Feelings, Damn Feelings!

Who hasn’t made snap judgements on occasion based on how we feel about whatever we are facing? And how often have those judgements or feelings on which they are based turned out to be wrong? It turns out that when we are dead certain about a situation or a person, that’s exactly when we need to evaluate other options. Really? you must be wondering. I never go wrong with a response and my perception Is always accurate.

With advancements in affective sciences, we have come to a new understanding of human emotions. The theory of constructed emotions posits that we are equipped with a feeling apparatus that decodes our bodily milieu in terms of arousal and valence. Not only it’s working all the time but also governs our perception, feelings and thoughts and memories if we are not mindful or self-aware. But do we stand a chance against inaccurate decoding of life situations or people around us in our daily exchanges? The answer is yes!

The human brain regulates the body's budget (amount of oxygen or glucose in the blood etc). And this primal capacity to express the status in terms of valence and arousal acquires a conscious psychological meaning in our mental lives because it’s not able to operate on its own and has very little detail. It needs to get into our consciousness or be brought into our awareness. The default orientation in most cases when our body budget is disturbed by an external or internal event is outwards into the setting we are in. The details in surroundings are necessary to form explanations or predictions based on our past similar experiences which translate into our subsequent action to bring things into balance. But this could go wrong as well. Our environment is not always to blame as two different persons can respond differently in the same environment and also with the same feeling. What causes this difference in responses? One factor is past experience. Are there any other factors? Turns out to be yes!

We are not doomed to experience the same emotions over and over again in similar situations just based on the reasoning that different people emote differently in exact same situation and with exact same affect. Other than past experience, between stimulus and response, the ingredients that go into brain predictions are feelings, thoughts or categorisations and perception. They all come together and predict suitable responses to any given situation. So, having sway over some of them can lead to a different response. The stimulus causes changes in our body which are later expressed in terms of arousal and valence. Before our brains predict the next action based on past life experience, bodily changes acquire psychological meaning and that psychological meaning shapes our perception and causes us to categorise or think about the feeling, not extensively but for a moment or two and that’s our moment of freedom, where we can proactively neutralise a false feeling (that feeling is mostly linked with the environment we are in but the attributed cause may be just wrong) and instead of going into emotional over-drive we can think of different explanations or options behind a stimulus and get creative with what to do next. This gets encoded in our memory and on the next occasion, our updated memory or life experience informs or suggests a different prediction or emotion for the same environment or setting. Takes time but response changes once we start thinking differently or expansively in the same environment and with the same affect.

Deep inhaling and exhaling centre us and restore our calmness and is an effective way to regulate our body budget as it’s a change in the body that causes our brain to search for the most suitable course of action to restore balance. It’s a means to expand our freedom and regulate our emotions indirectly.

Also, affect or mood is influenced by how well we maintain our health. Do we get adequate sleep? Do we eat healthy food? Do we get enough exercise? So, we have some degree of control over our feelings, affect or mood. To emote in a more informed manner, we need to get our basics right or in order. To summarise:

• Our past experiences have a major say in how our brains predict and make emotions. It’s necessary to put ourselves in diverse settings so that we are able to develop diverse responses.

• Our affect colours our perception which later influences our thoughts and actions leading up to different emotional states. Perception is not without affect.

• Our affect or feelings can be improved by maintaining good health (sleep, nutrition and exercise).

• Before becoming emotional, we need to use the small window of thought to question our first impressions.

• First feelings or impressions are our affect and shouldn’t be taken certainly. Replace certainty with curiosity. Question what other version of reality can there be? Don't take first impressions as last.

• Only when we are relatively calm, we are able to see things as they really are and this informs our decision-making in life.

• Affect is expressed as a certain instant judgement.

• The environment can disturb our body's budget as well which may lead to skewed affect and later skewed perception and we all know where it leads to.