Mindfulness and Emotions April 7th

 

To understand emotions today we gonna take a deeper look at the biology of emotions. Knowing where they are coming from and what they actually give us a deeper understanding to also deal with them.

Emotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, 

prompting automatic reactive behavior that has been adapted through evolution as a survival mechanism to meet a survival need, and we share those basic emotions with animals. Research in rats and mice shows that just like us their behavior is steered by

emotion.

Take a look here for an in-depth look into the limbic system related to our emotions.

When you break it down simply: emotions are energy, energy in motion, e-motion. 

This energy pulses through your body constantly even when you are not aware of it. 

The Kindness Club: Breaking the Spell of Negative Emotions

Today we enjoyed a video called, "Breaking the Spell of Negative Emotions," by Sam Harris.  Anna has been talking to us about thoughts and mindfulness recently, and this fit nicely into that program.  

Sam Harris is a well-known author with a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA. He has practiced meditation for more than 30 years and has studied with many Tibetan, Indian, Burmese, and Western meditation teachers, both in the United States and abroad.

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Kindness Club: Breaking Addiction to Negative Thinking

 Today at Kindness Club we enjoyed a talk from Eckhart Tolle about breaking addiction to negative thinking.  Tolle tells us that our brains become trained to feel rewarded by negative thinking and that even when there is nothing "wrong" in our worlds, we still have a tendency to seek out the negative.  Great video, only 14 minutes long, and Eckhart is lovely, funny and gentle as always. 

Mindful Thoughts: Emotions pt4

Today our pt4 of Emotions, and we will take a closer look on

how Mindfulness helps us to deal with negative emotions and the sensations and pain they cause in our body

Yesterday I shared how we can stop reacting when emotion is triggered. 

The 3 step process:

 A stimulus

 the stimulus sparks an emotion

 and the emotion sparks a reaction

 

How Mindfulness adds another step to this process:

Instead of stimulus-emotion-reaction,

you have stimulus-emotion-exploration-choice. 

When you are reacting, maybe sometimes it works out well for you, 

most of the time it does not. 

Reactions are almost entirely out of ego. 

Choices are almost entirely out of consciousness. 

Example:

If one of you sent me a rude im now and said:

Dude, shut up with your nonsense

It would spark in me: 

anger, frustration, rage, that is the emotion

I can eject him/her, ban him/her and answer the im in rage, 

look what I can do teehee, that is a reaction

It is the egoistic structure of processing emotion

Now being Mindful

I will still feel the emotion, the anger, the rage etc

But I go in exploration: This is an emotion, it is anger, it is rage, I do not like those comments

that is pretty disrespectful 

recognize and make a decision 

So I witness the emotion, and then I get to make a conscious choice

I can still ban him and answer him, but it was not a reaction, it was a conscious choice.

Now pay attention to the fact I accepted the emotion of anger and rage

I did not push it away as oh bad emotion go away

I accepted the anger

I explored it

I labeled it 

and then made a choice

Does it make me feel better to ban him? Does it make my life better? Will it stop him from making bad comments?

I have the power and the freedom to make a choice.

Being Mindful, you still feel the emotion, but you go in exploration:

you witness the emotion, recognize it and make a conscious choice how to react. 

You explore the outcomes of any reaction and feel the power and freedom to make a choice.

Mindfulness does not mean you ignore your emotions, hoping they go away, emotions are energy, they stay and keep building.

Like a rubber band you keep pulling and pulling.

They stay until given attention.

This is why some people seem to be wound up tight, they are literally filled with tight rubber bands of emotions.

Any situation can activate them and try to come out.

This is how emotions get stuck in you, you walk around unhappy, 

not confident and unexpressed, you lack the life that you truly desire

because these emotional blockages hold you in reactive old models.

We can numb this old pain with maladaptive behavior like alcohol, drugs, medicines, being a workaholic, 

excessive sports and sex addiction, anything to not have to feel it 

and in the end at certain moments they will erupt and demand your attention.

Mindfulness means you accept emotions.  Every time you have an emotional reaction, 

you need to accept it and explore it. 

Put yourself inside it and even though it feels bad, 

bring your loving awareness into it. 

Let that emotion know it is OK to be expressed. 

"I am here to listen." You invite it to speak. 

Invite it to express itself. You are there to witness it, 

to feel it and to get the message that you have ignored 

so many times before. 

