Emotions are neither good nor bad, they are data.
According to neuroscientist Antonio Damásio: “It is emotion that allows you to divide things into good, bad or indifferent.”
Thoughts can be good or bad, positive or negative. Buddha said that “no enemy can harm you as much as your thoughts”.
Having emotional intelligence is knowing how to shift the focus that led us to a certain emotion. It is not about suppressing or not displaying the emotion.
To make this task easier, it is important to know when a certain emotion is fulfilling its role of defending us, preserving life, or if it is simply relying on the algorithms that make our brains seek pleasure or avoid pain, without good reason.
It is pleasing to eat greasy meals every day, but in the long term it can result in the pain of a heart attack.
Feeling pain when you bring your hand close to the fire ensures the pleasure of continuing to be able to use it.
Knowing how to manipulate the time it will take to obtain pleasure or escape pain are basic requirements to take into account when we seek to boost our emotional intelligence.
Emotions are influenced by a past experience that has been recorded in the memory.
When we live through an experience that is similar to a past situation, this new experience serves as a trigger to retrieve archived memories, and we then feel an identical emotion. I say identical because its intensity depends on the context, on the location at hand. For example: being sad at a party is different from being sad at an hospital. It also depends on how our body feels. If it is full of energy, this is different from being ill.
The ability to analyse what we were thinking when said emotion set off (the trigger), in addition to the associations we made, redirects the energy contained in the emotion.
Having emotional intelligence means creating models that allow us to automatically redirect the energy of each emotion. This is possible by making different neuroassociations, using creative imagination to shift the focus.
You are the sole responsible for your life, as you are capable of shaping your own brain and using it to create your reality.
Dr Amy Cudy, psychologist and Harvard professor, explains how the brain reads the body.
“You can control your emotional states through your body and through your mind. When you’re feeling low, you can change your emotional state in two ways.
The first way is through the body. If you adjust your posture, assuming what are called power poses, you can feel more motivated to do what needs to be done. This usually involves putting your shoulders back, straightening your spine, puffing out your chest and looking forwards.
The second way to change your emotional states is through the mind.
If you want to feel a certain way, start acting as if you already feel that way.
In other words, fake it until you make it. For this to work, the ideal is to focus on what you want. If you want to feel excited, focus on acting excited. If you want to feel concentrated, focus on acting in a concentrated way. You can access many of your emotions using these two methods.”
Fear
Fear is the emotion that has the most influence on our lives.
It is responsible for our survival when we are up against an actual threat. When the threat is not real, but imaginary, it feeds stress and ends in anguish. This means that a comfortable and secure life depends on the ability to manage fear.
Fear leads to paralysis, flight or confrontation. It triggers the amygdala, releasing adrenaline and cortisol.
Most of our decisions involve choosing between what gives us more or less fear.
How is it managed?
By reinterpreting the situation in which it was triggered. By developing and keeping habits that serve as a way of reacting to threats. Habits of acting, breathing and thinking that shift the focus. Anything that can deactivate the amygdala serves as a weapon to inhibit or reduce this emotion. It can be physical exercise, sideways eye movements, or something else.
By knowing that humans’ greatest fears are related to death, worthlessness and shame.
By analysing uncertainty, anticipating scenarios.
As Dr Mario Alonso Puig says: “Adaptation mechanisms are very interesting. They help us deal with difficulties in a completely different way in comparison to survival mechanisms.” “In unknown scenarios where there are opportunities, the brain activates adaptation mechanisms.” “When there is a threat, the brain activates survival mechanisms.”
“When the brain kicks off this mechanism, unlike when it kicks off survival, the blood goes to the prefrontal zone, the key area for paying attention, making decisions and learning; it also gives an order for the stem cells located in the brain cavities to turn themselves into neurons.”
“Facing uncertainty by anticipating possible scenarios in a realistic way makes it less likely to trigger the amygdala.”
For example: the fear of loss is one of the fears that strongly influence our lives. It is closely linked to risk. When we have to take risks to achieve something, this fear stops us. This can be bad, but sometimes it can save us from making serious mistakes.
