Emotions

“Emotion is 24 times more powerful than logic!” Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (1466 – 1536)

From the depths of despair to soaring on the wings of love, both wonderful and important feelings, but what causes them, where do they come from how can my body stay the same and my feelings change?

How can I feel strong and confident in one moment, then suddenly feel worthless and insecure, or go from happy to sad, or hate to love?

As Erasmus or Rotterdam figured out many years ago, our emotions and our feelings are the prime motivators in our lives. All of your decisions are enhanced and or motivated at some level by our emotions.

From a simple physiological perspective, emotions are a result of hormone secretion in our bodies, specifically our stress hormones. Hormones are caused to be secreted by things external to us. So, something happens in our world, our body reacts physically by secreting hormones which gear up our physical body for a response. At the same time, the hormones motivate us emotionally to follow through with our physical response. In other words, we are hard wired to pay more attention to our hormones than to our logic because sometimes in a survival situation, we will have to do things that defy logic!

If you observe your world, you will notice that institutions such as political parties, advertising agencies, religious institutions, conservation lobbies, and even private clubs or institutions all use emotion to re enforce your feeling of superiority, inferiority, caring, anger and even love. It is the only way that they can by pass your reasoning logical mind and convince you to follow their ideas, even if you don’t want to!

In the past I have been writing a lot about your world view, how you see yourself in your world and how you are responding to the circumstances presented to you. If you now observe your responses and look for the underlying emotional trigger, you will be able to see two things;

First you will see what emotion is being used to trigger the response, and second, you will see what it is within you, that strength or insecurity, that is being pandered to by the trigger.

Armed with these two pieces of self awareness, you can then re assess the appropriateness of your intended response and fine tune it to your expected outcome. You will be more consciously aware of yourself in your world and will be better able to make sound decisions that positively affect you.

Ask yourself;

 How am I feeling now?

What is that feeling?

Where does it come from?

What result do I want?