What You Should Know About Emotions

by Nick Pagan

Most of us spend a great deal of time just reacting to emotions. We are either attempting to evade negative emotions or hoping for positive emotions. Emotions don’t happen by accident. There is a clear mechanism at work that most of us don’t know about.

This article explains how emotions are caused and what you can do to control them. Armed with this knowledge you can eradicate bad emotions and fire up the good emotions by design.

Responding to negative emotions

Like most people I respond to negative emotions by behaving in certain ways normally designed to evade the pain. I didn’t like those behaviors because they often led to further long-term difficulties and a very unsatisfactory way of living and so I attempted to use willpower and force of character to fight against those behavioral responses.

The problem was that it never worked for long. I would find the struggle too hard and I would give up or give in and then feel lousy about myself for ‘having weak character’ and for being weak-willed.

For years and years I seemed to battle against myself in this way. I read many books on psychology, philosophy and self-help and although I sometimes found temporary relief I never fully eliminated my problems.

I couldn’t figure out why I struggled against myself and it created a lot of personal misery. One thing I knew though was that if I could eliminate the root cause of a problem then the symptoms would vanish and no response would be necessary. I used to think of emotions as the root cause problem but my breakthrough came when I realized that emotions are a symptom of another problem.

How emotions are created

I thought deeply about what mechanism causes emotions and I came to the surprising conclusion that emotions are generated simply by the difference between what you set as a desire, or expectation, for yourself and what result you actually get in reality.

For example, if you check your post box and expect to get the usual bills and instead find a letter from a long-lost friend then you’ll feel delighted. In this case you got more than you expected and that surplus creates a positive emotion.

Alternatively, if you go to your post box and get a bill from your credit card company that shows that someone has gotten hold of your details and spent thousands of dollars at your expense then you’ll feel your stomach drop and you’ll feel angry and nervous and miserable. You got a nasty surprise from what you would normally expect and that difference creates a negative emotion.

It seems blindingly obvious when it is broken down but until I worked out this mechanism I was forever reacting to negative emotions instead of controlling the things that cause the negative emotions in the first place. It became clear to me that if I wanted more balance in my life and more control over how I felt then I would have to consciously manage my desires and expectations.

Emotions are dynamic

The generation of emotions happens from moment-to-moment and so if you feel bad in the moment it is usually because you want something right now that you can’t have in this moment. When you find yourself feeling negative emotions you can now stop and ask yourself the following questions:
• “What desire do I have right now that I can’t fulfill?” Answer this question and you will know what is causing your negative emotion.
• “Can I get this desire in the very near future?” If the answer to this is no then you must accept this. Doing that will bring some instantaneous relief and allow you to adjust to your current reality.
• “Is this desire actually possible?” We often desire things that are actually impossible or highly improbable to fulfill. If we get aware of this we can give up on those desires because they just needlessly create negative emotions.
• “What could I do right now that will lead me in the direction of fulfilling my desire?” If the desire is possible then set a ’stepping stone’ desire to help get you there. Make it small, easy and very possible of fulfillment. Succeeding in a small thing, will lead to good feelings because you fulfilled a desire. This in turn will lead to a virtuous cycle of acting well and feeling good.

This solution works because it gets to the root of what causes a negative emotion. It identifies which desire is unfulfilled and then consciously allows you to either reset the desire, so that it doesn’t bug you anymore, or else to accept current frustration and define a practical way to get what you want sometime later.

The next time you become aware that you are responding to negative emotions sit down and write out the above questions and go through thinking about the answers. It takes time to develop this skill (and it is a skill). As a hint, you will find that most desires fall into the category of a goal, an expectation, a need/obligation or a belief. Given enough practice you soon get to the stage where you take much greater care over what desires you set in the first place and so you end up controlling how you feel.

Accept reality

A vital part of this whole process of analysis is to accept the real world results that you actually get. At times this will mean having to face and then give up issues of personal denial and delusion. This is not an easy thing to do and can prove very painful at times (as I well know) but it is the only way to readjust desires so that the root cause of negative emotions disappears.

You have to be very forgiving of yourself and the people around you. Without forgiveness it becomes difficult to accept what has happened and without acceptance you will continue to set up desires that you cannot fulfill and that will lead to the unending production of negative emotions.

Negative emotions are a great drain on our abilities to function well. They are so instantaneously painful that we simply react instinctively to them and seek immediate relief from them.

Unfortunately that never gets rid of the root cause of what generates those painful emotions in the first place. Simply through consciously managing your desires you get the following benefits:
• You spend less and less time feeling bad
• You spend more and more time feeling good
• You act more maturely, sensibly and responsibly
• You feel more balanced and at one with yourself
• You understand what causes all of the grief in life
• You remove confusion from your life
• You have more quality time for yourself and others
• Your cheerfulness returns because you choose your desires, not others
• You live in the moment and enjoy it
• Isn’t that what we all truly want?

Nick Pagan is the author of the blog Nick Pagan. Nick is also the author of the short and free e-book How to Operate Your Brain Perfectly.

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