The way we handle emotions every single day has so much power over how we choose to live our lives. That’s why it’s important to keep our feelings in check and understand that emotions can be worked; they can be shaped too and moulded. Emotions are not an isolated construct, according to experts, so much goes into them; our present and past experiences, norms that we grow up living and believing, all of these are part of what end up informing our theories and principles and consequently, how we feel and react to certain matters. With this and so much left for consideration, how much should we trust how we feel? An article on Science Focus highlights that the answer of how emotions are made flies in the face of common sense, because the human brain is a master of deception. Like a magician, it creates incredible experiences as diverse as joy, envy, curiosity and wrath without revealing how it does so. But thanks to recent advances in brain imaging, which allows scientists to observe a living brain as it thinks, feels, and perceives its surroundings, there is a good idea of the brain’s secret technique for making emotion. Studies show that the brain spends 60 to 80 per cent of its energy on prediction. In every moment, your brain issues thousands of predictions at a time, based on past experience, and the ones that win are (usually) the ones that fit the situation in the next moment. Gorretti Munyana experiences mood swings every now and then. She can be happy in one moment and very sad in the next. Before she understood how her bodily changes as a woman were affecting her, she always thought of herself as a horrible person. “I normally experience mood swings right before and after my menses. Previously, I would hold onto these feelings because I had accepted them as my reality. They influenced so many bad decisions in my life because then, I had no idea of how to isolate them from my reality. I thought they were my reality, however, since then, I have come to know better,” she says. The 30-year-old says our emotions are part of how we feel in our daily lives but they shouldn’t define us, “they are not constant, you can feel a certain way now but feel completely different just seconds later. This is not something a person should rely on, especially when it comes to making very important decisions in life.” Alpha Muge, a photographer, is of the view that much as our emotions are real, they are not always right for us to be entirely dependent on them. “When defining life, it should take us more than how we feel. Emotions waver, they can’t be final,” Muge says. When you’re busy numbing out your feelings, your feelings are in the other room doing push-ups, author Anna Borges quotes Caroline Fenkel, executive director of Newport Academy. “Then, when you’re done watching Netflix or whatever you were doing to numb out, and you walk into the other room, you’re like, wait a minute. These feelings are worse than they were before. That’s because you gave them all that time and space to do push-ups.” So what’s the alternative? Start with identifying your feelings, Borges notes. Many of us aren’t in the habit of investigating our emotions as they strike us. We kind of just make a quick judgmental call about what’s going on or even brush it off. But given how complex our emotions are, we do ourselves a disservice by not taking a moment to name what we’re experiencing and why. Resist judging your feelings. Anger hits, but instead of feeling angry, you feel ashamed because it feels irrational. You feel sad because you can’t celebrate your birthday at a restaurant, but then you feel guilty because it’s such a “small” thing to worry about compared to what other people are going through. It’s tough, but Borges writes that it’s good to try to exercise self-compassion and sit with the feeling without explaining it away, piling another emotion on top of it, or telling yourself what it says about you as a person. “All of this sounds like a lot, I know. But the thing is, the more you do it, the more automatic it becomes. Just like many of us condition ourselves to respond to strong emotions by running away from them, if we practice facing them head-on, that will start to stick too. It won’t take away all of the sucky-ness of negative emotions—like, they’re still negative emotions—but it will make them easier to deal with.”
