Understanding Your Emotional State

Components of Emotional State

As you saw in a previous post on Emotional Wisdom, emotions exist for a reason. However, there will be times when your emotional state hinders your effectiveness, and you therefore need to know how to successfully manage your feelings. This series of articles will show you how.

BUT BE WARNED—trying to manage your emotional state without understanding how it works is like trying to diagnose a patient without ever having attended medical school. So before jumping into specific techniques for managing your emotions (which I cover in upcoming articles in this series), this article explains how you may come to find yourself in a particular emotional state.  

Put simply, your emotional state refers to how you feel. However, your feelings do not exist in isolation. Thinking, feeling and physiology are closely entwined.

Perception

Emotions are not irrational. In fact, they are typically logical reactions to something that has happened. For example, we feel sad when we have lost something of value (tangible or intangible), we feel angry when we have been treated unjustly and we feel scared when we believe something bad will happen to us in the future. Yet, it is important to realise that we do not react to events per se, but rather to our perceptions of those events. We do not just take in information through our five senses. Rather, we interpret and attach meaning to that information. Sometimes our perceptions are spot on. At other times we may find ourselves blowing things out of proportion, jumping to conclusions, believing the grass is greener on the other side, or taking things more personally than we should. Our emotional reactions are shaped by how we think about an event, not just the event itself.

Feelings & Primal Triggers

At a more primal level, emotional reactions can occur without any thought whatsoever. Our brains are wired to react to certain triggers in a particular way, such as salivating when we smell the appetizing aroma of food. These primal reactions are instinctive and occur nearly instantaneously. Researchers believe this is because they occur in parts of the brain that are responsible for emotional memory, habitualized actions and innate drives such as hunger. You take in information through your five senses, but before you get a chance to think about what you have seen, this information is quickly processed by the sub-cortical parts of your mind, triggering subconscious reactions. Some of these primal reactions are innate, such as salivating when smelling nice food. Yet some of our primal reactions have been learned though a process psychologists refer to as conditioning. This happens when you hear a special song and get a warm feeling inside, or when you see a police car and quickly look down at your speedometer with a feeling of dread. You have conditioned the more primal parts of your mind to automatically respond to those triggers in a particular way. You may have unwittingly conditioned your mind to associate certain foods or alcoholic drinks with feeling sick, so that a thought or a smell is all that it takes to turn your stomach. This process of conditioning new primal responses was first noticed by Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov. Pavlov conducted an experiment in which he rang a bell shortly before feeding a dog. The dog learned to associate the bell with food, and after repeated exposure would start to salivate upon hearing the bell even without food.

Physiology

Your physiology is also connected to your emotional state. Throughout history we have experimented with changing our emotional state through changing our physiology, be it through alcohol, drugs, mediation, exercise or even hypnosis. Chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline and endorphins have proven and distinctly different effects on our emotional state. Yet the link between your emotional state and your physiology is not purely chemical. Different emotions are associated with different physical sensations, such as:

• Heart rate
• Body temperature
• Muscle tension
• Breathing patterns

For example, when you are angry, you are literally “hot under the collar”, with heated skin temperature as well as tense facial muscles, shallow breathing  and an increased heart rate. By contrast, when you are calm, you are more likely to have a lower body temperature, a slower breathing pattern and an average heart rate.

From Knowledge to Action

Armed with an understanding of how you come to be in a partiular emotional state, you are now ready to put this knowledge to work by using three different paths to successfully managing your emotions.

Tagged as: emotion