How Do Emotions Impact Our Happiness & Mental Balance?
How do emotions impact your happiness, well-being, and mental balance? How would you like to transform them?
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Emotions cause us to feel one way or another. These feelings drive whether we feel happy, sad, angry, blissed out, neutral, etc. The feelings, in turn, affect our mental state.
Emotions impact our happiness because we misunderstand or plainly ignore their messages, end up confused about what we’re feeling and what’s next best move, and make up all sorts of narratives and stories to fill in the blank and make sense of our daily ups and downs
I agree that emotions are messengers – that’s kind of what I’m getting at below with the whole guidepost / slalom analogy. If we can experience emotions as instructing us toward or away from genuine happiness, then we have our emotions “in place”.
As far as I can tell at the moment, the role of emotions is to get in the way of our happiness, because I feel like happiness is more like equanimity, the balance between extremes of emotions. But I’m not in a very good mood at the moment – if I was in a better mood, I might say emotions are sets of guideposts we must navigate between on the way to genuine happiness. So, emotional balance is like a slalom event, skiing between the two extreme poles on the emotional spectrum between happiness and sadness with the intention to experience equanimity in between.
Extreme emotions impact our mental balance by distorting our view of reality: if we are angry, there is a tendency to accept only information that justifies our anger; if we are in a false sense of peace (say we’ve used drugs to subdue our emotions) we may become apathetic and ignore information that might justify anger or the passionate exertion of influence to change an unjust situation.
What I want from emotions is for them to have their place as guideposts, but to not be so strong that they distort my perception of reality.
My emotions, either those that I enjoy or those that I want to get rid of, captivate me and obscure my experience. For example, I had lunch today with someone who is extremely well read and accomplished as an actor. I felt various emotions such as jealousy of her very sharp mind and her adventurous life and sadness/embarassment that I wasn’t able to contribute to the conversation with the depth I wanted to. These emotions kept me from fully connecting with this woman and they led me to narratives of how I should be more like her. I did catch my mind and see this happening on and off, and I could see opportunities to enjoy her stories of Egyptian archeology and late night motorcycle riding through the city. When I could see my emotions for what they were, I could be fully in conversation with her and appreciate her intelligence and adventure without focusing on my own “deficiencies.” By the way, I think part of the reason I was able to note my emotions this afternoon is because I did the Vision Quest practice this morning.
So they can either obscure happiness, or promote it 🤔
When I look at the way emotions are described here, in my work, these are called perspectives, or sometimes limiting beliefs. The idea I’m getting is that a perspective makes us label something good or bad to us, and like in Pamela’s example, it gets in the way of our connection to the person and to our loving kindness for their joy and happiness.
Without emotions or an emotional lens, we would flatline, and it would deeply interfere with our ability to connect to others.
Emotions are a mental state, and they can lead to happiness and/or mental balance. We want our emotions to help us navigate how to react to different situations and interactions in our lives. Preferably, we want them to be balanced or stronger on the positive side.
I’ve heard a saying of conventional wisdom before along the lines of, “The head believes it is the one in control of all you do and all the decisions you make, but it is the heart that feeds the brain the majority or often all of what it uses to make such decisions and act, just as it gives the brain life through blood.” I’ve found this to hold very true, but only to a certain extent and not exclusively so. I think this is reflected well by the CBT model of the interdependence between Thoughts, Feelings, and Actions. Change one of those things and the others must change as well to adapt to the changing contexts, voids left, and spaces filled.
I imagine we’ll likely find going forward on this journey that if you can balance and maintain one of those, the other two become easier to balance as well. Emotions are, of course, the most volatile of the three I have to believe, so it makes sense to stabilize the component with the greatest probable variation over which we often perceive ourselves to have the least control over.
Strong Emotions that occur suddenly, seasonly, or inconveniently can be upsetting because it’s as though you lose control of steering even when knowing deep inside it will only be for a fleeting time.
In this moment, an overwhelming feeling can cause a ripple effect clouding perceptions, senses, intuition and so then emotions can be hard to feel through or identify.This overrides and consumes energy, impacting wellbeing and mental balance in a way you would feel exhausted and beat.
I think spending more time learning to identify the emotions, acknowledging those feelings coming through & continue to practice more of ‘deep listening’ in conjunction with deep breathing exercises. Journalling and just free writing can always provide a redirection and assistance in releasing these tensions to try to recognise when you can ‘see’ clearer what some of the triggering points or what occurred or what disrupted you to feel such strong emotions.
Very insightful, and a lot pointing to material we will dive deeper into later. Thank you for sharing.
I think emotions are good barometers to help us navigate, feel and survive. Negative or fear-based emotions are useful in emergency situations, they signal the brain on how to react. Good emotions are part of the joy factor. The problem of course is when either becomes imbalanced. As mentioned in the Hedonic Treadmill of 8-Mundane Concerns over access of either can cause pain and suffering. For me, it’s the rumination of either which causes me the most suffering. I find the more I engage with mindful practices such as yoga, qigong, and meditation the more equipped I am to handle mental imbalances and they seem to be less frequent.
Emotions affect my happiness by in a the immediate way that an emotion colours an experience. In a more long term way, I see people including myself expressing about the same emotional bandwidth throughout their lives. Transforming emotions is very difficult. I want to be calm, composed, responsive rather than reactive, and there has been a very good measure of change in the desired direction but … transforming is difficult.
Emotions impact my well-being as they do all people’s, all mammals in fact. Even pigs get ulcers when they’re stressed. There is quite the impact on our immune system and longevity, the quality of our health and well-being.
Emotions impact my mental balance with some measure of opposition from a desire to not be too sticky with them, and with the understanding that following every emotion allows no freedom of choice – I am a programme if I follow every reaction. I want freedom.
That’s amazing, thank you for sharing.
Transforming is difficult because:
1. Transforming is change, change requires energy, and deep change requires more energy;
2. Emotions are complex and changing the complex requires expertise and skill
3. When something requires a lot of energy and/or expertise and skill we call it difficult 😌
But that’s why we begin step-by-step, to first generate the momentum and the expertise/skill we need 😉
I stumbled upon a huge problem, to me happiness IS an emotion, as is sadness or fear – now I just looked up if I am correct in my understanding, whether it is a difficulty in terminology or philosophy.
I will follow the lead and pursuit – rather than get lost in definitions. I wonder how many emotions can be felt side by side, how some can pair up and others don’t…
I am not very well connected to my happiness, a good reason to be hear and fetch it out of the hidding
Emotion’s role is to act as signposts to how our nervous system has interpreted our experiences. Emotions are very useful in helping us navigate our journey. Although, if we have not learned how to interpret and understand their origin, we can be led astray by them. Emotions are always genuine but not always correct. Learning to notice and investigate our emotions can lead us to make conscious decisions and respond rather than react to the present moment. Offering compassion and curiosity to our experiences can help us navigate our emotions and mental well-being.
All of the emotions that are in the human experience are useful and welcome, learning to embrace them all, even the emotions that are not as pleasant can help facilitate transformation and being able to experience what it is like to be a fully present being.
Emotions are the feelable reactions on what happens to/around me in correlation with my needs, values etc. based on my capacity to process them. My observation might be distorted, when I’m already in a heavy emotional state. Ideally, emotions help me to guide me through the world in the direction of happiness.
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What are my emotions. They are like a pendulum that starts moving after I observe something. It is my inner rating system, that tells me, how I value my observation. The value is depending on my ethics. In wich direction the pendulum is moving can tell me about my inner state and condition. We ideally wish our pendulum to move to the side, that we regard to be pleasant and seek for satisfaction.
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