Important to explore the emotion is to de-attach it from the event that caused the emotion or 

the thought of the event, like we did yesterday in the emotion, we shush the mind a explore what we really feel with our body

For example: your relationship ended

Grief, anger, frustration or any emotion is always going to materialize in your body as a FEELING. 

In this case as pain

You feel this pain in your chest, your heart, your head is filled with questions why and what ifs

you blame him, her, yourself, others

you do not want to feel this way

you play a movie of the past in your head while being overwhelmed by emotions like grief, anger, frustration, humiliation 

and more.

the future looks like a big black hole of loneliness

you feel completely alone

Out of these emotions comes reaction: 

you can beg them to come back even if it is not good for you

you can stalk them 

you can scratch their car out of anger

or you can eat a lot of ice cream

and some of you will do nothing and fight the emotions

some of you will scream in agony I can't take this, this is too much

In Mindfulness you will separate the event of the break up from the emotion pain and grief

and focus only on the emotion

explore it without judgment

and accept it as an important message 

witness the impermanence of an emotion

and how it changes

In our universe nothing is permanent, energy changes shape and so do these emotions

Accepting and explore the negative emotions that overwhelm you

and recognize where they reside inside you 

is one of the most powerful tools of Mindfulness

because it means you will end a lot of suffering for yourself

Just letting them be as they are without trying to change them in any way. 

In mindfulness acceptance is a very important cornerstone. When you are able to tolerate and 

accept difficult emotions you have more energy to focus on 

effective strategies that actually help you to manage the problem causing the emotions

You learn and therefor become free to make a choice

and bring your life forward without getting stuck in the emotion

Mindful Thought: Emotions pt3

Today we explore more what emotions are and how they steer our reactions and our life. 

Let's take a look at the evolution of our emotional programming and processing.

Emotional competence is a developmental process that has 3 components: 1) emotion expression; 2) emotion knowledge; and 3) emotion regulation As we grow up we go through different levels of cognitive ability.:

As a newborn baby we are not aware we exist, emotions are purely based on survival, to influence our caregivers and surroundings.

Often you can see on a baby's face how nature trains the right muscles to communicate the emotions they will need to express themselves later in life.

Around 2 years old, the magic happens, the emerging of the emotional self separate from the parents or caregiver, 

our emotions are fully erupting and tantrums prove that, 

our emotions are no longer a mean of survival, 

still we  are not not fully conscious yes.

This happens when we are approximately 3 years old, we now have a conceptual self, a sense of identity. 

We are fully conscious and this starts to blossom between 3 and 6 years old. Here language is the concept, the noise we make to communicate

with others, we label our surroundings and the world around us starts to make sense. 

Emotions are now triggered by stimulus outside our self with an immediate reaction. 

Smile, cry... 

Between 6 and 9 years old we reach what we call concrete consciousness,  we start to learn the rules about governable concept. 

We learn to adapt and to accept the ways of the home, school and the society we live in, 

we are taught to control our emotions, to hide them if needed and we become aware of the emotions we can evoke in others. 

Only in our teenage years we make an attempt to go beyond the 

rules, teenage conflict is a developmental stage, a way of testing the rules. 

This will bubble on for a few years and is almost always suppressed by our parents or caregivers.

It is a period of deep and strong emotions: our body changes, hormonal changes, conflicts with authority and first love.

The transverse of our teen years fades and we go back into concrete consciousness, we follow the rules, our life become stereotypical, 

most of us do not question the rules, some of us are not even aware of them. 

This is the stage where we stay in for the rest of our life. At least most of us ☺

Here we have covered everything of 2 of the components, expression and knowledge, now about emotion regulating

The message of our emotions is strong, so it is very important 

to listen...

It is also important to be able to control them where needed.

And here we arrive at an important step for our well being.

Why is it so hard to control our emotions?

Let's look at an example:

You are 3 years old and there is a cookie jar on the table.

Your mind goes in a state of wanting.

You reach for the cookie and your mom says no, you can not have it

The feeling of wanting something and not being able to have it is hard to deal with

As a child this feeling is very confronting and you do not have the cognitive ability yet to think about it logically.

You do not understand that the cookie is not the best nutrition at this moment.

