Emotions

Emotions can be basic or compound. Basic emotions are common to all people, and to higher animals as well. To better understand your own state, you need to learn to identify your basic emotions.

Psychologists argue about exactly which emotions count as basic, the core from which all the others arise. They agree on these four:

joy

sadness

fear

anger

All other emotions can be considered compound: they are combinations of the basic ones. For example, disappointment can be seen as a mix of anger and sadness.

Are positive emotions good and negative ones bad?

Emotions can be negative (anger, sadness, fear, shame, disgust) or positive (pleasure, interest, joy, love).

All emotions are good and very important. There's no need to avoid negative emotions: they tell us that certain events, thoughts or situations aren't right for us. Positive emotions, on the other hand, tell us that we're in satisfying circumstances.

We may feel anger when our boundaries are violated.

For example, a colleague keeps drinking coffee from your personal mug. What's so bad about this emotion, and why should we avoid it? Here, anger is a signal that tells us, faster than we could even think it, that the situation is unpleasant for us and our wishes aren't being met.

Tracking emotions

We often notice emotions only once they're already strong. But we can learn to track emotions as they're just beginning to appear. You can rate their intensity on a scale from 0 (completely absent) to 10 (at their strongest).

Strong emotions are harder to control: they take over and cut us off from reality. For example, sadness at a low level (1 to 3) is sorrow, accompanied by tiredness and heaviness throughout the body. At a medium level (4 to 7), it's tears, a lump in the throat, a feeling of longing. At a strong level (8 to 10), sadness becomes complete exhaustion, having no strength left to live.

Why do we suppress emotions?

The urge to suppress emotions may be linked to a fear of experiencing them at a strong level, in their most painful form.

Controlling, ignoring or suppressing emotions won't make them disappear; it will only bring them closer to coming out at full intensity.

It's most comfortable to express emotions before they reach a high level of intensity.

So how do you live through emotions?

To do this, you need to identify:

• what you're feeling right now (that is, give the emotion a name); which situation, thought or event caused this emotion (that is, find where it came from);

• what you want to do right now, or what's happening in your body (that is, what reaction you're having)

The next step is expressing your emotions.

How do you express emotions?

through body language: gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice;

verbally, that is, in words;

and through actions and deeds.

Expressing emotions properly in all these forms is just as important as learning to understand and identify them. Otherwise you may send mixed messages: that's when what you say and what you do don't match the nonverbal meaning.

For example, you confess your love with a stony face or, even worse, with disgust. Then you need to go back a few steps. What are you actually feeling right now? Is it really love?

Knowing your own emotions and the ways to express and live through them also gives you an understanding of other people's emotions, which means it builds empathy.

Through knowing ourselves, we can come closer to knowing another person.