Emotions keep us alive

They make us laugh, be sad, rejoice or cry…

Every day, under the influence of impressions and memories, we experience a whole range of emotions. They skillfully manage us: we feel joy – and at this moment we become more responsive, attentive to others. Sadness makes us more polite, kind, and considerate. Stress can literally kill us.

Thanks to emotions and feelings, life takes on special colors, but this is what scares us. Perhaps the fact is that we are taught to control ourselves and our spiritual impulses from childhood, and later life in society begins to dictate its own “adult” rules: it is not customary to pour out one’s soul to work colleagues, rejoice violently or yearn in public.

We try to hide our feelings, suppress them. But is it possible to do without them, to go through life only with what cold reason dictates? In order to harmoniously get along with your emotions, experts say, it is first of all important to understand how they are arranged, what they carry in themselves, and why they arise. About this Russian psychophysiologist Chingiz Izmailov and French psychotherapist Christophe Andre.

Psychologies: Emotions – our friends or enemies?

Chingiz Izmailov: They help us to live and procreate. Love pushes us towards a partner, anger protects us from enemies. Fear warns of danger. Joy attracts other people to us … Basic emotions are the same for everyone, they are “recorded” in the genes to the extent that they ensure survival. Charles Darwin said so, and modern science confirms this.

Christoph Andre: Emotions are a universal language, a code that allows people of different gender, age and social class to communicate. The culture, the society in which we live, only determines the form of their manifestation so that we can be understood and accepted by the group. If I’m from the South, I’m more likely to express my emotions very noisily during mourning.

If I behave with restraint – for example, as if I lived in England – I will be considered a hysteric. A top manager who breaks down at a meeting in a fit of anger will be considered by colleagues as a person with an unbalanced psyche. But if a teenager from a disadvantaged area does not respond to an insult, he will be considered a coward.

Emotions, feelings, affects – how to determine what we are dealing with?

C. I .: The main criterion is duration. Affect is an immediate and short-term reaction to some event. When it takes possession of us, we lose self-control, we cannot control our actions. Sometimes this is how rage, anger, horror are manifested.

Emotion (emotional excitement) is a temporary emotional experience of some event or situation. We consider seven emotions basic – their combination determines our experiences: anxiety, for example, can consist of basic fear, anger and interest. Feelings, on the other hand, reflect a long-term and stable emotional attitude towards another person, hobby or business in which we are engaged.

Why is it so difficult to understand your emotional state?

C. I .: We tend to repress and modify emotions that are considered socially or morally unacceptable. We restrain ourselves by not being able to express our irritation to colleagues, and we compensate for the strength of this emotion, for example, by eating uncontrollably much. Or we have some kind of “inexplicable” pain – in the head, in the stomach. Or we withdraw into ourselves, become indifferent.

If some emotion is forbidden for us, every time we encounter it, we transform our sensations into something else … and do not understand ourselves. Thus, envy can turn into aggression or even admiration for the person who causes it.

K.A.: As soon as we fence ourselves off from emotions, intuition begins to work worse, we are mistaken in assessing others and our own needs.

Some of us are too emotional, others are reserved. Is there a golden mean?

K.A.: If there is a norm, then it is a social norm. When we live in the grip of feelings—shame, embarrassment, guilt, or worry—it gets in the way. If we are “infected” with fear, afraid of the opinions of others, then we become victims of social phobia. Too long sadness and all-consuming guilt are already symptoms of depression.

The other extreme is also dangerous. Some of us consider ourselves less expressive, often because we are afraid of being too emotional. As a rule, such people are not talkative and talk about any episode of their lives in a neutral tone, summarizing: “it was nothing” or “so-so”. As a result, they complain about the poverty of their social and personal life.

Why are some of us more and others less cheerful people?

C. I .: We are born with the same “set” of emotions: we feel physiological arousal in the same way, we contract the same facial muscles when we feel joy, fear, surprise, or sadness. But we grow up in different families and in different cultures, in addition, parents unconsciously change the way they communicate with their child depending on their gender. Boys are just as emotional as girls, but they are ordered to be reserved and invulnerable. Therefore, as adults, they hide their emotions and tend to withdraw into themselves.

Women, on the contrary, dare to talk about what they feel, to show different emotions, including anxiety or sadness. And if some people are especially predisposed to negative emotions, this may be due to the fact that wariness and distrust were more welcomed in their early environment, rather than joy and pleasure.

Can emotions be dangerous to health?

K.A.: It is known that positive emotions have a beneficial effect – long-term or temporary – on the immune system. But is it dangerous to hide negative emotions?

When psychosomatic medicine took its first steps, it was hypothesized that each type of repressed emotion corresponds to a certain type of disorder: fear of separation – asthma, repressed anger – pain in the abdomen, etc. Research has not confirmed this assumption. Although a link has been established between pent-up or too frequent anger and cardiovascular disease.

I think that rather than the emotions themselves, but the general attitude towards the world and hostility towards other people can cause illness in irritable people.

Are there emotions that we underestimate?

C. I .: All emotions are important and useful – even those that we call negative. They are just as necessary as positive ones, although they make you suffer. Emotions – even such as sadness, disgust or anger – carry useful information that facilitates understanding between people, protects against danger, so you should not ignore them. On the contrary, it is important to accept them as they are and learn to manage them.