Emotions: Coloring our experiences

Feelings as a general category translate from thoughts to actions by adding “color” or valence to motivate what to do, and intensity to understand how important it is to do it — all with the aim of maximizing reward and minimizing punishment.

In the pages that follow, we’ll discuss some common, basic emotions that you may experience. Some people are able to identify and label their emotions with great granularity. Others may experience emotions in a more blunt way — they feel “stressed” or “not stressed”, making it hard to distinguish between different specific types of feelings.

At the end of the day, our level of emotional granularity is less important than being able to tell a story about what we are feeling and why.

All feelings are valid — whatever you’re experiencing is your experience. Often we find ourselves invalidating our own emotional states: “I’m not angry” (we say through gritted teeth). Or others invalidate our emotions: “Don’t be sad” (said with best intentions, but not helpful when we are, in fact, sad). Whatever you’re feeling…it’s real and it must be reckoned with.

Not all feelings are justified, however. If someone uses your coffee mug in the kitchen, you certainly may be miffed, but if you reacted by screaming for hours and breaking all the other mugs in the kitchen, this is probably not a justified response.

Emotional reactions can be categorized by type, intensity and duration. While the emotion type here (anger or frustration) may make sense, your average bystander might find the intensity (rage vs. miffed) and the duration (all day vs. a few minutes) to be unjustified given the situation. Nevertheless, the rage is valid — there’s not sense in denying or ignoring that it’s the present feeling. Only once we validate that the rage is indeed there, and try to tell a story around it, can we start to engage with it effectively.

Next we’ll discuss our some of most basic emotions and the actions they motivate.