No course about stress is complete without talking about emotion — because stress is, essentially, an overwhelm of emotion. If you are stressed out — you’re emotional! This week, we’re learning about what emotions are, and how we can work with difficult emotions.
Quick Quiz!
Take out a piece of paper and write down all the emotions you can think of in one minute. Go!
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Now look at your list. Next to each emotion, put a + for a “positive” emotion, a – for a “negative” emotion, and leave “neutral” ones without a sign.
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Now I’m going to make a few predictions about your list:
- You have more “negative” emotions listed than “positive” emotions. The English language has far more words for negative emotions than positive ones! So interesting, right?
- This could be because our brains have what’s called a “negativity bias” — we are primed to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones. Blame evolution, yet again, for this one — we are far more likely to survive when we are attuned to threats, and when we recognize and remember dangerous events. Those uber-chill hominids who didn’t sweat the small OR the big stuff…. well, they died and didn’t become our ancestors! As one of my teachers likes to say, we’re the descendants of the nervous worry-warts!
- You don’t have any “neutral” emotions. Unless you wrote something like “equanimity” (which is more of a mind-state than an emotion), you probably didn’t rate any emotions as neutral. Emotion researchers tell us that NO EMOTION IS NEUTRAL. Emotions are the body’s way of alerting us that something in our environment needs our attention. Every emotion has an “action tendency,” which, put simply, prompts us to either approach or avoid.
- Scan through your list again… The emotions you rated as “positive” are likely the ones that will encourage you to keep doing what you are doing, or to seek out another situation similar to the one that generated these feelings (approach). The emotions you rated as “negative” likely prompt you to avoid particular people, environments, or activities, or encourage you to transform a situation.
I use the scare-quotes around “positive” and “negative” because, as we will learn this week, ALL EMOTIONS SERVE A PURPOSE. There are no “bad” emotions; again, it’s just the body telling us to pay extra attention to something. A “negative” emotion like sadness prompts us to seek affiliation with others, while anger can move us to take action to make the world better!
A better way to characterize the “tone” or “valence” of an emotion is pleasant/unpleasant, or, as described above, approach/avoid. Emotions, put simply, guide us to approach the things that are pleasant (safe), and avoid the things that are unpleasant (dangerous).
Learn more about emotions in this introductory video:
Clarification: When I say that we may need to “let go of an idea about the self,” I am not referring to the Buddhist teaching of “no-self.” I’m speaking more from the psychological conception of self, and that there may be beliefs that we cling to about ourselves that cause stress. For example, even the thought, “I’m a great mother,” can contribute to stress if we then attach the label “great mother” to our identity. If we have a day where we yell at the kids, forget an appointment, and serve fast food for dinner, we might start to needlessly attack ourselves for not being the “great mother” we are “supposed” to be. With mindfulness, we can try to loosen our grip on this aspect of self. Can we instead just be a mother…. a person… who tries her best? Can we have compassion for ourselves and understand that each day … each moment … is a new day and a new moment and a chance to begin again?
The Subjective Emotional Present
A helpful way to tap into the subjective emotional present (as described in the video) and to detach a bit from notions of self is to think of the first moments when you wake each day. There is often a brief period of time, as you transition from sleep to wakefulness, when all you are is sensation and awareness. The chatter of the mind has not yet begun; there is perhaps stretching, moving, hearing, feeling, smelling… but there is no “I” yet. That is the type of awareness that we are referring to as the “subjective emotional present.”
It’s kind of one of those states that as soon as you realize you are in it, you are no longer in it! So don’t “try” to experience it…. just see if you notice it sometime!