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Traversing Our Gradients of Emotions: Why We Need to Greet All Feelings As Friends
“We cannot selectively numb emotions. When we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.”
Brené Brown
By Dr. Kate Truitt
As humans, we are naturally moving in and out of different brainwave states every day, and much of that is driven by emotions. This is a sign of a healthily functioning brain. As courage and vulnerability authority Brené Brown alludes to in the quote above, there is a good argument to be made for intentionally experiencing different emotions, whether you might consider them to be “good” or “bad.”
Of course, you don’t want to be angry or frightened or insulted or ashamed all day. On the other hand, I’d also like to challenge you to consider that you don’t want to be happy or calm or delighted or content every second of the day either—in fact, and this may come as a shock, that can actually be downright dangerous to your health and safety. I’ll explain why that is in this article and give you some tools that can help you “feel all the feels” to help you grow and make your brain resilient.
LET’S TALK ABOUT EMOTIONS
The hundreds of emotions we are capable of experiencing cross a wide spectrum from the exhilarating to the exhausting, and from the wonderful to the absolutely awful. They are always out there waiting in the wings to visit us, and they do so with astonishing regularity. Research shows that we typically experience 35 to 50 emotions as we go through each day. That’s a lot of feelings, and sometimes they can be a lot to handle, but experiencing them is O.K. It’s when we try to deny or avoid them that we run into trouble and miss opportunities for change and growth.
Notice that I used emotions and feelings there interchangeably because all of us do, but the neuroscientist in me needs to point out the distinction: Emotions are physical reactions activated by hormones and neurotransmitters released by your brain, while feelings are your conscious experience of those emotional reactions. The difference is subtle, but it will become clearer as you read on.
As you can see from the image below, there are wide gradients of emotions and each of them is important. It is vital to our resilience in life that we learn how to distinguish between them so we can both traverse and navigate them. There is an important distinction in these two terms as well that I need to point out, because to traverse is to travel across, often under difficult conditions, while to navigate is to plan, control and record your progress on a journey—to follow a planned course. You want to empower yourself to do both.
Becoming Aware of Your Emotional States
As your first exercise in this article I would like to invite you to start writing down four to six emotions you’re feeling each day. You can use the wheel above for guidance or create your own names for these feeling states. As you are identifying those feelings, move into a deeper relationship with them by attending to your both your mind and body, inviting them to share with you what each of those feeling states look and feel like. The larger your gradient of emotional language is, the greater your capacity for resilience and self-awareness.
Many people want to avoid difficult emotions because they feel “stressful.” It is important to be aware that all emotions are stressful, whether they are considered positive or negative. You might be surprised by that statement, but it’s a fact. Remember, emotions are bodily reactions, and all bodily reactions involve stress. Do you ever remember a time laughing so hard that your eyes became filled with tears and your belly hurt? Experiences such as these reflect the stress your brain is going through even while you are having a great time. The same thing happens when you experience hard emotions, but in order to heal, grow and get to a place where you are thriving, you need to confront some scary emotions, and you must do if purposefully.
UNDERSTANDING THE METHOD BEHIND THE MADNESS OF STRONG EMOTIONS
First, let’s look at what happens in the brain when we come up against hard emotions. By providing the ability to learn from our mistakes, the frontal lobe, or prefrontal cortex—the higher, “thinking” part of our brain—has been crucial to our survival and evolution as a species, but the reactive or troubling emotional responses that often get in your way are a consequence of the frontal lobe not fully participating in the present moment. To get past this, you need to learn to appreciate what your primal and survival-oriented brain is doing, how it is interacting with your life—in effect, what the emotional brain is causing you to do that is separate from what your logical, grounded self would choose to do.
If the amygdala (which we call “Amy”) in your survival brain senses a threat and starts managing the data-processing sequence, then she can actually start to shut down your prefrontal cortex. That’s because Amy, whose highest purpose is to ensure our survival, has the priority in that information processing sequence. Literally, she gets there a split second before the thinking brain has the opportunity to weigh in, judging the level of threat.
Blink your eyes.
Guess what? Four times faster than your awareness of that eye blink, your survival brain, empowered by the amygdala, is already assessing for the level of threat, and Amy decides how much she is going to involve your thinking brain in how you’re going to react.
For simplicity, look at it this way: if Amy’s attention is turned up 40 percent, our prefrontal cortex is functioning at 60 percent. If Amy is at 80 percent, the prefrontal cortex is only 20 percent functional. If you have ever had an emotional outburst or overreaction and a tiny voice is whispering in the back of your mind, Why in the heck am I doing this?! you are experiencing the effect of Amy taking charge.
This is why we need to move into that deeper relationship our emotions, rather than denying or avoiding them. Remember, when Amy starts sending you data it’s because she thinks your safety is threatened. If you continually ignore Amy she will get louder and louder. That’s why you need to learn how to befriend your feelings and grow stronger together.
INVITING ALL EMOTIONS TO BECOME A PART OF YOUR DAILY LIFE
The most important thing to keep in mind in the process of greeting all feelings as friends is that you have the potential to rise above hard emotions and that you have control over creating your own experience of your own world. This is part of what we call “healing in your hands.” It is essential for us to give credence to the emotions our mind and body are experiencing, so we can enhance our opportunity to use them as guiding points of wisdom for the future.
If you have trouble imagining how this works, I invite you to watch and join in on the second video in the sidebar of this article titled, “A Self-Havening Guided Meditation for Greeting all Feelings as Friends.” In this exercise you invite your emotions to become a part of your daily experiences, empowering you to identify when a strong emotion arises, and create a deeper relationship with these feelings or felt senses. The goal is to learn to change your experience of strong emotions from seeing them not as challenges, but rather as opportunities for wisdom and growth through their presence.
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