Who is in the driver’s seat; you or your emotions?

Many of us allow our feelings to control us because we don’t believe that we have control over them. If we can’t control our thoughts and feelings, what do we really have control over? I think that one of the reasons that we do not feel as if we can control our emotions is that we don’t truly understand where they are coming from. One of the reasons that our feelings are so painful, and can be overwhelming, is that they are somewhat ambiguous. You may have never thought how a thought or an emotion “works” and how they are created, or about their physiology.

According to the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the creator of the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, (a movie I highly recommend) our emotions, just like our thoughts, are created by the brain. The brain is built of tiny nerve cells called neurons. Neurons connect to other neurons and form a neural network. When neurons connect, they create a thought, which eventually imprints in our memory. The more we think the same thought, the more we reinforce this neural connection. This is a very important concept, because this explains why it is so difficult to change how we think and, consequently, how we feel, because our thoughts are actually “hard-wired” in the brain. We can think of our thoughts as habits, and to break a habit takes time and intention. If you practice stopping or changing a thought, the neural connections become weaker.

For example, say you noticed that you see life in a pessimistic way and you want to change that view. Every time you have a pessimistic thought, you need to stop it and replace it with an optimistic one. In time, you will weaken the neural pathways associated with pessimistic thinking and reinforce optimistic thinking, making the positive view more automatic. It is like learning a new dance step. When you learn the foot work to salsa, at first the steps are hard to perform. You have to learn each step separately and then consciously think about your foot work as you dance. But you reinforce the foot work by practicing until it is almost automatic. When you then hear salsa music, you do not have to consciously remember the foot work. Your feet just move to the beat. However, when you stop dancing salsa for an extended period of time, the connections in the brain weakens because you are no longer reinforcing it. When you try to dance, having quit after a significant amount of time, you will most likely need a refresher course or be more conscious of the steps, until it becomes automatic again. This is similar to how your thoughts connect.

When we interact with the environment, our brain assesses the information at hand, and our understanding is colored by past experiences, which is largely created during our childhood, which is also addressed in a previous blog; Healing From the Past. Because we learned about ourselves and the world through our limited experiences, our perceptions are not always accurate. As we grow older, we continue to use these inaccurate paradigms and to distort our reality because we use our past experiences to try to explain our present reality. When we assess our experiences, whether internal or external, these produce thoughts which then create feelings. We continue applying our old paradigms, which recreate these feelings of fear, hate, sadness, hurt, anger, jealousy, disappointment, restfulness and so many others. These emotions come from two sources; our unconscious, which are unresolved emotions from past experiences and our feelings based on appraisals of the present. It impacts how we react to and feel about our current experiences as well as what we think and feel about ourselves and others. These emotional scars create current pain because present circumstances trigger these feelings that hurt so much. Because we carry all of these emotional scars and dysfunctional thinking into our present, until they are made conscious, addressed and processed, they impact every moment of our lives and motivate our decisions. Because how we have viewed our situations in the past, color how we view situations in the present and we are not seeing things as they truly are, which create emotional pain.

When we assess our experiences cognitively, we then have an emotional response to what is occurring at that moment. These emotions are chemicals that are designed to imprint these thoughts into our memory. These chemicals are created in the hypothalamus which is located in the brain. The brain creates a chemical that matches every emotion that we experience. When we have an emotion, the brain assembles the chemical and then releases it into the bloodstream. There is a chemical for every emotion, such as anger, fear, jealousy, and love. Every cell in our body has thousands of receptor sites, and these chemicals attach to these receptor sites, which activates the cell and changes it. Each cell is alive and has consciousness, and it craves these chemical reactions. There are receptor sites for all emotions.

By experiencing a certain emotion regularly, our cell changes in that it creates more receptor sites for that chemical, similar to how our cells change due to psychotropic drugs, such as nicotine. We then actually become addicted to our emotional experiences. If you become angry everyday, your cells will eventually crave anger. This also explains how we get addicted to other people. We get addicted to love, for example, because we enjoy the biochemical reaction we experience, which is why we go through withdrawal when the relationship ends or we are not near them for a significant amount of time. Therefore, we can look at all emotional experiences as just chemical reactions in the brain, which may help in terms of processing and dealing with our emotions. They no longer have to be these scary, ambiguous things. If we learn how to change our thoughts, we can learn how to change our feelings, which takes times and practice, but can be done with intentional living. I bet you never learned this in biology class!