Dealing With Certain Emotions

How human are our emotions and feelings? Are people who experience less emotion less human? Are emotions a human strength, or a weakness? Are we being controlled by our emotions or can we better manage our emotions and take control to better benefit our life experience? What are emotions? What happens in our body physiologically when an emotional state becomes noticeable to us?

 

Many people will be familiar with the following mindsets or levels of awareness. The thing is, everyone is experiencing all of these levels according to the topic or subject. A ditch-digger will have particular knowledge and awareness that an astrophysicist doesn't. What is the biggest difference between knowing something, and doing something?

 

1.       Unconscious Incompetence - You don’t even know that you don't know it.

2.       Conscious Incompetence - You start to become painfully aware that you really don't know how to do a certain thing.

3.       Conscious Competence - You’re competent, but you still need to think about it.

4.       Unconscious Competence - You're so good at what you do, you don't need to think about it. You just do it.

 

An example of something, I think, unfamiliar to most is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment currently undergoing in Europe. This could be the single greatest scientific experiment ever. It certainly is the most expensive and most elaborate.  Yet, I suspect most people remain unaware of this experiment (fit the category of Unconscious Incompetence). Once this new experiment is introduced to a person, they begin to filter this new information through their own belief system and world-view and that elicits an emotional and visceral response. We start to feel a particular emotion or tension and can become overwhelmed. The new information impacts our status, or how we view ourselves in relation to others. Many times our status is weakened by new information and a defense mechanism (hormone cortisol) is triggered within us. We start to ask questions and make comments which supports our position prior to the new information being received. Most people can consider a day either good or bad relative to our status being threatened or emboldened.

 

Anytime we feel the slightest bit threatened, especially socially, but physically too, and anytime we feel that our status may change, like someone else might win an argument or someone might think poorly of us, or any way our status may change, our brain gets overwhelmed with electrical activity and bursts of the hormone cortisol is released, which is a stress response in the brain. It causes us to become tense and make sudden unexpected brain connections. We are very focused on status and on potential threats. The electrical activity involved in noticing these threats very easily overwhelms the steady and easy function of the brain.

 

I view and compare this hard-wired brain function to a PC that has anti-virus software installed. It’s always running in the background even though you don’t need to be aware of it. It also consumes some of your computers resources to function. When it detects a potential threat, it requires all your computers resources to operate. You have to shut down all other programs to run the program.

 

Since we filter any new information or stimulation through our belief systems, world view, and life experience stored in our brains, the older we become, the more hard-wired functions we’ve created. With more life experiences comes more threats. Perhaps this is why older people are more generally more fearful.

 

Some people may say, what is this airy-fairy California stuff? For some people, better understanding one’s own human experience may explain or define a belief structure or world-view.  Some religious belief structures renounce this type of thinking. For some, this new personal understanding can embolden one’s own faith. Regardless of a person’s particular belief system, understanding how your body functions is our own responsibility. Denying ourselves continued understanding is accepting our current position in life and a depiction of an idle mindset. 21st century technology has offered each of us incredible insights into how our body functions. Previous generations could not understand and thus either believed it to be supernatural involvement, or chalked it up as impossible to understand. I've learned that in most everything I do, to ask the question: “Why?”