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Emotions, Moods and Reactions

The Most Destructive Emotion

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions

 

Envy is an ugly emotion with awful effects. Many religions forbid or warn against it, as with the 10th commandment in the Old Testament; storytellers show its horrible effects. We all know that it’s bad on a feeling level, yet envy persists as a powerfully destructive force.

It isn’t about having very little; we aren’t particularly unhappy when we have very little. But we do become very unhappy, depressed, and bitter when we dwell on having less than our neighbor.

Yet there is an antidote to envy: empathy, curiosity, admiration, and the effective redirection of our initial impulses. It can also help to more fully understand this destructive and bitter emotion.

Envy de-humanizes the person envied. When we envy another person, we are not seeing that person for who they are, we are seeing him for what he has. It breeds malevolence; when we envy, we are not happy for the success of our neighbor, we are resentful of it.

Envy diminishes our capacity for empathy, and this lack of empathy makes it possible for people to do horrible things to one another.

It also reinforces a self-image of helplessness and impotence. Envy implies disbelief in ourselves; it presupposes that we don’t believe we can create the wealth, the relationships, the values that we see in others, and this helplessness can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, limiting our ability to work toward what we would like to create in our lives.

But like any negative emotion, by catching ourselves and understanding what we’re feeling, we can redirect our actions in a way that works much better for us.

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Fear, Famine, and Finances

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies

 

Money troubles can tap into the most primitive emotions, including intense fear, and even reactions of flight and panic. But there are ways of using these signals, so we don’t get lost in them.

Matt wakes up in the middle of the night, anxious and troubled. Breathing shallow and high in his chest, thoughts racing… The severity of his financial troubles has just hit him. His investments have dropped significantly, and his spending has been putting him deeply into debt surprisingly quickly.

At least it feels like it was quickly. The habits had been established some years earlier, but he hadn’t modified his spending in relation to the real income he could draw from. For many months the trouble had been building, but credit created a buffer that allowed him to avoid feeling it.

Then one morning, at 3 am, it hits him. He’s in trouble, big trouble. So big that he couldn’t see a way to solve the problem. Panicked and overwhelmed, he soothes himself with a positive fantasy of things turning out okay. This calms him enough to get back to sleep.

When he wakes up, he’s forgotten the urgency, and dives into his day. The soothing fantasy providing a reprieve from the anxiety. Until another week passes, and he wakes up again in a panic…

In this case, the panic is Matt’s friend; his own awareness trying to break through his defenses so he can face the real problems. And there are ways of solving these problems. But nothing happens until he’s willing to acknowledge the reality first.

Why is this panic around money so severe?

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Savoring the Micro-Moments of Human Connection

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Habits and Strategies, Happiness

 

It’s easy these days to get drawn into a variety of small boxes: computers, televisions, ipads, kindles, smart phones… or occasionally even an actual book. There are a lot of wonderful possibilities within each of these (particularly books, but I’m old fashioned), but they can also deprive us, if we’re not careful, of life’s greatest joys: the treasure of human connection.

Fortunately, it’s fairly easy to counter this tendency, and enjoy the benefits of a richer emotional life, and a healthier physical life, as a result. I’ll show you how shortly.

One of my favorite researchers is Barbara Fredrickson, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of her books is Love 2.0, in which she looks at “love from the body’s perspective.” She has been studying how the experience of the emotion of love affects your physiology, including your physical health.

Now, when we hear the word “love,” the first form that usually comes to mind is romantic love. But this is only one framework within which we feel the emotion of love. The emotion of love requires safety and trust, and a Long-term, committed love relationship can create the opportunity for feeling the emotion of love often – but it is not the only place. We love our children, we love other family members, we love our friends…

We even feel a kind of love in what Fredrickson calls “micro-moments of connection.” The nice conversation we have with the checkout person at the grocery store; the warm greeting of welcome by a new acquaintance at a meeting; even the moment of eye contact with a stranger who holds open a door. That wonderful warm feeling is something that is much more ubiquitous than we might expect.

It turns out that these micro moments of connection are actually filled with stuff that is good for us, emotionally, psychologically, and in terms of our overall health… like a good meal is filled with nutrients.

The more positive emotions we have, the better our “vagal tone” is. Our vagal tone is the strength and health of our vagus nerve, which connects our heart with our brain and our internal organs. Our vagus nerve, among other things, controls our heart rate variability.

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How to Overcome Our Old, Limiting Beliefs

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

 

Have you ever felt that in striving toward a goal of some kind, that there’s something holding you back? Something that you can’t see or grasp clearly, but you feel it’s there, slowing you down – like you just can’t get traction?

