On a quiet night, sitting idle, doing nothing, I was thinking about the word ‘emotion’. As soon as this word struck my mind, the notion that followed it was they should be controlled. Then I thought do I really understand what an emotion is by the way. Soon I started searching and reading and guess what, the word that is so much into my mind started sounding a little difficult to me. After an hour of reading I managed to define this rather difficult word. Here is what I understood:
Emotion in simple words is feeling. It’s an outcome of the perceived favourability of a situation.
If you take a pause and think for a moment when do you not have an emotion? You would find it real hard to answer as we always have some emotion. While living, we always are under some situation and our minds definitely remain busy perceiving it. If we like it we get positive emotion like love, happiness, peace etc. while if we don’t like it we get negative emotions like fear, anger, sadness etc.
If you go back into your life, I am sure at some point of time somebody might have definitely asked you to control some emotion. If I make it clearer, definitely you were asked to control a negative emotion. Were you able to do that? Answer yourself.
Were you really able to control your emotion? I suspect you were.
Did that help? Certainly to others.
Did that help to you? May or may not be.
If your answer is NO then it is because in reality you never controlled your emotion. Probably you controlled the expression of your emotion. What is really needed to control the emotion is changing the perceived favourability of the situation which causes your emotion in consideration.
Simple example to quote is say “I get angry when my dad scolds me.” You get angry not because your father scolds you but because you don’t perceive that scolding as favourable for you. Probably you find somebody is attacking your freedom. If you do a minor tweak in your perception and try to redefine the favourability here, the anger would just vanish. Somebody scolding for your benefit is definitely favourable for you. Looks to be very simple but it is not actually.
What always holds us from controlling our emotion is this little tweaking.
Emotion in simple words is feeling. It’s an outcome of the perceived favourability of a situation.
If you take a pause and think for a moment when do you not have an emotion? You would find it real hard to answer as we always have some emotion. While living, we always are under some situation and our minds definitely remain busy perceiving it. If we like it we get positive emotion like love, happiness, peace etc. while if we don’t like it we get negative emotions like fear, anger, sadness etc.
If you go back into your life, I am sure at some point of time somebody might have definitely asked you to control some emotion. If I make it clearer, definitely you were asked to control a negative emotion. Were you able to do that? Answer yourself.
Were you really able to control your emotion? I suspect you were.
Did that help? Certainly to others.
Did that help to you? May or may not be.
If your answer is NO then it is because in reality you never controlled your emotion. Probably you controlled the expression of your emotion. What is really needed to control the emotion is changing the perceived favourability of the situation which causes your emotion in consideration.
Simple example to quote is say “I get angry when my dad scolds me.” You get angry not because your father scolds you but because you don’t perceive that scolding as favourable for you. Probably you find somebody is attacking your freedom. If you do a minor tweak in your perception and try to redefine the favourability here, the anger would just vanish. Somebody scolding for your benefit is definitely favourable for you. Looks to be very simple but it is not actually.
What always holds us from controlling our emotion is this little tweaking.
Controlling the expression of a -ve emotion leads to stress and later on depression that is dangerous u feel loaded when not expressed and lighter when able to..so if anything is to be controlled, its the way u looked at it..what i generally try is to zoom out the whole picture and look at it and then when it starts looking small to me I feel bigger in myself and feel confident.
ReplyDeleteWell, this is how I tweak to them..I loved this article, thanks :)
You nailed this one Ankit. Emotions are driven primarily by brain chemistry. Expression is driven by Social Grooming. The former is beyond human control (unless some one is on dope) but latter is not only controllable it also changes from people to people and cultures.
ReplyDeleteI wonder why you picked up just "Anger" as an example. If you think deep all emotions (Adoration, Affection, Awe, Amusement, Anger, Anguish, Annoyance, Anxiety, Arousal, Attraction, Caring, Compassion, Contempt, Contentment, Defeat, Dejection, Depression, Desire, Despair, Disappointment, Disgust, Ecstasy, Embarrassment, Empathy, Enthrallment, Enthusiasm, Envy, Euphoria, Excitement, Fear, Frustration, Grief, Guilt, Happiness, Hatred, Homesickness, Hope, Horror, Hostility, Humiliation, Hysteria, Infatuation, Insecurity, Insult, Irritation, Isolation, Jealousy, Loneliness, Longing, Love, Lust, Melancholy, Neglect, Optimism, Panic, Passion, Pity, Pleasure, Pride, Rage, Regret, Rejection, Remorse, Resentment, Sadness, Sentimentality, Shame, Shock, Sorrow, Spite, Suffering, Surprise, Sympathy, Tenseness, Thrill, Revenge, Worry, Zeal, Zest) have exactly the same characteristics :D