I started to write this article in the original order (Part 3 was titled "Be Individual") but I realized that I needed to explain something that I was going to talk about in part 6, so I switched the order of things.
Reread:
INTRODUCTION
PART 1 - Create Space
PART 2 - Persuade Yourself
EMOTIONS
Most people look at life with the lens that being emotional is bad and that we should try to be rational at every opportunity, but I have learned from my depression that Emotions are superior to rational thought. The problem that most people have is that they don't deal with their emotions correctly and so their emotions come across as a bad thing. If you want to be happy, you need to understand the role that emotions have, after all, Happiness is an emotion of itself!
The common consensus is that decisions made based on emotion are, more often than not, poor decisions. They are often described as irrational, hasty, not well-thought out, and carry a lot of negative connotations. Generally, people consider being "overly-emotional" to a bad thing as though the individual's judgement is clouded and that they aren't experiencing life normally. This is why people look at depression as such a bad thing.
Contrary to what everyone says, Emotions are not bad, Emotions are very positive. Happiness is one of the most positive emotions. People who are happy are said to be more efficient, make better decisions, are more in tune with reality and better contributors to their community and the world around them. Happiness is an emotion just like sadness is an emotion.
At the most basic level, I have determined 12 primary emotions: Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Guilt, Anger, Confusion, Disgust, Boredom, Loneliness, Frustration, Love, and Passion as well as Pain, Hunger, Thirst, and Fatigue, and being too Hot or too Cold. The six that I excluded from the main list are actually clues into the purpose of the other emotions. We feel hungry, thirsty or tired when our bodies need food, water or rest, and we feel hot when our bodies need to cool down or cold when our bodies need to warm up. These emotions are messages from our subconscious to our conscious prompting a response.
The human brain is a sophisticated tool for automating and condensing information and emotions are the link between the conscious and subconscious. Think of it this way, the subconscious is constantly gathering and interpreting information from our senses. Much of the information that we receive is useless on its own, but used together it creates meaning. For example, smelling smoke indoors could mean that your neighbor is holding a bonfire, or it could mean the house is on fire; seeing smoke indoors at the same time and feeling heat could mean there is a fire in the building. Your subconscious can interpret these senses and synthesize them so that you don't have to consciously think about them and then send you the message to run--but the message that your subconscious communicates to your conscious isn't the clear and concise "run", the message is generally an emotion: fear, confusion, anger, etc. The emotion you feel is what prompts you to run outside or to charge in with a fire extinguisher. Feeling confusion/curiosity could prompt you to investigate further only to realize that someone lit the fireplace and it went out leaving smoke everywhere.
We learn emotions through our experiences. Many toddlers are considered "fearless" until something happens that they don't like. As a baby we learn through mimicry and observation what happiness is when our parents show us attention and play with us. As we get older, our emotions become more sophisticated because we have more experiences to draw on and some of our experiences are emotions reacting to emotions. Think of a time where a good friend scared you--you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend.
Our modern language still has a hard time expressing emotions. The sentence above "you were scared at first, but then you might have been angry at your friend" isn't entirely accurate: you first felt fear, then you felt anger, then you attributed it to your friend. In describing what actually happened however, you might have thought you were angry at your friend, which is only partly true. I point out this distinction because it isn't universal. Some people feel fear and then they feel happy and laugh at their friend, other people feel fear and then feel sadness and cry, still others don't feel fear at all and instead feel confusion or frustration. The feeling that you are feeling isn't directed at your friend, it is triggered by your friend.
Emotions are triggered responses. Jumping back to the topic of the subconscious and conscious, your emotions aren't caused by other people, they are caused by yourself. Miles Sherts, in his book "Conscious Communcation" drove this point home to me, that we don't feel things because of other people, we feel things because of ourselves, other people just trigger those feelings in us. The reason that we feel fear is because we learned when we were young to steer clear of people or things that might do us harm. Loud noises and abrupt movements scare most people because they are generally associated in our minds with accidentally getting hurt so when your friend makes a loud noise while jumping up from behind you it triggers fear.
The reason that I would argue that emotions are superior to rational thought is that they are founded on experience--experiences that we often don't even remember--and they happen at lightning speeds. Rational thought takes time in order to come to any conclusion and we have to research and recall the experiences that are pertinent to the decision at hand.
As I mentioned earlier, in society, emotions are generally considered a bad thing. I think this is a fatal flaw of our society--one that we as a society have only recently started dealing with since the start of the millennium. Because we look at emotions as a bad thing, whenever we feel a negative emotion, we don't deal with that emotion but instead we brush it aside in order to make room for more rational thought.
On my path to permanently overcoming depression, I noticed two things I was doing in regards to my emotions:
First and foremost, I never really learned how to accurately describe my emotions--there isn't an emphasis on learning this in our society, so I never really made an attempt to learn what I was feeling. I would, and still do, feel hungry and think that I am feeling anger. I would feel loneliness and think that I was feeling sadness. I'm a very thin person by my natural genetics, so this doesn't apply to me, but I know many people who when they feel bored they think they are hungry. Before I could overcome depression, I needed to correct my interpretation of myself and my emotions. The word "depression" is such an overbearing term that it makes it unmanageable, but when you break it down into its individual components: Sadness, loneliness, fear, etc. Those emotions are manageable.
The second thing I was doing with my emotions was that I wasn't really addressing them. Part of this was because I didn't know what emotion I was feeling, and the other part was because I thought it wasn't acceptable to feel emotions and to act on those emotions and a third part of this was that I didn't know how to address my emotions. We are generally taught that if we feel anger we should put it aside because it can never lead to a good outcome; but this is an incorrect statement and only leads us to never addressing the emotion! Anger is just an emotion--the acts that people do because of it are bad, but the Anger is just an indication that you are in conflict with someone else or with yourself. You need to resolve your conflicts in order to stop feeling angry and you can't push them aside and forget about them without first addressing them.
The third ingredient to my all-natural anti-depressant is addressing your emotions. You will have to first learn what emotions you are feeling, and then learn the appropriate response for dealing with them. The next time you recognize that you feel a certain way, you will probably have to put conscious effort into determining why you feel that way. Again, remember that other people don't make you feel a certain way--our language is such that it would make us think that they do simply because the natural response is to say: so and so is making my angry--other people trigger the emotion, they don't force it upon you. Once you can determine what triggered the emotion you can address it. If your friend jumping out of a bush scared you and you were angry because of it, you could appropriately address that emotion by telling your friend that you are angry and to please not do that again.
Everyone handles their emotions differently, for some people having some room to breath (being away from others) helps them to calm down and release the emotion. For others, doing something enjoyable that takes their mind off of the emotion helps them release the emotion. Sometimes verbalizing or talking about the emotion with someone else can help you release the emotion. You may even have to try all of the above depending on what emotion you are feeling. The key here is to make a conscious effort to do these things. You want to allow yourself to feel sad, you want to allow yourself to feel angry, you want to allow yourself to feel scared, because after you have had the time to feel the emotion, (in other words to address it) you will no longer feel that emotion.
Addressing your emotions can take time. We don't always have consecutive time to address our emotions and so sometimes you might find that you can only squeeze 10 min of time here and 10 min of time there to focus on that emotion, but if you make a conscious effort to resolve the emotion and you come back to that conscious effort at every earliest opportunity, eventually you won't feel that emotion anymore. Once you no longer feel the predominant emotion, you can start focusing on doing the things that will make you feel happy.
NEXT: Part 4
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