Emotions aren't good or bad; they are just information

The title of this blog post is a quote from a book by psychologist Ethan Kross, Shift: Managing Your Emotions -- So They Don't Manage You, that I've just started reading after seeing a mention of it in a recent New Scientist article about emotions.

I'll have more to say about the book after I get further into it. So far, I'm enjoying some fresh insights about emotions, which obviously are key to how we experience the world.

Everything outwardly can be going fine with us, but if we feel sad, disappointed, listless, or are under the sway of some other negative emotion, life can seem miserable from the inside even as things are going great from the outside.

Here's some passages from the book that resonated with me. I've read several other books about emotions. Kross, the director of the Emotion & Self Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, has his own appealing way of describing both what emotions are all about, and how we can manage them wisely.

Our emotions are our guides through life. They are the music and the magic, the indelible markers of our time on earth. The goal is not to run from negative emotions, or pursue only the feel-good ones, but to be able to shift: experience all of them, learn from all of them, and, when needed, move easily from one emotional state into another.

And that -- like any skill worth having -- is something that takes a bit of practice. I look at our emotional life as a priceless instrument, a work of art capable of manifesting the near divine. Something a lot like a Stradivarius violin.

We are all born with an emotional apparatus -- an instrument. But we've never been taught how to play it skillfully. How to position a bow, hold a long note, or recover when we flub a passage.

...When it comes to emotions, there are two common sources of confusion. First, despite the cultural trope depicting emotions as the antithesis of rational thought, cognition -- what we colloquially refer to as thinking -- is actually a key building block of emotion.

How we think about our circumstances shapes the emotions we experience; then those emotions reverberate to influence how we think.

For instance, if you walk into the SATs thinking you are bad at taking tests, your anxiety will be ramped up. Then you don't feel good about your performance on the test, and that becomes evidence for continuing to think that you're bad at test taking. 

In this way there's simply no pulling emotion and cognition apart. This bi-directionality of cognition and emotion allows us to modulate difficult emotions by changing the way we think. By thinking differently -- I get nervous sometimes, but I'm still a good test taker, or that jittery feeling is just excitement and anticipation, it means I'm ready -- you can work those pathways to your advantage.

A second source of confusion: the relationship between feelings and emotions. While thinking often gets pitted against emotions as if they were perpetually at war, feelings and emotions tend to be thought of as one and the same and used interchangeably. 

The truth is that feelings are simply the part of an emotional experience that we are aware of. And we are conscious of feelings in ways that we are not always conscious of in other aspects of our emotional experience (for example, an instinctive frown or shifting hormone levels). Feelings are like the "fever" of an emotional response, the conscious readout of what's going on behind the scenes.

Feelings are also a unique expression of our emotional experience, which is why no two people "feel" an emotion the same way.

...No matter how painful and overwhelming our emotions can sometimes be, it is essential to remember that we evolved our capacity to experience them for a reason: They help us navigate the world, which is why all emotions are functional, even the ones we don't like. 

...While most of us have no problem reveling in emotions such as joy or excitement, we'd generally do almost anything to avoid negative emotions such as fear or shame. From that vantage point, negative emotions are the bad guy, so it's easy to believe avoiding them altogether is the key to happiness and success. 

But the fact is that our emotions -- all of them -- are a central adaptive feature of our lives. Emotions aren't good or bad; they are just information. 

...Anxiety helps us marshal a helpful response to either approach or avoid the threat we're dealing with so we can handle it.

...Sadness slows us down physiologically in moments when we need to reflect, helping us take time to mourn a loss and shore up any remaining connections associated with that loss.

...Envy can motivate us to work harder to obtain what we want.

Regret helps us avoid making the same mistakes twice.

Guilt guides us to recognize harm we caused and prompts us to make amends.

Anger can help us respond to a threat and correct an injustice.

Fear is a response to a specific danger that sharpens our awareness and compels us to act.

And lust can -- well, let's not get into that, though it does help perpetuate the species.

Comments

[Appreciative Reader]

Yep. This amounts to the core of what Theravadin practice amounts to.

Yet this is something I personally struggle with, both intellectually and as abstract, as well as experientially. Because what it's really about isn't just managing emotions, it is basically merely witnessing them, and thereby not being driven by them: that is, in effect, going beyond them, no longer being governed by them.

The going beyond desire and aversion, and the many nuances of this, as discussed in this post: to the extent you go beyond them, to that extent you end up relinquishing the drive, the impetus, for action. If I don't desire, why then should I do a whole bunch of things, beyond merely "drawing water chopping wood"?

Hindu philosophy, or at least, ancient Indic philosophy, has a handle on this. Nishkam karma, desireless/selfless action. Except, it sounds like a bunch of bromide to me. It just says, just do it. A blind faith thing, a blindly obeying thing, a blindly pretending thata bunch of nonsense is wise thing.

After all the Buddha himself relinquished it all, didn't he? He didn't go do the selfless action thing and become a virtuous model king, as he very easily might have done, had he a mind to.

Yeah, that aspect of this I struggle with, both intellectually and also, to an extent, experientially.

[Ron E.]

Following my past reading and my own inquiry into emotions, I understand emotions as being concepts which the brain, drawing on past experiences uses to guide our actions. In other words, emotions, like any other brain activity is predictive, founded on past experience. Without past experience, we cannot know how to react to a current situation. All this activity nearly always occurs outside of our awareness.

The title of Ethan Kross’s book: - “Shift: Managing Your Emotions -- So They Don't Manage You”, points to the possibility of changing our emotional reactions to situations through awareness, thereby re-programming a different reaction to the emotion rather than the ingrained conditioned ones.

I believe it does help to understand emotions as not emanating from some fixed, primitive ‘emotion organ’ in the brain to seeing them as programmed concepts that, like all concepts, can be subject to change.