Feelings Are The Most Important Thing Or Maybe Not?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

The first time you discover feelings within yourself, and that there are so many of them, you begin to take them very seriously. After all, this is a feeling. So it was with me. I put my feelings everywhere. Look at these feelings of mine, they are very important, here are some of my feelings for you and for you. If someone did not want to deal with my feelings, they immediately went to where they did not return. How dare they ignore my feelings. After all, these are feelings. After all, this is wow.

And so it happened with each of my friends, after visiting a psychologist, they ran around with their feelings and poked people at them. If someone was not ready to accept their feelings, they broke off the relationship. Well, yes, if you don't like something, get out of here.

At some point, a person begins to identify himself with his feelings, and any rejection of feelings and their expression is considered a personal insult. But the feelings are not you. Feelings do not characterize you. And more your feelings do not always help to adequately respond to situations.

The first chapter is not in vain about feelings, because now a lot of attention is paid to feelings. Everyone talks about feelings. I very often hear that feelings are the only real support. That you need to rely on feelings, feelings are the most important thing.

Well, what else can you rely on? How else to make the right decision for yourself? How do you make any choice at all? To be with this partner or not, to work in this job or not, there is another piece of the pie or not. Just look inside yourself and ask, what do I feel ?!

But are our feelings really a reflection of our inner life, not to mention the external environment?

Can you and I always rely on what we feel without looking back?

No we can not. Because there are very significant nuances.

First, let's define which is which. In this book, I will have the same thing under feelings and emotions for simplicity of explanation.

So, what are emotions and what role do they play in a person's life?

In Wikipedia, they write, we take the definition from here, since an ordinary person will not read one hundred and one definitions of emotions that exist.

Emotion is a subjective relationship to various situations in the real world. Emotions act as a signaling system that helps a person navigate the world. According to this theory, the statement that you can rely on feelings is quite obvious.

But here's the thing, our brain does not see the difference between signals from the external environment and internal mental processes. At the physiological level, it will be the same process.

Hormones are released, then they enter the bloodstream. When a hormone in the blood reaches the target cell, it interacts with specific receptors; the receptors "read the message" of the organism, and certain changes begin to occur in the cell. Having completed their task, hormones are either broken down in target cells or in the blood, or transported to the liver, where they are broken down, or, finally, they are eliminated from the body mainly in the urine (for example, adrenaline).

And while the whole process of producing adrenaline, for example, and removing it from the body, the person will experience fear. Real fear. Adrenaline is a hormone of fear, it triggers a hit-run-freeze reaction. And it doesn't matter if a lion is chasing you across the savannah, you are afraid to go on stage, watch horror movies, remember how last year you jumped with a parachute or that your mother will come tomorrow, and you have a shit in your apartment.

I will repeat this again, the brain does not understand the difference between reality and internal mental processes (memories and event construction).

If the brain could distinguish, then there would be no problems, we would not be so worried about what happened three years ago, or what has not happened at all. Then we could rely unconditionally on our feelings, because we would be sure that this is a reaction to reality. But things are different.

Sometimes I find myself already in the process of an event I have invented, as I glance at the grandmother who is walking down the aisle and imagine that she will now begin to demand that I give her place. There is a whole drama inside me, I am on edge, my heart beats harder, I sweat, I am preparing arguments. Cortisol is released to the full, adrenaline joins it, which prepares me for a fight. I'm already getting hot.

I remind you that granny is just walking down the aisle, and I am sitting with a huge belly in the ninth month, the likelihood that someone will raise a pregnant woman is very small. So I find myself already in a state of readiness to enter into a skirmish with the approaching granny, and I understand that it was me who was driven. And I laugh at myself. But for a few minutes after I regained consciousness, I feel the effect of hormones on myself, because the process has started.

The hormones will stop working only after they have gone all the way. You can't say, hey, you stop there, I made it up for myself. It doesn't work that way. And against the background of a hormonal surge, I can still find something in a real environment to quarrel with someone under the guise of protecting my borders.

Interesting, right? And I feel all this, I really feel a threat to my borders. This is how each of us feels. Feelings are real, only they are not caused by reality. And if you take such feelings seriously, then you begin to live in a fictional world. Does your feelings help you then? I think you yourself know the answer.

With the construction of situations and memories, it is clear that feelings cannot be a support.

Support is reality. I use this technique to return to reality. I pay attention to the environment and my body. The body is always in reality. Therefore, I pay attention to him, it is convenient - not comfortable, as I breathe. It helps to recover and cope with the time while the hormones are at work.

One more thing about hormones. This is when hormones malfunction, too many or too little of them are produced, or receptors do not transmit information. There are many options for the malfunctioning of the hormonal system.