One way of managing the fear of loss is to make it neutral. Neither good nor bad. In other words, fear, which is an emotion controlled by the unconscious, will be analysed rationally by the conscious. We can decide whether the risk is proportional to the benefit or not.
How?
When a threat arises, think about the possible scenarios. Answer these questions: What is the worst that could happen? What is likely to happen? What are the solutions to each scenario? Can I turn the threat into an opportunity?
The ego
The ego is the great guardian of our need for meaningfulness. It prevents us from being doomed to uselessness.
In the past, being doomed to uselessness meant being expelled from the tribe and not being helped in times of illness and hunger. A death penalty, essentially.
The possibility of feeling useless provokes the most diverse behaviours, such as excessively defending our most cherished tribes, ignoring rationality, closing our minds and giving wings to questionable truths.
Tribal sense, stupidity and political correctness
The tribal sense arises from the need to unite in order to preserve life. This was initially about common, simple interests, such as: keeping each other warm, finding food, defending against threats. Then, as a result of the evolution of living beings, other species, groups and families are involved, and, consequently, these interests multiply, divide, become more sophisticated. And then comes the “need to belong” to a more specific tribe, sometimes even more than one tribe within the same group. A tribe that better reflects aspects of our identity, which takes into account the need to be meaningful, to help the feelings of safety and support. This evolution is increasingly underpinned by feelings and interests, which go as far as the love for the country and the veneration of symbols.
This tribal sense is as old as the existence of life itself. The need to preserve it makes every living being use every means at their disposal. It is utopian to deny this. Studies show that those who have a stronger sense of group identity are impacted less severely and recover more quickly when they experience prejudice or intolerance. In addition, our group identity often gives us a sense of common purpose, centred on the pursuit of goals. This means that we are more likely to get support from people within our “tribe”, and we are likely to experience their support as a more valuable and meaningful interaction than the other ones. The tribal sense leads us to the point of blindly believing the discourses which we attribute to the tribe, even if they contradict some of our convictions. It leads to prejudice against those who think or are different.
However, the reasons that used to justify the defence of our tribes have either changed or no longer exist. They are not the same as before. Despite this, our brains are the same, they are obsolete. And we can observe this when we see fans of different teams fighting and killing each other at football matches, or friends breaking off old relationships because they realise they have different political views or religions.
Knowing this is fundamental to defending ourselves against today’s real threats—the main one comes from the manipulation of the way we think, our values, beliefs and feelings.
Stupidity
There is a saying that we all have at least five minutes of stupidity a day. Let us think about it together: since this is a possibility, which takes shape when we analyse the moments in which we act stupidly, we can only pray that it happens in our sleep. But back to analysing the root of stupidity: the best evidence is when we see that it almost always arises from the need to defend one of our tribes. It has more or less serious consequences, it is behind all wars and conflicts, and it is always disastrous when tribal sense meets the compulsive need to prove a point.
Stupidity affects all humans to a greater or lesser extent, regardless of their intellectual capacity, knowledge, maturity or emotional intelligence. Manifestations of racism, homophobia, gang mentality, nationalism and many other exacerbated “isms” are clear evidence of this.
With modern-day possibilities to track everything that each person does and says, and how they behave, it is easy to identify which tribes any person belongs to, and then write messages that match the values, codes and convictions of each of these tribes. You just need to know how to use the many Artificial Intelligence tools that are now available to the public.
This is our main threat: becoming slaves to those willing to manipulate us. Either we learn to defend ourselves against the new threats by using techniques that allow us to make them known, learning to tell the tribes that represent threats apart from those that strengthen us, or we learn to push for educating the behaviour of the threatening tribes so that they learn that it is worth joining the friendly ones. This would be the best way to achieve “political correctness”, as well as peaceful and constructive coexistence, because there is no use in denying the existence of the tribal sense displayed by all living beings for billions of years.
Managing the ego is mandatory for a healthy physical and mental life. It means aligning personality and character, so as to avoid the shame felt when we realise that our persona is a lie.
In this sense, the best thing to do is to have integrity as a purpose. This means learning to healthily balance conflicting forces, which translate into emotions that give us pleasure and emotions that give us pain. The apostle Paul sums this up when he says “all things are lawful unto me, but all things are not expedient”.
