You go camping with your friends on the weekend and while having the fun it requires sitting around the bonfire you suddenly feel something on your leg. When you try to see what it is, a sheer fear runs through your veins freezing you to the core because of the snake you just saw on your leg. Within a split second you jerk your leg to get rid of the danger noodle and scream while you’re doing it.
This quick fight or flight response is caused by your emotions to that particular situation. Emotions originate in the subcortical region, the amygdala, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortices, which cause biochemical reactions to occur and change our physical state. When faced with danger or any stressful event, you will experience symptoms of anxiety, such as a racing heart or sweating.
You pretty much can’t control your emotions. You fear when it’s scary, you feel happy when something joyful happens, you feel sad when shits goes down and you also feel angry when shit goes down.
What you CAN control is your feelings. Feelings are your reaction to your emotions. Feelings originate in the neocortical region of the brain. Feelings form when your brain assigns a meaning to the emotional experience that you are having. Because they are based on an emotional experience, feelings can be entirely subjective and vary from person to person. You go to an aquarium and see a shark in the tank but instead of feeling threatened by the savage creature, you find it majestic and are happy to see a shark because YOU KNOW it can’t kill you from behind that glass. While some other kid might be terrified of the same shark even if its harmless.
Your feelings is what makes you human and what type of human you would be. Because you can control your feelings, you have to choose how you feel about certain things for your benefit and the benefit of your peers. If you are mean and annoyed all the times at all the things chances are not a lot of people like you. What is also fascinating is that people think there’s just a few emotions and feelings we can experience like anger, joy, fear, guilt, disgust etc. But we actually have 75+ emotions and feelings registered till date.
With that bit of information, if might be something to think about. How you feel about certain things that is in your control and could be manipulated for better. Go nuts about it!
Artwork: https://dribbble.com/shots/4164444-Square-Feelings
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