You explode into emotion as an immediate reaction

What you see here is a 3 step process:

 A stimulus

 the stimulus sparks an emotion

 and the emotion sparks a reaction

 

 Stimulus: Cookie, I want it but I can not have it

 Emotion: Frustration, anger, sadness

 Reaction: Crying and screaming

 

Sadly that is how most of us continue to operate for the rest of our lives and if you are emotionally reactive you will 

feel a lot of pain and you will cause a lot of pain 

 

Take a look at the world around us, there is many things that are quit negative, 

many people are operating from a very negative place, 

there is really hard circumstances in many people's life, in many places.

Life is suffering for most of humans on earth.

All those things are going to cause you emotional reactions if you do not understand the conscious next 

level of this process. That's the reactive model of emotional processing.

I have good news :D

This is where mindfulness comes into place...

Mindfulness adds a step to the processing of emotions and it is not terribly difficult

CHOICE

Instead of stimulus-emotion-reaction,

you have stimulus-emotion-exploration-choice. 

Choices are powerful. Choices are made with consciousness in a way 

that brings you FORWARD in life 

regardless if it's a hard choice, a negative situation or a positive situation. 

It doesn't matter.

When you are making a choice, 

you are ALWAYS moving forward. 

When you are reacting, maybe sometimes it works out well for you, 

most of the time it does not. 

Reactions are almost entirely out of ego. 

Choices are almost entirely out of consciousness and being aware.

Controlling and/or regulating your emotions is very important part of being able to live a happy life.

 

 And here I can add for you this little task: when your emotions are sparked in a negative manner, by something

 or someone practice this golden rule to count to 10 in your mind before reacting. It gives you time to make a choice

 how to react and it also lowers the strength of your emotion.

 

 I want to share this with you about the power of not reacting (really beautiful):

 

 More tomorrow! ♥

 

Mindful Thought: Emotions pt2

Yesterday we took a look at the limbic system, where the source of our emotions is situated. Let's explore more what emotions are and what is their use biological and social.

The most fundamental emotions, known as the basic emotions are anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. These have a long history in our evolution and have developed to help us make rapid judgments about stimuli and respond quickly with appropriate behavior.  They are experienced and displayed in much the same way across cultures and we can read other's face accurately even if we never met.

Not all of our emotions come from the old parts of our brain; we also interpret our experiences to create a more complex array of emotional experiences. 

For instance, the amygdala may sense fear when it senses that the body is falling, but that fear may be interpreted completely differently (perhaps even as excitement) when we are falling on a roller-coaster ride than when we are falling from the sky in an airplane that has lost power.

The cognitive interpretations that accompany emotions — known as cognitive appraisal — allow us to experience a much larger and more complex set of secondary emotions.

Although they are in large part cognitive, our experiences of the secondary emotions are determined in part by arousal and whether they are pleasant or unpleasant feelings.

When you succeed in reaching an important goal, you might spend some time enjoying your secondary emotions, perhaps the experience of joy, satisfaction, and contentment. But when your close friend wins a prize that you thought you had deserved, you might also experience a variety of secondary emotions (in this case, the negative ones) — for instance, feeling angry, sad, resentful, and ashamed. You might mull over the event for weeks or even months, experiencing these negative emotions each time you think about it.

The distinction between the primary and the secondary emotions is paralleled by two brain pathways: a fast pathway and a slow pathway.  The thalamus acts as the major gatekeeper in this process. 

Our response to fear, for instance, is primarily determined by the fast pathway through the limbic system. When a car pulls out in front of us on the highway, the thalamus activates and sends an immediate message to the amygdala. We quickly move our foot to the brake pedal. 

Secondary emotions are more determined by the slow pathway. When we stew in jealousy over the loss of a partner to a rival or recollect our win in the big tennis match, the process is more complex. Information moves from the thalamus to the frontal lobes for cognitive analysis and integration, and then from there to the amygdala. We experience the arousal of emotion, but it is accompanied by a more complex cognitive appraisal, producing more refined emotions and behavioral responses.

In some cases it may be difficult when experiencing a high level of arousal to accurately determine which emotion we experience. That is, we are certain that we feel arousal, but the meaning of the arousal (the cognitive factor) may be less clear. Some romantic relationships, for instance, have a very high level of arousal, and the partners alternatively experience extreme highs and lows in the relationship. One day they are madly in love with each other and the next they are in a huge fight. In situations that are accompanied by high arousal, people may be unsure what emotion they are experiencing. In the high arousal relationship, for instance, the partners may be uncertain whether the emotion they are feeling is love, hate, or both at the same time. The tendency for people to incorrectly label the source of the arousal that they are experiencing is known as the mis-attribution of arousal.

