Understanding Emotions

Understanding Emotions

Emotions are central to our human experience, influencing our thoughts, behaviors, and interactions. They guide us toward our goals and reflect our internal states. Yet, understanding and managing emotions is often challenging. This section presents strategies for emotion regulation, drawing on contemporary research and practical experience.

Defining Emotions

Emotions are subjective internal feelings generated by our perceptions and interpretations of life events. Their intensity and duration vary, and they can be triggered by thoughts, interactions, memories, or specific situations. Emotions, like thoughts, can be neutral or move us in positive or negative directions.

Emotions are not just fleeting feelings; they are complex sensations, shaped by personal experiences, beliefs, and contexts. The brain and nervous system automatically respond to environmental triggers, creating patterns of emotional reactivity that evolve over time. Understanding these processes can offer valuable insights and help improve coping skills.

Automatic Reactions

Primary emotions—including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust—have traditionally been viewed as universal. Recent research, however, questions whether emotions are truly universal, suggesting instead that each person constructs emotions through a unique interplay of brain, body, culture, and context, as described by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett in “How Emotions Are Made.”

Emotional Valence

A key concept surrounding emotions is valence—the subjective positive or negative value an individual assigns to an object or situation. Valence is a measure of emotional responses to stimuli and influences attitudes, behaviors, and decisions. These responses trigger the release of endorphins, hormones, and neurotransmitters—powerful chemicals that shape our emotional reactions

Remember, however, that everyone reacts differently, so emotions that may be perceived as positive for one person may not have the same effect on another.   Emotions are not inherently good or bad; they are simply reactions. Becoming aware of the nuances in our emotions gives us greater agency in managing them

A fundamental rule of neuroscience is: “What you practice becomes stronger.” Repeatedly experiencing an emotion strengthens it, much like repeatedly performing a behavior strengthens it. This principle underscores the importance of learning to regulate emotions before they take control of us.

There are hundreds of emotions, often built from combinations of more elemental emotions. The emotions listed below are inspired by Brené Brown’s "Atlas of the Heart," which defines some of the more common emotions and provides a language to discuss emotional states. Everyone experiences and describes emotions differently; the list is not exhaustive, but it serves as a good starting point for understanding the common emotions most of us experience.

Individual Differences

Primary Emotions

What You Practice Grows Stronger

As you scroll through the different emotions, notice how each one moves you positively or negatively or somewhere in between. Everyone experiences different emotions, and each emotion is different. The point of this exercise is to familiarize you with the emotions you experience most often.

The following list of emotions is not exhaustive, but noticing and becoming more aware of these common emotions can help highlight subtle differences among them. Noticing the emotions you experience most often can help you manage challenging emotions and appreciate helpful ones. Accurately identifying your feelings at any moment also supports well-being.

Emotions with a More Positive Valence

Love: Love is often considered the central and most helpful emotion of the heart. Some debate whether it is an emotion or a mindset comprised of multiple positive emotions directed toward a particular person. Love involves authenticity and connection, and it grows when reciprocated. It is nurtured through trust, risk, respect, kindness, and commitment.

Joy: Perhaps the most vulnerable of all human emotions, it brings expansion and deep connection. It often arises unexpectedly and is linked to gratitude, forming a positive spiral. Expressing joy can be challenging to articulate in American culture.

Happiness: Happiness is influenced more by heredity than many realize. It relates to the pleasure derived from external circumstances and is generally more intense but less lasting than joy, providing positive yet less profound experiences.

Gratitude: Gratitude is closely related to joy and contentment, focused on appreciating what brings meaning and connection. Daily gratitude practice offers significant benefits for the mind and body.

Contentment: Contentment involves feeling that one has enough and is satisfied. It is not about settling, but about recognizing sufficiency, fostering appreciation and completeness, reducing stress, and promoting heart health.

Compassion: Compassion is an active process that involves awareness of and acceptance of others’ struggles or suffering, and acts of kindness. It means understanding pain without trying to fix it, offering presence rather than solutions.

