Not one moment of our lives goes by without an emotion. Our fight or flight response is our fear and anger response, programmed to warn us of danger and give us the ability to survive the stressors we encounter.
Programmed deep in our reptilian brain, these responses are automatic and unconscious. To avoid activating these responses, our reptilian brain only asks two things from us; a stable environment and that we keep it safe. Not much to ask, hey? Which brings me to how you are coping with your personal stressors and how buried deep in your internal world is an incalculable number of emotions and their best friends, ‘moods’, that effect every feeling and thought in your internal world, while you strive to sustain a stable environment and keep your reptilian brain safe in your external world.
Our emotional database is open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Our senses send information to it all the time, through the ‘buffer zone’ of our reptilian brain, with visuals and smells directed straight to the brain, to trigger alarms. All this information, data, is tagged and logged in our emotional database ready to be pulled up whenever we need it or, unfortunately, when we don’t need it.
A very important part of this process is our emotional repertoire. Our emotional repertoire is our ‘logged’ supply of all the emotions we used with specific stressors down through the years.
“We go through life encountering new emotional events that may be interpreted by our automatic appraising system as similar to a theme or variation already stored in our emotional database, and when this happens, an emotion is triggered. Sometimes we respond emotionally, or we are emotionally triggered by things that were important to us earlier in life but are no longer relevant. As adults, we may find ourselves responding inappropriately to emotional triggers that angered, frightened or disgusted us when we were younger, but these reactions may now be unacceptable in our environments today. Our early-learned emotional triggers may have greater strength, greater resistance to unlearning than what we learn later in life. (Dr. Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap).
We go through life from child to adult constantly experiencing emotional events; some good, some bad. Our brain tags and files all the emotions, feelings and thoughts for all our stress responses in our emotional repertoire, a section of our emotional database. So when we’re faced with the same or similar childhood stressors later in life, we automatically respond by ‘coping’ with the same childhood emotions, feelings and thoughts in our adult world. Unfortunately, most of the time, these childhood emotions, feelings and thoughts don’t fix our adult problems because they don’t fit into our adult world and usually get us into more trouble than the original childhood stressors. This is something we all experience whether we admit it or not.
Our reptilian brain logs all our emotional scripts, how we dealt with past stressors, in the hope they will protect us as we go through life, but it does not update them to fit better into an ‘age-appropriate’ environment as we get older. We are meant to do this manually, especially when we realize we are not coping well with our important relationships. We do this by developing our understanding of the world and our place in it. By learning social and cultural norms, by educating ourselves, by adapting to others and our circumstances. By being conscious of our behaviour as we get older and how our behaviour affects us and the people around us. We update our feelings and thoughts, which update our emotions and our behaviour to more ‘adult’ approaches, which automatically amends our childhood ‘emotional scripts’ to fit better with our age-appropriate and dynamically evolving emotional repertoire.
To get a grip on our psychological state of mind, we need to have some knowledge of our emotions, feelings, thoughts and behaviour. Our emotions don’t just change our psychology but also our biology, physiology and behaviour.
“There are three phases to every emotion: 1) The internal or external stressor: A bad memory, disturbing thought, pain, a smell, taste, touch or sight of something or someone disturbing. Our brain will register this event and alert us it is happening. Our emotion at this stage is apprehension and curiosity, milder forms of fear. 2) Prepare to respond: Our brain appraises the situation, event or person and let’s us know if it is beneficial or harmful and simultaneously it alerts the body for action; to approach or to avoid. Our brain will trigger an acute stress response based on fear only when it judges a situation, event or person as harmful. If it judges the stressor as helpful, it will trigger our bodies to approach and explore based on joy. 3) The mind takes over: As our bodies are being readied for action, our mind (psychological state) is being altered to support what our bodies need to do. At this stage, we experience a range of sensations and impulses which our mind automatically attaches meaning to; we can now recognise distinctive emotions such as frustration, joy or sadness”. (Dr. Russ Harris, The Happiness Trap)
So, as you can see, your brain registers and alerts you to what’s going on around you; it’s like a radar constantly picking up and assessing everything, and when it figures out what everything is, it triggers an emotion. While understanding emotions, stressors and stress responses is vital if you are going to get a grip on your psychological state of mind, it’s also important to get some knowledge of other factors that affect the state of your mind.
Emotions, feelings and thoughts are not the whole story when it comes to our psychological state, Positive and Negative Affect and Moods are important parts of this story. We’ll dive into these later, for now let’s all focus on creating a safe and stable environment to stay as happy and as healthy as we can be.
By Joan Maycock
Joan Maycock MSc Health Psychologist specialising in designing, setting up and presenting Stress and Burnout Educational Retreats, Workshops and 1 on 1 sessions on Stress Response, Stress-Illness Link and De-Stressing for business owners, directors and staff in Ireland and Portugal.
Telephone 00351-915793592 Email: mindsynergyint@proton.me
