Feelings
The way we’ve described emotions this week makes it sound like our internal experience should be something like the readout from an electron spectroscope. It would sound something like:
Today I learned it was raining. I felt a 4.2 on the sad scale because I wanted to play soccer, which I find rewarding. But since I have no power to change the rain, I accepted this reality, which motivated me to seek alternate reward, and planned to see a friend. When I arrived, I learned it was my friend’s birthday, and I felt ashamed because I don’t want to be rejected by this friend for not caring enough to remember their birthday. Because I felt ashamed at an intensity of 7.5, I tried to hide that I’d forgotten, and therefore lied that their present was coming in the mail.
These well-defined emotions, described as part of the story of belief, learning, reaction and action, sounds pretty foreign to many of us.
The more sensitive we are, the more we need at any given moment. Our “out of range signals” come rapidly, often overlapping and interacting with one another - leading our emotional landscape to look less like a neat spectrograph and more like a Jackson Pollock painting.
👉 Developing a nuanced palate for your emotional experiences can help you navigate the world more effectively.
This can make it hard to identify what we’re feeling, since we’re feeling so much at once, and these feelings need to be pulled apart and understood discreetly to map them onto specific needs and motivate specific actions.
Alexithymia is a term that describes the difficulty many people have in identifying and naming what emotion they are feeling. But as we pull each emotion apart – understand what each emotion is, what it’s responding to, and what it’s telling us to do, we can become as discerningly expert in emotions as a food critic is at tasting the nuances in food. Ultimately, this sensitivity can become a power, not a prison.
🤔 Reflection of the Day:
What emotion are you feeling right now?
How would you rate the intensity of the emotion on a scale from 1 to 10?
What’s the story behind the emotion?
What action is the emotion driving you to do?