In one interesting field study by Dutton and Aron (1974), an attractive young woman approached individual young men as they crossed a wobbly, long suspension walkway hanging more than 200 feet above a river in British Columbia . The woman asked each man to help her fill out a class questionnaire. When she had finished, she wrote her name and phone number on a piece of paper, and invited him to call if he wanted to hear more about the project. More than half of the men who had been interviewed on the bridge later called the woman. In contrast, men approached by the same woman on a low, solid bridge, called significantly less frequently. The idea of mis-attribution of arousal can explain this result — the men were feeling arousal from the height of the bridge, but they mis-attributed it as romantic or sexual attraction to the woman, making them more likely to call her.

In addition to experiencing emotions internally, we also express our emotions to others, and we learn about the emotions of others by observing them. This communication process has evolved over time and is highly adaptive.

One way that we perceive the emotions of others is through their nonverbal communication. Our tone of voice, gait, posture, touch, and facial expressions, and we can often accurately detect the emotions that other people are experiencing through these channels, particularly liking or disliking, and dominance or submission. 

The most important communicator of emotion is the face. The face contains 43 different muscles that allow it to make more than 10,000 unique configurations and to express a wide variety of emotions. For example, happiness is expressed by smiles, which are created by two of the major muscles surrounding the mouth and the eyes, and anger is created by lowered brows and firmly pressed lips.

In addition to helping us express our emotions, the face also helps us feel emotion. The facial feedback hypothesis proposes that the movement of our facial muscles can trigger corresponding emotions. Fritz Strack and his colleagues (1988) asked their research participants to hold a pen in their teeth (mimicking the facial action of a smile) or between their lips (similar to a frown), and then had them rate the funniness of a cartoon. They found that the cartoons were rated as more amusing when the pen was held in the smiling position — the subjective experience of emotion was intensified by the action of the facial muscles.

These results, and others like them, show that our behaviors, including our facial expressions, both influence and are influenced by our affect. We may smile because we are happy, but we are also happy because we are smiling. And we may stand up straight because we are proud, but we are proud because we are standing up straight.

So... pull those shoulders back now and smile! ♥

Mindful Thoughts: Emotions pt1

This week we talk about emotions, what they are, how we use them, what they do to us and how Mindfulness can help us control

them.

We are all familiar with emotions such as fear, joy, envy, anger, and excitement. To some extent these emotions are automatic: The brain systems that carry them out operate without us being aware of it. At the same time, we experience feelings of which we are fully aware, so that we are capable of describing ourselves as scared or angry or grumpy, surprised or happy. 

All of our emotions have two components. 

The first begins unconsciously and manifests itself as an outward expression; for example, a bear crosses your path and you start

running, you burn your hand and pull away... subconscious spurred to action to survive.

The second is a subjective, internal expression, the feeling of emotion connected to the narrative in your mind, for example: I am scared, bears are scary, I never take this path again... conscious memorizing the state of mind because of this bear

To understand emotions today we gonna take a deeper look about the biology of emotions. Knowing where they are coming from

and what they actually are gives us a deeper understanding to also deal with them.

Emotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, 

prompting automatic reactive behavior that has been adapted through evolution as a survival mechanism to meet a survival need, and we share those basic emotions with animals. Research in rats and mice show that just like us their behavior is steered by

emotion.

When you break it down simply: emotions are energy, energy in motion, e-motion. 

This energy pulses through your body constantly even when you are not aware of it. The limbic system is the area of the brain most heavily implicated in emotion, it includes the hypothalamus, thalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus. 

The processes of the limbic system control our physical and emotional responses to our environment and categorizes the experience as pleasant or unpleasant. Based on that the neuro-chemicals such as dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin increase or decrease resulting in changes in our body movement, gestures, and poses.

This is all complicated to explain in a short time so I want to direct you to this great learning youtube channel:

 

It goes without saying that our emotions need to be regulated. 

Aristoteles  argued that the proper regulation of the emotions was a defining feature of wisdom.

And this is where Mindfulness comes in.

More tomorrow!

Good link about the brain: https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/learning-strategies/