What emotions truly are?

To introduce ourselves to this fascinating topic, we must answer a first question that is not always obvious: What is an emotion?

Knowing the origin of the word helps us clarify this concept. The word "emotion" derives from the Latin "emoveo", "emotum," meaning moved or disturbed. An emotion could be defined as "energy in motion." It is an involuntary impulse that induces us to action, takes us out of our usual state, and mobilizes us!

Emotions can originate in response to external stimuli (our immediate environment) or as a result of internal stimuli (our thoughts and beliefs) and trigger behaviours of automatic and instinctive reaction.

The circuit of an emotion responds to the following dynamic:

Now, is it possible to intervene in this dynamic circuit without being "swallowed" by our emotions?

The answer is yes! As long as the human being undertakes a committed "work on oneself." What do I mean by this expression? Anyone who is prepared to "self-observe," who does not take for granted by saying "this is how I am," can learn to train their emotional intelligence to be able to manage their emotions skillfully and thus respond in increasingly healthy ways to their environment. Conversely, a person with emotional immaturity will continuously be captive to their unconscious and more primitive emotional reactions. Emotional Intelligence is an "acquirable" skill. It is like a muscle we must train, strengthen, and develop.

What are emotions for?

We come into this world with a toolbox to survive. The basic emotions, which I will define later, respond to this fundamental purpose: to keep us alive and preserve the species. Nobody teaches us to feel fear, anger, joy, or sadness... "we feel them in the body" from very concrete sensations such as tachycardia, sweating, blushing, a lump in the throat, etc.

There are 6 basic categories of innate emotions. Each has an adaptive purpose; all are necessary and have a very specific purpose. Therefore, there are no “good” and “bad” emotions, but rather emotions that are more comfortable or uncomfortable to navigate and more or less effective responses.

Let's look at each of them:

Fear: anticipation of a threat or danger that produces anxiety, uncertainty, insecurity. Its adaptive purpose is to protect us.

Surprise: startle, astonishment, bewilderment. Its adaptive purpose is to orient us in a new situation.

Aversion: disgust, repulsion, we tend to move away from the object that causes us aversion. Its adaptive purpose is to distance us from what we recognize as not good for us.

Anger: rage, anger, resentment, fury, irritability. Its adaptive purpose is to destroy what harms us. Without reaching those extremes, in our daily life, it can be expressed as an emotion that helps us get angry and set limits on unpleasant situations.

Joy: fun, euphoria, gratification, contentment, gives a sense of well-being and security. Its adaptive purpose is to reproduce what is good for us. We wish to repeat what makes us feel good.

Sadness: grief, loneliness, pessimism. It immerses us in a reflective attitude, and its adaptive function is to generate a new personal reintegration.

All these emotions are necessary for our emotional ecology. Everyone feels them to different degrees; they are universal and are not distinguished by race, culture, gender, or religion. No one would stop running if, for example, they came face-to-face with a lion. In this case, fear will save our lives. However, this basic and innate repertoire becomes complex and sometimes hindered, given our human capacity to think, feel, and anticipate. Why? Because we run the risk of confusing a real threat with threats that only exist in our imagination.

What distinguishes a person who knows how to manage their emotions?

The difference is not given by what they feel but by "how" they relate to what they feel. A person with emotional intelligence is one who knows how to recognize and manage their emotional repertoire appropriately. The measure of our ethics, then, is not given by what we feel but by what we do with what we feel. ACCEPTING without "struggling" with our emotions is the healthiest way to relate to them. In this way, we manage to "ex/press" (release from imprisonment) what we feel in an integral, congruent, and especially conscious behaviour. If, on the contrary, we repress, deny, evade, or reject our emotions, they surprise us in unconscious acts, dragging us toward behaviours with detrimental consequences for us and our relationship with others.