One example of such a failure is depression. Of course, the feelings that arise with depression are quite real, but they do not reflect reality. But feelings are stronger than reality. And this is tragic.

Emotions can also be triggered by other body processes that affect similar metabolic pathways. So we can feel anxiety, sadness, joy, seemingly without causality.

If you have such a causelessness, you should go to the doctor and be examined.

Now let's talk about another mental phenomenon that also affects our feelings.

Patterns are stereotyped emotional reactions, which seem to be feelings, and the situation is real, but still somehow not so.

Our brain does a million processes per minute, and if something can be simplified, then it does just that. Moreover, for the template, he chooses the set of feelings that was successful, which means it led to the desired. And this is an important point, patterns in themselves are not bad and they help us live. But it so happens that the situation changes a lot, but the pattern remains the same, and that's when we have problems.

I have a favorite example of how patterns work.

Imagine that you live on a street along which a highway passes and cars drive along it day and night in a stream. Your house is on the left and your store is on the right. And sooner or later you will need groceries. And you will start thinking how you can get to the store. You will have different options for solving this problem. Put a traffic light, make an underground or ground crossing or something else. For example, you decide to dig an underground passage. And super, now you go to the store at any time without a threat to your life and you do not care about cars. Does everything work well? Good. Let's say 10 years have passed, and you still go to the store through the passage.

But the thing is, there are no more cars. The road has been empty for 5 years already. And you could walk straight, but you still walk through the underpass. Not noticing that there has been a change in reality. This is the pattern. It may be hard and uncomfortable for you to walk through the underpass, but you do not notice the changed situation on the road, and you don’t even think that it can be done in any other way.

Our brain takes the most successful option for solving events and remembers it, and in each similar situation it gives a ready-made solution, without especially checking how much it suits this particular situation.

The brain works according to the scheme: stimulus-response. Every time you run out of food, you will go to the store through an underground passage. Automatically, without stopping to think. If the circuit has worked positively several times, then the brain will always apply it. It takes a direct shock to get the brain out of autopilot and change the pattern. Or deliberate attention.

What else we need to know about the pattern is that it works in conjunction with an anchor, an irritant that triggers a reaction. And the anchor can be anything, a certain feeling, sensation, sound, color, smell, etc.

The anchor turns on the reaction, and if you are not in a conscious state, then you cannot influence this. And it turns out that we are doomed to repeat our past. Most of the behavior patterns were created in early childhood, when we were small, defenseless and generally understood little and could not do much. So they are completely unsuitable for an adult.

We are all full of formulaic reactions: emotions and actions. Noticing them is a great joy, being able to change them is happiness.

You can independently track what patterns you have.

We all have one kind of behavior, a feeling in conflicts, for example. Being in a conflict, you can hardly be in such awareness to think about anything at all. But if you take some time to ego, you can remember how you usually behave, how you feel, what serves as a trigger. Of course, it is better to do all this with a psychologist or coach, they know questions that can more deeply show the work of the pattern. But there is this information on the Internet and you can do it yourself.

For example, I know for sure that my aggression is not aggression. This is usually about powerlessness. Aggression is my behavioral habit. Which is caused by a wide variety of triggers. And I know this now, at this moment, when there is nothing like that. But as soon as something like this happens, I'm already all on fire. If I can recover, then it's good, if not, then I'm angry for a while.

I also do one exercise. I am looking for at least three more feelings in the situation. Because it does not happen that there is only one emotion. And while I try to differentiate something else, the anger goes away. And then you can be with the feelings that really are. This helps me a lot in relationships, but we will talk about this in more detail in the chapter on patience and whether you need to leave when you don't like something.

Is it possible to rely on the feelings that arise during the pattern? Not worth it. Because the brain does not take into account reality in patterned behavior, it takes. It's like trying to put on the jacket I wore when I was 7 years old

Just imagine how funny it would be if our reactions were visible as clothes. We should have seen how out of so many we have grown.

I think everyone has situations when you break down, when at first you feel one thing and do according to your feelings, and then you regret it. When you cannot understand where the truth is, and where you convince yourself. Because we are taught that we can rely on feelings. And how then to be? Don't believe yourself? This is quite an important point, because according to our feelings we make vital decisions.

How do I change my patterns? Be aware, notice patterns, and be kind to yourself because it takes time for the neural connections to change their paths.

Feelings are really important, but you need to remember about the nuances that are. That affect our lives. After all, our life is not a theory, not a beautiful title for an article.

This is a chapter from the book "You are all right", which I am writing in real time, with new chapters coming out by devils. You can read the book in telegram on the channel My Psychology