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We all have highs and lows, don’t we? The key is what we do with our lows. Are we using our emotions to grow and learn or are we beating ourselves up over them?
Your emotions can also act as a powerful guide. They can tell you something is wrong and allow you to make changes in your life.
Your brain’s primary responsibility is not to make you happy, but to ensure your survival. Thus, if you want to be happy, you must actively take control of your emotions rather than hoping you’ll be happy because it’s your natural state.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that, among other functions, plays a significant role in rewarding certain behaviors. When dopamine releases into specific areas of your brain—the pleasure centers—you get an intense sense of wellbeing similar to a high. This sense of wellbeing is what happens during exercise, when you gamble, have sex, or eat great food.
In the past, dopamine directly linked to our survival, now, it can be stimulated artificially. A great example of this effect is social media, which uses psychology to suck as much time as possible out of your life.
To take control of your emotions, you must understand the role dopamine plays and how it affects your happiness. Are you addicted to your phone? Are you glued to your TV? Or maybe you spend too much time playing video games.
This acclimatization is also probably why the new car or house you want will only make you happy for a while. Once the initial excitement wears off, you’ll move on to crave the next exciting thing. This phenomenon is known as ‘hedonic adaptation.’
Perhaps you believe that you’ll be happy once you’ve ‘made it.’ But, as the above study on happiness shows, this is simply not true.
fifty percent of our happiness is determined by genetics, forty percent by internal factors, and only ten percent by external factors. These external factors include such things as whether we’re single or married, rich or poor, and similar social influences.
We often say of someone that, “he has a big ego,” referring to the ego as something close to pride. While pride is undoubtedly a manifestation of ego, that’s only one part of it. You may show no pride and appear humble while still being controlled by your ego.
The ego refers to the self-identity you’ve constructed throughout your life. How was this identity created? Put simply, the ego was created through your thoughts and, as a mind-created identity, has no concrete reality. Events that happen to you bear no meaning in themselves. You give them meaning only through your interpretation of those events.
Your ego is a selfish entity, only concerned about its survival. Interestingly, it’s somewhat similar to your brain in the way it operates. It has its survival mechanism and will do whatever it can to persist. As with your brain, its primary concern is neither your happiness nor your peace of mind. On the contrary, your ego is restless. It wants you to be a go-getter. It wants you to do, acquire and achieve great things so you can become a ‘somebody.’
Most people derive their self-worth from their physical appearance. Your ego loves the way you look because it is the easiest thing to recognize and quantify. When you strongly associate with your physical appearance, you tend to identify more easily with physical and emotional pain. Believe it or not, you can observe your body without ‘identifying with’ it.
The ego also derives its sense of identity from your relationships with others. The ego is only interested in what it can get from them. In other words, the ego thrives on the way it can use people to strengthen its identity.
The ego tends to equate ‘having’ with ‘being,’ which is why the ego likes to identify with objects. The ego lives through comparison. Your ego likes to compare itself with other egos. The ego is never satisfied. Your ego always wants more. More fame, more stuff, more recognition, and so on. The ego’s sense of self-worth often depends on the worth you have in the eyes of others. Your ego needs the approval of other people to feel valued.
if you experience the same emotions repeatedly, it probably means you hold disempowering beliefs and need to change something in your life.
Let’s say you have a bad day at work and you’re in a terrible mood. The negative state you’re in causes you to attract more negative thoughts. Suddenly, you fixate on the fact you’re still single at thirty and start beating yourself up over it. Then, you blame yourself for being overweight. You also remember you have to go to the office the following Saturday which reminds you how
Thus, to reduce negative emotions, you must learn to compartmentalize your issues. Don’t let your mind over-dramatize things by clustering unrelated matters.
What triggered my emotions? What fueled them over the two days? What story was I telling myself? How and why did I get out of my slump? What can I learn from this episode?
