pay close attention over time to what triggers that anger, and to the very earliest physical sensations signaling that anger is beginning to arise, and before our fight system is activated. Avoiding those triggers and using those early sensations as a signal to stop and redirect that emotion are keys to taming and retraining the anger response.

How do you know you feel joy? Does your breathing deepen, do your muscles relax; do you feel lightness and a pleasurable vibration in your skin? Often we just have a sense that we feel happy, but we may not have the words or the awareness of what’s happening in our bodies which is an integral part of that joy. In many cases, those physical sensations can help us feel even more joyful… and it’s hard to imagine a downside to that.

Emotions in general involve not just a feeling, but also an impulse to move. And that impulse to move is something that happens outside of our conscious awareness.

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What we want, and what we end up liking when we get it are two different things. They each involve different parts of our brain, and different states of mind.

Understanding this difference and bringing more consciousness to what you think you want can save you a huge amount of time, effort, and money.

This last bit is important, the amount of money we spend on things that we want, but then end up not liking, can be huge. It can make the difference between financial ease or financial stress; a sense of abundance or a sense of desperation. It can make it possible – or impossible – to save and invest.

I’ve had clients who, though they make plenty of money to live very well, end up feeling desperate and on edge financially – because they spend more than they make, buying things they want.

This doesn’t need to happen. It’s a simple enough math problem, easy to solve on paper – just don’t spend more than you make, right? But desire is a powerful motivator, and our emotions can mislead us hard with this one.

What happens is that we focus too much on what we want, thinking (and feeling strongly) it will bring us comfort or relief or happiness. But what we end up with is things we don’t even like very much, plus the significant stress of sustained financial anxiety and regret.

The difference between what we want, and what we will like when we get it is what researchers Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson call “Miswanting.” We have a strong bias toward what we want, and we often aren’t very good at predicting how we’ll feel once we get it.

We focus too much on the wanting – which is exciting and offers the promise of satisfaction, joy, or relief – and not enough on the reality of having whatever it is. When we have something that we’ve wanted, it might be nice, but it’s usually a quieter, less emotionally revved up feeling. Which is different from what the higher rev of our wanting leads us to expect.

The antidote, as with many things, is to bring awareness to the part of the experience we haven’t been looking at.

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I write sometimes in these columns about thinking biases that can affect our decision making. Today I want to talk about a way of thinking that can undermine our resilience during hardship, as well as our ability to flourish and succeed.

Catastrophes happen in life. Natural disasters, tragic accidents, terrible illnesses, heart-rending betrayals, economic calamities, war, famine… Human history has been filled with these, and most of us have been at least touched by something catastrophic.

But a catastrophe is not usually the most likely scenario – if they were common, we wouldn’t think of them as catastrophes; they’d just be the kind of normal troubles we expect in life. There can be disappointments, hardships, struggles, and losses that hurt badly, requiring us to step up to challenges we would rather not have to step up to. These are not uncommon.

But a true catastrophe is rarely likely. When we expect catastrophe as a likely scenario, that expectation creates its own troubles, and they can run deep.

Yet our current media and political culture thrives on creating and maintaining an atmosphere of impending catastrophe. This is true across the political spectrum, and throughout much of the common space we share through internet, TV, movies, print media… The conversation that is mediated by every kind of media is filled with visions of catastrophe.

The very way that these threats are framed do not encourage us to think clearly, investigate deeply, or to search for practical solutions.

The way they are framed encourages us to feel terrified, enraged, and helpless. And this can undermine our capacity for success, happiness and well-being across every aspect of our lives.

This orientation is guaranteed to activate our primitive reactions of fight, flight, and freeze – reactions that are designed to give us a last-ditch possibility of surviving the mortal attack of a predator.

While these parts of our nervous system serve an essential survival function when needed, they are very rarely actually needed. They also undermine our capacity to think clearly, our desire and ability to seek understanding, empathy, and compassion for others, and our internal sense of well-being and basic trust.

Catastrophic thinking can undermine resilience, and increase our risk for anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It can also undermine our capacity for success: those who tend to not engage in catastrophic thinking also tend to be the ones who excel.

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