Let's see a concrete example: a woman is calm and receives a call where they are informed that they have been left out of a job search they longed for. Suddenly, she feels a lot of anguish, frustration, and anger. In this case, what would be a healthy emotional management outlet? She needs to become aware of her emotional state and the impact that news had, register what she feels, and identify why she feels how they feel. The next step is to look for functional ways to express those emotions without causing harm to herself or other people. Some healthy strategies would be talking with a friend, going for a run, looking for new job opportunities, etc.

On the other hand, a dysfunctional outlet would be denying what she feels at that moment, moving on to another issue, and continuing her day as if that frustration had not occurred. Possibly, by nightfall, that emotion that remained "undigested" repeats itself. Perhaps, being with her family, her tolerance threshold is too low, and at the slightest annoyance, "that emotion of anger that could not be properly expressed is triggered." What will be her first and most primitive reaction? She´ll respond aggressively to their loved ones without being aware that furious energy actually corresponds to the disappointment of having been left out of that opportunity she so longed for.

This is a very simple and direct example of the impact emotions have on our daily lives. Imagine what it means to "accumulate," "accumulate," and "accumulate." The consequences will no longer be "jumps or outbursts" but "explosions," "symptoms," and "diseases." Emotions that are not registered do not evaporate... they remain in the body in the form of muscle tension, lumps in the throat, chest pains, gastritis, and even cancer.

The emotions we deny first whisper in our ears, then they talk to us, and finally, shout at us. Caring for our physical health implies the commitment to train ourselves in emotional intelligence.

How to begin training emotional intelligence?

The "work on oneself" consists of developing a "conscious" work on emotions.

Each person, according to their innate temperament and past experiences, carves out emotions that are very difficult to modify; why? Because each of them is linked to the instinct for survival. That is, with hits and misses, they have brought us alive to this point and adapted us to our immediate environment. Let us not forget that our biological unconscious seeks, above all, to keep us alive; it is our most primitive animal part. It does not judge what is better or worse, functional or dysfunctional, convenient or not for us. This work will be done by the most evolved part of the brain, which can begin to act when we train ourselves in emotional intelligence.

The first step to begin working with our emotions is to recognize them and accept them as they are, without judging them, condemning them, criticizing ourselves for what we feel, and recognizing ourselves as "just human."

Learning to manage one's emotions requires turning life into a laboratory, where one is both a subject and a researcher. Start by taking an optimal distance so as not to be devoured by emotional whirlwinds.

The main anchor for "taking a stand" in the midst of emotional chaos is breathing; this resource facilitates lowering revolutions, calming the mind, and choosing how to conduct ourselves.

After observing and making contact with breathing, the next step is registering everything that moves within us.

Some questions that may be guiding you on the journey to becoming more emotionally intelligent are:

It's about starting to get in touch with what we feel, trying to be more and more lucid, being more and more present to know ourselves in depth.

Only from then on can we begin to choose what, how, when, and before whom to manifest what we feel in a conscious and prudent manner. What happens if there is no such "pre-cooking"? We release raw the most primitive part of ourselves! With regrettable consequences most of the time. As Aristotle said:

The impulses we tend to fall into are directly related to the emotional unconsciousness we have of ourselves. To make the best decisions, we must have enough information, in this case, about ourselves.

Knowing oneself is the key to being able to choose from a conscious place in our lives. In Taoism, the expression "domestication of oneself" is used to refer to the grand ability to learn to "be masters of ourselves." How would you domesticate an animal? Not by kicking it, for sure: the key to achieving this is tenderness and determination. When we resist and get angry with ourselves for feeling what we feel, we are giving ourselves a treatment we would not give to an animal. Well, it is about being tolerant and compassionate with our most primitive parts, but no less firm about that. This attitude will help us to be "Master" and no longer "slaves" to our impulsive outbursts. That is what being "emotional adults" is about: mature the emotions and let them "be" to be able to savor them, extract their juice and not get indigested with them!

I encourage you to get to work! Proper emotional management brings us quality of life because it helps us take care of our relationships with others and get along better with ourselves. In addition, open dialogue with them functions as a kind of "internal GPS" that guides us in life if we know how to listen to the message they reveal to us.