Most of the choices we make in life have to do with how we manage these conflicts. That is, these choices have to do with the ego.
The ego sums up the behaviours we embrace to protect our image, our personality and the thoughts we have when we compare our persona (what we represent on the outside) with our character (what we feel when we look inwards).
This can be better understood by, for example, analysing the difference between what most people show on social media and what their real lives are like.
Shame
Fear and shame are the emotions that condition human behaviour the most. It can even be said that quality of life depends on them.
They can be used to manipulate us, for better or for worse. To train us or subjugate us.
Shame appears as a consequence of the guilt felt for not meeting what our beliefs believe to be the expectations of the society in which we live. Which, in the past, this meant banishment and death.
Shame causes immense pain, suffering, “a loss of energy comparable to death”, as Dr David Hawkins, an American psychiatrist and scientist, puts it. Or, a loss of “the will to live”.
In order to take control of our lives, it is paramount to clearly identify what causes us shame when it arises and reinterpret the situation, reconfiguring reshaping our beliefs.
Use the metacognition techniques explained below.
Shame is killed with self-confidence.
Attitudes
To have attitudes means to preserve emotions and behaviours over time. An attitude is a state of consciousness.
When it is physically visible, we can say that it is the anchor of the emotions it represents. When we see a confident person and a sad one, it is easy to see the differences in their attitude.
Attitude is the way of being in life, it is the mirror of behaviour, it is the result of memes, beliefs, paradigms and thought models. Attitudes can be modified by changing behaviour.
Some attitudes are convenient to the goals we choose to pursue. Others are in fact necessary.
They are trained by taking care of the right behaviours we want in our lives, turning them into habits and routines. Example: if I start something, I must finish it. Finishing what you start, even if it involves small things, is an attitude that sustains your energy. Observing the results we get strengthens our self-confidence.
Attitudes can be acquired or reshaped to adapt to the needs of the phase in which you are living. Displays of insecurity, fragility or fear are not appropriate in battle. However, they can be a sign of maturity in other circumstances or moments.
Attitudes are the summary that shows where you are headed in life.
You can choose to be either a problem maker or a solution maker.
A problem maker is someone who, regardless of the life they live, wealthy or not, regardless of the family they were born in, made of good people or not, is always despondent and in search of the cause, the culprit.
The discourse of such a person is like this: “My whole life is a struggle. I blame my family because they give me a hard time. This government is no good. My boss is an evil person. God doesn’t help me.”
In short, this person only sees problems and is a victim to them. They are always focused on the past. They are stuck in it and they do not take action.
A solution maker, on the other hand, is someone who charges the issue head-on whenever they come across some hardship, whenever they think something like “everything in my life is difficult”. They start looking for solutions, not culprits, and they only give up when they find these solutions.
Seeking solutions requires creativity. It means imagining what will happen (in the future) and discovering the possibilities, learning and taking action along the way.
Creativity is recombining what you know from the past and creating a new film.
Think of your memories as a film. Have you ever seen a film reel? It is a plastic strip with several frames on it. These frames are your memories. If you were to cut out some of these frames and put them together in a different sequence, you would have a new film. That would be the creative process.
Neurologically, there is a remarkable difference between the problem maker and the solution maker. The solution maker uses the cortex 80 per cent more than the problem maker.
The difference between one and the other lies in their own stories. Not the chronological records of their past, but the real stories, the stories that they lived.
The story that matters concerns the events that triggered emotional reactions, which are recorded in memory. These records come in different forms.
When the emotion is very strong, pleasant or otherwise, we even remember the place, the date, the time of day, the sounds, and even the scents. In other cases, we try to repress the emotion and find it difficult to access all these details, but we still have the same emotion from an unknown source.
Other emotions are the consequence of behaviours or thoughts that we repeated mostly during the early years of our childhood, related to our family life, school or other interpersonal relationships. To learn more about this subject, you can read about the “theory of constructed emotion” by Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett.
If you want to live “the life you desire”, I suggest you learn to build a real dictionary for life—for your life—by delving into your true history.
We shall call this dictionary the “palace of emotions”.