From the course: Managing Your Emotions at Work

What is an emotion?

From the course: Managing Your Emotions at Work

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What is an emotion?

- Whether or not, you're consciously aware of it, there is always a physical feeling associated with an emotional feeling. In fact, there was a research study done in Finland in 2014 that showed the most common emotions trigger strong bodily sensations in a pattern that is consistent across culture, gender and age. In the study, 700 men and women of all ages from Europe and Asia were shown videos that were meant to elicit strong emotional responses. And then they were shown pictures of human bodies on a computer and asked to color the parts of the body, where they felt activity increasing or decreasing. In the image, the blues represent decreased activity and yellow, orange and red indicate increased activity. Black represents the places that felt neutral. Can you see then how depression feels like your limbs are heavy? Whereas happiness is a feeling of being energetic all over your body. The takeaway is that an emotion is a physical sensation, that your mind interprets as a feeling. And this physical reaction is linked to your nervous system and to the stress response, you know, fight, flight and freeze. It's important to understand that your emotions are linked to your body and your nervous system. And that's important for two reasons. First, for you to know that the wiring between your body and the part of your brain that is associated with the stress response is involuntary. You aren't weak or sensitive or flawed in some way for having an uncomfortable emotion, you're human. And second, because understanding emotions in this embodied way gives you the opportunity to bring awareness to these involuntary processes and be able to regulate your nervous system and emotions, so you don't feel so out of control. Let me unpack this by sharing some basic science. The amygdala, one of the parts of your brain that's frequently involved in detecting threat, also contributes to emotional processing. And when the amygdala detects a threat, whether it's the actual threat of being chased by a lion or a perceived threat, like a looming deadline, or your dog throwing up on your home office rug, right before virtual meeting with a customer, it sends a distress signal and that distress signal sets off a hormonal and nervous system response, which does things like speed up your heart rate and your breath rate so that you have the energy to fight or flee, or it puts you into more of a free state where you might feel foggy-brained and shut down. And all of this happens so quickly you don't even know what's happening until suddenly you notice some new and possibly uncomfortable sensation going on in your body and your mind interprets those sensations as an emotion. So the emotions we culturally tend to think of as negative are the ones we experience as more physically uncomfortable. For now, I'd like you to consider reframing how you think of an emotion, that it's a physical sensation influenced by your nervous system, that your brain interprets as a feeling. There's no stigma, just wiring. And that when we talk about managing emotions, we're really saying regulate your emotions. An emotional regulation is about having a choice over what emotions you have, when and how you express them.

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