Emotions, What Are They Good For?
We receive all kinds of messages about emotions; they’re messy, they make us act irrationally, they get us into trouble, we all just need to stop being so sensitive and be more reasonable. When it comes to emotions some of them feel good, some of them are harder. Sometimes they’re a mild thing we barely notice and sometimes they hit us like a semi-truck going 70 down the freeway. No matter who you are or what’s going on in your life, if you are a human and you have a brain then you have feelings. And contrary to popular belief they serve an important purpose other than just making you miserable. Read on to learn more about why emotions exist and what they’re good for.
A Framework for Feelings:
When thinking about our feelings and why we have them I find it helpful to consider what life was like when humans first walked this planet. This is a framework that can shed so much light on our emotions as well as our thinking patterns and our behaviors.
If you consider early humans compared to other living beings, we are not so well equipped for survival in the harsh, unforgiving conditions that used to be part of human’s day to day life. We don’t have sharp claws or fur, we don’t run all that fast, our eye-sight and sense of hearing isn’t nearly as good as many other animals. But what we do have is our big brains that are incredibly complex, including our ability to feel. We also had our social bonds, other people who get us through tough times. If you can hold on to this perspective as we go through what emotions do for us then you’ll start to see that survival as a species would have never been possible if we never came down with a case of the feels.
Why #1: Emotions Communicate to Us
When we feel something, pleasant or not, it gets our attention very quickly in a way that helps us to tune into that message with laser-like focus. Fear communicates to us that there’s potential danger, anger that our rights have been violated, sadness that something important to us is missing. Without these emotions, we might never stand up and pay attention, know what we value, or protect ourselves and what we love.
Where this gets tricky is that sometimes the emotion and what it's trying to communicate can get a bit skewed. Our thoughts might be sending a message to us that’s not entirely accurate, which then causes an emotional reaction and everything goes a bit sideways.
Let’s say I walk up to a group of friends and they all stop talking. My thoughts say “oh, they’re saying bad stuff about me. They think I’m dumb!” then my emotion is anger and I want to tell them about themselves. The truth is I have no idea why my friends stopped talking, maybe it was a natural pause in the conversation, maybe they’re planning to take me to a surprise dinner, but my thoughts about the situation caused my brain to serve up anger. For people who have lived through trauma or other adversities, your brain may often throw you thoughts based on experiences from the past rather than the realities of the present. Your mind is doing just what its supposed to do, it kept you safe in the past but maybe it doesn’t work so well in the present.
Our emotions are powerful and needed for communicating important information about what’s happening in the world around us. It's also okay to pause and ask yourself if your emotions are based on the observable facts of a situation or your thoughts about that situation.
Why #2: Emotions Communicate to Others
Emotions speak louder than words. Research has shown that people are far more in-tune with body language and facial expressions than the words that come out of someone’s mouth. That’s why if someone asks how you are and you say “FINE!” they might not believe you. Your tense body and face show otherwise. The changes that can happen in our bodies caused by emotions is a powerful communicator.
Let’s take this idea back to pre-modern humans: Let’s say you and I were hangin’ in our village and a lion wanders in, I see the lion but your back is turned to it. What you do see is the look of terror on my face. You know immediately that something is wrong and grab your spear before I’ve even said a word. My feeling of fear kept us both safe from the lion without needing to waste precious time discussing it.
Why #3: Emotions Motivate Action
All emotions come with an urge to act in some kind of way. Here’s just a few examples:
Fear urges us to fight or flee
Anger urges us to resist
Sadness to withdraw
Joy to connect
All of these action urges serves one of two purposes: to protect ourselves and others from harm or to deepen our bond with others, for if we feel bonded we are more likely to want to protect each other. When you think back again to those days of early man and how our main tools for survival were our advanced brains and each other this makes sense. Emotions motivate us to protect and grow the human race.
Love is a great example of this: Love motivates us to be around a person, to think about and care for their needs and helps us form a healthy attachment. We want to protect the person we love, and depending on who it is, maybe create new humans with them. If not for the action urges that come with love humans wouldn’t have gotten very far.
Sometimes the urges we get with an emotion don’t fit very well with modern life. If someone makes you angry, you can’t exactly hit them over the head with a club, and though we might be anxious about giving a presentation for work, giving in to fight or flight won’t do much to protect us from not fulfilling that responsibility. This is where learning some skills for coping with emotions can be helpful for getting through modern life with all of its ups and downs that can cause all kinds of emotional responses.
So next time you get the feels- pause, acknowledge it, and thank your brain for working so hard to do its job. This means you’re human, just like the rest of us.
Interested in learning more about your emotions and coping with the ups and downs? Feel free to contact me or subscribe below for more free tips on mental health and parenting.