Did you know your subconscious can’t clearly distinguish real experiences from ‘fake’ ones? This means you can trick your mind by simulating desired experiences through visualization. The more details you visualize, the more your brain will interpret the experience as real. By using visualization to elicit positive feelings such as gratitude, excitement, or joy, you can condition your mind to experience more positive emotions, as we’ll see in more depth in the section “Conditioning your mind.”
Eight breathing cycles per minute: Relief from stress and increased awareness. Four breathing cycles per minute: Intense feelings of awareness, increased visual clarity, heightens bodily sensitivity. One breathing cycle per minute: Optimized cooperation between brain hemispheres, dramatic calming of anxiety, fear, and worry.
Some studies have shown that listening to positive music can help people boost their mood. In a study conducted in 2012, participants reported higher positive mood after listening to a positive song for just twelve minutes, five times, over a two-week period.
Rather than saying, “I’m sad,” a more accurate way to describe that emotion would be: “I feel sad,” or “I experience a feeling of sadness.” Can you see how different it is from saying, “I’m sad?” It gives you more space to distance yourself from your emotions. The more you become aware of your emotions, the more you can label them and detach yourself from them, and the easier it will be to let go of these emotions.
If you’ve been resenting a particular friend for weeks because of something he said or did, changing your behavior might be having an honest talk with him and share your feelings. This will allow you to clear the air, clarify any misunderstandings, and avoid building up resentment. Oftentimes, we misinterpret events, or see things that aren’t there.
Nick Vujicic believed he would never be happy. After all, he was born with no arms or legs. As he said in one of the lectures he gave at a school, What kind of husband am I gonna be if I can’t even hold my wife’s hand? Nick Vujicic
There are two ways you can reduce stress: By avoiding situations you perceive as stressful, and By becoming better at dealing with stressful situations.
When you’re twenty, you care what everyone thinks, when you’re forty, you stop caring what everyone thinks, and when you’re sixty, you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.
Resentment often builds up when you fail to communicate effectively with the people you resent. That is, when you didn’t tell them you felt hurt, or didn’t communicate your needs and wants, assuming they would naturally cater to them. It can also grow when you did express your feelings but can’t let go of them and forgive. As Nelson Mandela once said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” It just doesn’t work.
You can’t stop thinking, “How could he do that to me?” The thought consumes you for weeks and you decide to cut ties with him. Months later you’re still resenting him. Notice that the event in itself isn’t upsetting. What creates resentment is your interpretation of the event. Now, is it possible that your interpretation was wrong? What if your friend assumed you wouldn’t like the party? What if he thought you were too busy? Sure, he should have at least invited you, but nobody is perfect. If you’d put aside your interpretation and confronted him at the time, maybe things would have turned out
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Often, what adds fuel to the fire is your inability or unwillingness to confront the people you resent. Instead of this, you keep revisiting in your mind what (you think) happened. As a result, your resentment grows stronger as time passes. This is especially true if you regularly interact with people you resent.
Your ability to release resentment is linked to your level of compassion. The more compassionate you are, the easier it will be to let go of resentment. One important thing to understand is that people always act based on their level of consciousness (or unconsciousness). You may wish someone had acted differently toward you, but if he or she didn’t, it’s probably because he or she was unable to do so.
Thus, rather than saying people are good or bad, it is more accurate to say they are either conscious or unconscious. When they do terrible things to you, it’s often because of their lack of consciousness, or the negative emotional state they were in at the time.
If you can’t talk to that person directly, an alternative is to write a letter. Even if you don’t send it, the simple act of writing the letter may help you release some of your resentment.
Remember, forgiving is an act of self-love. You forgive not just because you have compassion, but because you value your happiness more than anything else.
The hardest thing about depression is that it is addictive. It begins to feel uncomfortable not to be depressed. You feel guilty for feeling happy.
Fear of disturbing: You’re afraid of disturbing people. Perhaps due to the belief you’re not important enough. As a result, you may feel reluctant to affirm yourself for fear of appearing selfish.
