Emotions Are Energy: They Create Us And Transform Us
Emotions are the score that orchestrates our daily life. Sometimes the music is joyful, lively and intense, but after a while it envelops us in its sad melody full of disenchantment.
These are the notes that nourish us, that give us the energy necessary to transform our reality …
There is an old Arabic proverb which says: “who does not understand a look will not understand an explanation either”. A sentence full of great wisdom, because it is from it that emanates the nature of emotions as a universal language.
Maybe the topic of emotional intelligence interests you and you have read a lot about it.
Yet today we want to invite you to see emotions in another way: as a weapon of power, as an energy that we can know and control to redefine many aspects of ourselves and our own. reality.
Emotions create our reality
According to a work published by social psychologist Barbara Fredrickson in Review of General Psychology (2008), positive emotions, in addition to giving us occasional satisfaction, act as learning mechanisms.
In other words: the more satisfying emotions we accumulate, the better the personal resources to face periods of crisis.
If emotions are capable of transforming our reality, it is not by magic. You should know that emotion is not only an inner state, it is an association of several powerful elements:
- Cognitions, that is, the way in which we transform everything that surrounds us, what we see, feel, experience. Everything acquires an internal meaning for us.
- Our feelings and the way we react. To understand, we’ll give you a simple example: you are in love with someone and you dare not tell them. Then, it’s too late and that person disappears from your life. You then lose the opportunity to tell him, at least to try.
The emotion you will feel is sadness because you did not know how to react in time when this feeling was positive and intense.
You did not take the action appropriate to the situation and your reality is now drowned in a conditional that you will no longer be able to resolve: “if I had done that…”.
Our brain, an incredible chemical dance
Our brain is a complex network that transforms large amounts of information every second. We transform sensory stimuli, we store experiences, dreams, scenery seen …
Most of these elements, whether you believe it or not, are stored in our brain, depending on the emotion we feel.
Often, we also see our brain as a little biochemical chaos where we are determined by the influence of neurotransmitters. In fact, they are genuine facilitators of our emotions.
The main neurotransmitters related to emotions
The main neurotransmitters that act as emotional facilitators are:
- Dopamine is linked to the experiences of pleasure and rewards our learning process. That is, when we do something good, we are gratified by the secretion of dopamine and we experience a sensation of pleasure.
- Serotonin, on the other hand, is a neurotransmitter linked to memory and learning. It is important to know that an imbalance in serotonin levels can cause anger, anxiety, depression, and feelings of panic.
- Norepinephrine, at appropriate levels, keeps stress and anxiety under control.
Emotional energy to transform your life
Dr. Fredrickson, cited above and expert in emotional psychology, explains that there is a curious paradox regarding positive emotions: their intensity is much shorter than negative emotions.
That is, the feeling of happiness is shorter than the state of sadness.
The best is to accumulate a lot of positive experiences which can counteract these states of negativity more effectively. We will explain it to you in more detail.
The Theory of Expanding and Building Positive Emotions
As we said in the introduction, if the human being is able to accumulate positive emotions, he will have the most competent basic tools to face difficult times.
- Experts call it the “enlargement and construction theory” and it is based on the need to multiply our positive experiences in order to acquire new skills.
- While negative emotions usually respond to avoidance, negation or immobility, positive emotions “grow” us and promote the relationship between “thought and action”.
Thus, according to the principle of this theory, we should orient our days towards positive emotions, towards things as simple as learning new things, having social relations, walking, touching, dancing, smelling, walking or reading …
These are little stones of positivity that gradually build continuous change. Dare to try!