Empathy: The willingness to be present with another’s suffering, to understand their experience, and to respond nonjudgmentally. Emotional empathy synchronizes bodily states, while cognitive empathy involves understanding another’s perspective without sharing their emotional experience.

Surprise: A reaction to unexpected events, often involving astonishment and a blend of emotions such as joy, fear, or excitement.

Excitement: Intense enthusiasm for current or upcoming events, felt as heightened physical energy.

Vulnerability: Vulnerability involves uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure in situations such as sharing feelings or taking the initiative.

Humility: Humility is a realistic appreciation of one’s strengths and weaknesses, openness to learning, and willingness to adjust, fostering grounded confidence.

Emotions with a More Neutral Valence

Pride: a feeling of pleasure derived from accomplishments that fosters self-worth and is sometimes shared with others. Negative pride, or hubris—an inflated sense of self-worth—is different from authentic pride.

Guilt: Guilt arises from failing to meet personal standards, prompting corrective actions when actions conflict with values.

Overwhelm: Overwhelm happens when an emotional experience exceeds one’s ability to process or cope.

Flooding: Feeling overwhelmed during conflict, often leading to a shutdown or panic; resolution is difficult until calm is restored.

Regret: Regret is the discomfort from believing an undesired outcome resulted from one’s own decisions or actions.Discouragement: Discouragement follows unmet expectations, reducing motivation and enthusiasm.

Anger: Anger is an intense reaction to perceived wrongs or unfairness that motivates action. It may mask other emotions or unmet needs. Anger can be helpful and motivational when expressed in balanced ways or destructive and damaging if not kept in check.

Emotions with a More Negative Valence

Stress: When demands exceed coping resources, we experience stress, which often combines multiple emotional elements.

Anxiety: Anxiety is future-oriented mental pressure, longer-lasting than stress, with strong physiological effects.

Resentment: A combination of frustration, anger, and a sense of unfairness.

Disappointment: Feeling hurt from unmet expectations, with intensity tied to the level of expectation.

Embarrassment: A feeling of discomfort when one is exposed or deviates from social norms.

Envy: Envy is the desire for something another person possesses, often accompanied by hostility.

Jealousy: a thought-based reaction characterized by a fear of losing a valued relationship or attention.

Sympathy: Feeling sorry for someone from a distance, which can hinder connection. With empathy, you connect with the person; with sympathy, you distance yourself while still feeling compassion.

Shame: Shame is feeling unworthy or unlovable, often driven by secrecy, silence, and judgment. Empathy and self-compassion are antidotes.

Hubris: Hubris is an inflated sense of ability, seeking dominance, and is linked to narcissism.

Hopelessness: Hopelessness arises when change feels impossible, related to self-blame and negative thought patterns.

Fear: A present-oriented response to perceived threat, triggering fight, flight, or freeze.

Hate: A complex mix of emotions, typically toward distant others or groups, that fosters a false sense of belonging or superiority. Possibly combinations of pain, suffering, envy, resentment, disappointment, or embarrassment

Contempt: Demeaning anger, often a predictor of relational breakdown

Assessing how often you experience each of these emotions and their perceived helpfulness can contribute to emotional health.   After you have examined your emotions, you might want to identify strategies to strengthen the emotions that help you feel more peace and equanimity, a feeling that is good for your soul and your CNS (Central Nervous System).

Expanding out to include more emotions, notice how many tend to be more negative than positive, but we can change that.

Picture: An emotion wheel showing more possible emotions

How Do We Develop Emotions?

Emotions are influenced by a complex interplay of factors, including genetics, life experiences, brain chemistry and development, hormones, health, sleep, fatigue, diet, trauma, social connections, and personal history. All these factors and many more interact to shape our unique emotional experiences.

Energy moves through the body and brain, and emotions are internal fluctuations of this energy. When you become aware of and connect with your unchanging essence, you can free yourself from unhelpful emotions that arise and pass throughout life.

Feelings are sensory information, while emotions are more like the meanings we assign to these sensations. Accepting and processing feelings allows them to pass, while rumination can keep them alive. Research suggests that the life cycle of a feeling is typically about 90 seconds, but rumination can prolong emotions for much longer.

