.A Basic Skill We Should Have Learned as Kids
A Basic Skill We Should Have Learned as Kids
By David Cain of Raptitude
The phrase “Don’t get emotional” implies that we normally aren’t.
Most of our news headlines can be interpreted as emotional responses gone overboard, becoming crime, scandal, corruption, greed, and bad policy.
The fact that these reactions are newsworthy seems to reinforce the idea that emotions are sporadic and exceptional, little whirlwinds that appear around significant events, making the odd day or week wonderful or awful.
But if you pay attention to your emotions as you read these headlines, it becomes obvious that even in our most mundane moments — reading the paper on a Monday morning — we are always feeling some way or another. Even a casual glance at a newspaper will begin to stir up familiar feelings like fear, amazement, disgust, admiration or annoyance. We’re never really in “neutral.”
We’re living through emotional reactions all day long, even to events as tiny as hearing a text message arrive, or noticing a fly in the room.
Our emotions aren’t always overwhelming us, but they are always affecting us, coloring our perceptions and opinions about ourselves and our world.
This is the “fish in water” effect at work — because we are immersed in our emotions’ effects every moment of our lives, we tend to talk about them only when they’re exceptionally strong.
Even when it’s not obvious, though, emotions are the force behind almost everything we do. They’re the only reason our experiences matter at all. If every event triggered the same emotion, it wouldn’t matter to us whether we got out of bed or not, whether we were sick or healthy, or whether we thrived or starved.
All of our values and morals, all of the meaning we perceive in life, stem from our knowledge that there are some very different ways a person can feel.
Wandering In Dark Places Without A Map
What might be surprising is that there aren’t that many basic emotions, and that virtually all of us have experienced every one of them, many times.
Each one has fairly predictable effects on us, and these effects are responsible for a huge proportion of our quality of life: whether we live a life of confidence or worry, whether we’re good with people or bad with people, or whether we believe the world is a good place or a vile place.
Yet we don’t make much of a point of understanding and adjusting for our emotional states. We even overlook the simple fact that we’re always in the middle of one, however subtle.
For example, if you’re aware that fear is prominent in you right now, you can remind yourself that the future is likely going to be easier than it currently seems, regardless of how strongly you might feel your impending doom.
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