This is something that most of us have experienced to one degree or another.

Maybe we find we hit a wall with how much income we earn; or we find a pattern in our relationships that limits our sense of closeness; or we feel there’s some obstacle in our work that we can’t seem to overcome.

It can feel like there’s a threshold that we can’t seem to cross, no matter how hard we try. We struggle to improve whatever it is, but it’s as though there’s something working against us, like a gravitational pull that keeps drawing us back within a certain range.

When this happens, what we may be experiencing is the effect of a rotten belief.

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If You Want to be Miserable, Compare Yourself to Others

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

 

We have a unique capacity to envision an immense variety of possible future states. This allows us have ideals and strive for them, to plan, to learn and grow… and to want things.

In an essential way this orientation toward the future is what makes us human. We can imagine something we want to achieve, something we want to avoid, something we want to have, and then we can plan and aim ourselves toward achieving, avoiding, or gaining possession of whatever it is.

But there’s a downside.

What if I want something that other people have, and I don’t?

What if I want something that I had in the past but no longer have?

What if I expect to have something, but don’t end up getting it?

What if I want something I can’t have?

That gap, between what we have and what we want, can inspire us to strive, to persevere, to lean into our lives more… but it can also make us miserable.

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Mastering Emotions Through Sensing Your Body

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

 

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.

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A Strategy for Quieting Painful Memories

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

 

About a hundred years ago, Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik was sitting in a café in Vienna waiting for her coffee refill. It never came. She noticed that her waiter had an excellent memory for all of his customers’ orders, but somehow had forgotten her coffee.

Bluma set herself to the task of investigating this phenomenon further. What she found in her subsequent studies was this: People tend to remember the details of things exceptionally well when those things are unfinished. She had already paid her waiter, so he had forgotten about her because he was finished with her as a customer.

What is unfinished haunts us. It stays with us, nagging us to bring it to completion. There is something immensely useful to understand here.

Bluma theorized that incomplete tasks create psychic tension within a person, which motivates them to complete those tasks. Painful memories of the past often have a quality of regret. Regret for having had to endure some sort of trauma; for having missed out on a relationship we might have had; for having done something that went against our values… or having not done something that mattered to us.

What is fascinating is that these painful memories seem to lose their energy as soon as we do something in the present, so that we are no longer perpetuating what was painful in the past. If we are lonely, and have been lonely for a long time, the emotional energy of our loneliness dissolves as soon as we begin having the kind of social interactions we have been longing for.

The reality of our past loneliness doesn’t disappear, but the sadness and the draw to ruminate on the memory of it does.

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The Healing Power of Playfulness

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

 

A relationship can have complex and unique needs at any given time, so there isn’t really a one size fits all panacea for troubles. But of all the specific actions we can take to improve our relationships, I have found none that apply as often or as effectively as this:

Be playful.

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? But it’s more challenging than meets the eye, and there are clear guidelines for it to work:

We have to approach play as allies, as a member of the same team; we have to be for our spouse, our child, our friend, our co-worker; and the play must have a spirit of love, kindness and optimism, as opposed to cynicism or sarcasm. There cannot be bitterness or resentment clouding the play; it’s the combination of creative, interactive flow and positive emotions that elevates us.

If you’re up for the challenge, you’re in for some pleasant surprises.

In over four decades of working with couples, families, individuals, and teams, I’ve found that playfulness is one of the clearest indicators of how things are going. When I meet a couple who are playful with each other in this way, even if their troubles are big ones, I know that the chances that they’ll prevail through whatever they’re struggling with are extremely good.

On the other hand, without playfulness, even small troubles can be overwhelming.

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The Quiet Power of Kindness

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

 

For some, happiness is a word that conjures up visions of selfish people concerned only with their own pleasure; but this sort of hedonistic approach to happiness is a recipe for serial bursts of pleasure at the expense of long-term happiness.

When I speak of happiness, I am describing a much richer concept; more akin to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia or “success at being human.”

One of the central elements for living well is how we relate to other people. In this regard, happiness is literally the opposite of self-centeredness or self-absorption. In fact, contrary to many Las Vegas advertisements or Hollywood-lifestyle fantasies, self-absorption is a key ingredient for depression, and single-minded focus on personal pleasure is a recipe for long-term misery.

So here’s the single most effective thing we can do to get an immediate and significant boost to our genuine happiness – and to set the stage for a deeper, long-term happiness as well. It’s simple. It’s not mysterious. But it is substantial:

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Distinguishing Wanting from Liking

By Emotions, Moods and Reactions, Happiness

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.

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