Managing emotions

Emotions are a thought process that tells you how you are feeling. They are an incredibly important part of our life because it affects us the most and we spend a lot of time dealing with it. It is the brains way of telling that something is happening in you life- good or bad. It’s a feedback system. But what you do with that emotion or how you handle it is far more important than that emotion in itself.

Emotions are not the goals themselves but a means to the end. Most people commit a mistake here thinking that emotions define us. Emotions coma and go and change continuously in our lives. If our life is based on emotions then there is constant up and down, contradiction, and running around in circles in our life.

Where does emotion come from

The brain works on two mechanisms – one is that of an emotional book keeper and that of an emotional tax collector.

The emotional book keeper keeps record of all gains and losses. It is like a gain loss account of your life. You get a good pay hike it is a gain to you, you fight with your wife it is a loss to you. Similarly a cool beer on a hot day is a gain to you and your favorite football team loses is a loss to you. This internal account maintains how much you are winning or losing in life. When the emotional book keeper gives good news then you get excited and when it delivers a bad new then you are afraid. It works on the biological instinctive level where everything is either excitement or fear.

The emotional tax collector studies your gains and losses and then decides whether you need to be rewarded or reprimanded. If it decides that if you deserve the gain then you will be rewarded with happiness. If it decides that you deserve the loss then it gives you sadness. If it decides that you don’t deserve your gain then it can give you guilt and if it decides that you did not deserve the loss then it will give you anger.

So the first level is the incident in itself that sets the ball rolling and in the second level is the emotional outcome of it. The reptilian and mammalian behavior is converted to emotions in humans. These are not the only emotions but in every field of emotions the system is the same. Love is the feeling that you deserve to gain something. Hatred is the feeling when others deserve to lose something.

Managing emotions

Managing emotions does not mean that we can get rid of bad emotions and only keep the good ones. This will never happen and if we try then it will backfire. There is a reason why there are so many emotions and all have its purpose. Therefore it is all about managing the emotions without trying to subdue some and stick to the others.

Let’s take a few emotions now.

Happiness. It is the default state. When there are no negative emotions or we can say no other emotions then we are automatically happy. So when we are chasing for happiness then we are chasing an illusion. Rather we should work on how to chase away the other emotions specially the negative ones. Once we can do it then automatically we will reach the emotional state of happiness.

Sadness. Sadness is taken as emotional equivalent to failure. We get sad when we have a relationship breakup or a friend leaves us or we lose a job. Sadness is a time of self inquiry as to what is at the root of your sadness. Suppose you loved a girl with broke up with you. We consider the going of the girl as the cause of sadness. But actually it is the quality of that girl which you are missing now not the girl in itself. That’s why when we find another girl friend with similar qualities then we get over the previous girl friend. The girl was just an object but what attracted you to that girl was something much deeper and different. Similar is the case with friendship.

Anger. It happens when we feel threatened or we are not able to control something. Suppose you get slapped then you will be angry and would like to fight. But if you get slapped by some hefty body builder then you will think twice before engaging him because you are afraid of being getting beaten. So anger happens when we have no fear of losing. Similarly we may get angry when we are not able to control an aspect of life and we feel helpless about it. But anger can lead you to the path of self improvement. You can decide to join a gym to make yourself stronger or you can take steps to make yourself empowered so that you can handle situations which now seem to be beyond your control. So for anger it is important to interpret you r anger and channelize it in the right direction of self improvement.

Shame. Shame is something which prevents us from doing horrible and unpleasant things or the emotion that comes after doing these things. Shame is more of a social stigma for us. We may feel ashamed if we steal money from father’s wallet, or eve tease some girl on the road irrespective of the fact if we get caught in the act or not. It creates a feeling that you are a terrible person. Shame can make you narcissist and create a distorted view of yourself. The best thing to do in such case is to focus on helping others who are facing such issues. This will not only create a support group but also helping in normalizing your experiences as well as theirs.

I have touched upon mostly the negative ones as they are the most difficult to handle in life.