Our body’s changing chemistry—endorphins, neurotransmitters, hormones—shapes how we feel, and it’s normal to experience emotional ups and downs.

Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation is a lifelong journey that requires practice and a willingness to adopt new behaviors and let go of old, unhealthy patterns. The TEACH strategies and exercises will help you navigate your emotions more effectively, fostering greater well-being and emotional resilience. As you embark on this exploration, remember that powerful emotions are not unmanageable; with the right strategies, you can harness their energy and allow them to enrich your life.

A  fundamental principle of brain science states: "Whatever you practice grows stronger." This means that if you consistently engage in strategies that promote positive emotions, you can gradually shift your overall happiness set point toward a more positive overall mood. You will move up and down from there, but you should return to that set point after adjusting to life's ups and downs. Along the way, you learn to ride the waves without panicking when things are not going well.

According to Dr. Feldman, emotions emerge in response to life events as we interpret and assign meaning to our experiences. Our thoughts, memories, and perceptions can significantly influence the state of our nervous system, affecting the chemical processes occurring within us at any given moment. In turn, these bodily changes affect our thoughts and emotional experiences as the brain attempts to make sense of and predict what is happening. The brain is constantly attempting to regulate and maintain a balance. This process is our energy in motion, or emotions. The narratives we develop around these changes play a significant role in shaping the emotions we experience.

Our nervous system is shaped over time by the environment in which we live. As we grow, perceptual systems develop, enabling us to adjust and adapt to the challenges in our environment. Culturally inherited knowledge facilitates this adaptation. As time passes, we acquire more knowledge and automatically encode important details in memory. This helps us grow and survive future challenges. When something challenging happens, the brain automatically predicts the ‘best response’ based on the sensory information available in the moment and past relevant memories. This creates a problem of prediction error, meaning that the brain is using current sensory information and old memories to quickly and automatically orchestrate a response. In many situations, this must happen instantly for us to survive a threat. Frequently, the brain’s prediction is wrong because it is based on memories that may not be pertinent to the current situation, resulting in limited information and uncertainty. This can lead to an unskillful response in that situation, along with unhealthy emotions and thoughts. When this occurs, we try to make sense of what happened; however, by the time we are consciously aware of how we reacted, our body has already responded biologically to the situation. We then tell a story and make meaning out of the experience, applying labels to familiar reactions, which, according to Dr. Feldman, is how we create different emotions.

This is a complex and challenging theory about emotions, but it is grounded in scientific knowledge about how the brain functions. It solves many problems and helps us understand how our body responds emotionally. Some theories suggest that emotions have an enduring identity, like anxiety, that determines how we respond emotionally. This suggests a specific area in the brain that consistently activates when we experience an emotion, but this does not align with current knowledge. Many things are happening inside, as we undergo biological changes from moment to moment. According to Dr. Feldman, the brain evaluates current sensory input and uses past relevant memories to generate a response automatically.  This is fundamentally how the brain works. And it gives great hope because it means that by understanding how our system works, we can develop control over our emotions.

We can do this by practicing skills that create new memories in triggering situations. This is how we reprogram the brain to automatically associate new helpful information with a given situation, thereby changing the brain’s prediction of our best option in that situation. This will reduce prediction error, a primary cause of unhealthy reactions and a significant contributor to human suffering.

This explains why some people think they cannot control an emotion like anger, for example. People who get angry often say that it happens before they can get a grip, or they cannot control their anger, or they feel like a victim of this emotion that somehow controls them. They are correct in that it usually happens quickly and automatically; however, if unhealthy anger is created by prediction error, they can reprogram their brain by noticing their response style and consciously trying different responses to change the brain’s algorithm in response to their triggers. They are not being controlled by an underlying condition of anger; automatic and unskillful responses to their environment have programmed them to respond this way. They can change their environment and their mindset and learn new ways to respond to their triggers.

By viewing themselves as helpless victims of anger, they program more prediction error into their brains, and as a result, they cannot predict alternative, healthy responses due to the meaning they attribute to these experiences. This is the problem of seeing yourself as the victim of anger (or any other emotion) as a trait or condition that you cannot control. In the angry scenario, the brain predicts that they should yell, fight, or hit. This is often reinforced by secondary gain, such as gaining the upper hand or when people back off (based on memories and experiences). Hence, angry behavior occurs; it happens by default because their brain is programmed this way in certain contexts, and they exhibit behaviors that may be maladaptive and abusive toward others. If you don’t think you can change, you won’t. However, this does not mean that they cannot control themselves; they have agency over the meaning they make of these situations, and they can train their brain to consider alternative responses. By moving out of the victim role and accepting responsibility for their actions, they can cultivate new, healthier emotions. This newfound freedom enables the release of fears, desires, worries, and any other obstacles that may be holding a person back from fully enjoying life.

According to this theory, you can assign a different meaning, remember differently, or expose yourself to triggers while maintaining control and thereby change your brain’s future predictions accordingly. You can invest in exposing yourself to new ideas to gain different perspectives on past and current experiences. You can practice new skills, such as accepting responsibility for your actions, developing a mindset of agency, increasing gratitude and appreciation for the good things in life, and cultivating self-compassion.  You can learn to forgive yourself for things you legitimately cannot control.  You can gradually expose yourself to stressors you need to overcome.  You can learn how to manage stress more effectively, be more present with loved ones, or become more optimistic. These skills alter the automatic predictions your brain makes in any situation and expand the range of possibilities your brain generates when faced with challenging situations. This is the essence of ‘mindfulness’, a series of skills that help you lower stress and become less reactive, allowing you to ‘drop into the plane of infinite possibilities’ (Dr. Daniel Seagle) and shape how your autonomic nervous system responds to challenging situations.  

When you create positive daily intentions, you make healthier predictions and minimize prediction error, allowing you to have more control rather than being controlled by past events.  We are meaning makers, interpreting the signals that enter the brain in relation to memories. You are at least partially in control of the meaning that is made of your experiences in life, and therefore, to some degree, responsible. You control the narrative even though you cannot control many of the internal events and the automatic reactions of your system. Awareness of this process helps you realize that you have more control, more agency than you might think or want to admit. This is the beauty of the theory that we create our own emotions.

This means that happiness, joy, and well-being are not a destination that fortunate people magically arrive at one day when the stars align. Happiness and emotional stability are available to everyone; you don’t need anything to find them, and the playing field is level, even though some individuals face more challenging circumstances than others. When it comes to happiness, nature seems to have a sense of humor; as elusive as it is, to a degree, it is there for anyone, and it doesn’t require anything outside of ourselves. Happiness and joy are emotions that we cultivate through the tiny habits that we practice each day.

How Emotions Take Control

Many factors influence emotions, such as genetics, brain chemistry, hormones, physical health, sleep, fatigue, hunger, diet, exercise, trauma, the people around us, living conditions, levels of connection and support from others, and our unique history. All of these and many other factors interact, and everyone’s experience in life is different. However, we are all similar, and the chemistry and neurology we experience inside can be understood separately from the various ways these systems are triggered.

Emotions Are Changes In Energy

We all exist as a form of energy; when we feel emotions about something, our energy begins to move. Energy exists in the body and the brain, but it can move outward into the environment where it is shared with others. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. We all have a certain energy, a fact that does not change. Yet, we have constantly changing emotional experiences. When we get in touch with that which never changes, the essence or energy that is us, we can begin to look at and free ourselves from the thoughts and experiences that hold us back or create conflict. This freedom allows us to let go of fears, desires, worries, or whatever is holding us back from enjoying life. Emotions go up and down, all around. Still, they are not us; they are natural internal fluctuations of our energy in motion.

Your body constantly experiences a complex cocktail of endorphins, neuromodulators, neurotransmitters, hormones, and pheromones that powerfully influence your subjective experience or how you” feel “at any time. Your body chemistry constantly changes, so many things can throw you out of balance. It is expected to experience ups and downs, and it is essential to learn to ride the waves without panicking when things do not feel right.

Learn To Ride the Waves