Emotions are Temporary Messengers
Your emotions are like an iconic crime family. Full of colorful characters with quirks. They’re connected by gossip and often travel with a posse. How you deal with one of them impacts how all the rest of them treat you. Sadness visits and you leave them on the doorstep? Happiness will snub you after a while.
How you handle a visit from a mobster has consequences. When they show up, pay attention. The flow of your life will change based on your relationship with them. And there’s no escaping their visits; how you deal makes the difference.
A more scientific approach might describe emotions on a spectrum. Tuning into your emotions is like turning up the volume level, while ignoring the messages of emotions is like turning the volume down. As much as we try, we can’t truly prevent thoughts of worry, irritation, or anger, but we can turn down the volume on our emotional response, suppressing or trying to distract ourselves from them. Since emotions are connected (on a scientific spectrum, or a figurative family of mobsters), suppressing one emotion reduces our sensitivity to all the rest.
Avoiding fear and worry leads to choices limiting our experiences of delight and satisfaction, pride and victory. For example, we won’t have to deal with the disappointment of a breakup if we don’t start a relationship in the first place; that situational avoidance connects joy and belonging to disappointment and abandonment. By avoiding the “bad” ones we also reduce our opportunities for the “good” ones.
Taking chances at work, braving the exhaustion of acquiring a new skill, and navigating uncertainty to find your purpose in life all involve opportunities for fear, shame, failure, loss, grief, and discouragement to visit us. But they’re also the unavoidable pathways to positive emotions like fulfillment, victory, delight, discovery, and joy.
Most of us need to learn how to feel more.
To feel more intelligently.
To feel more intensely.
To feel more broadly.
To feel more rapidly.
To feel more temporarily.
For the sake of this discussion, let’s define emotion. I first heard this functional definition verbalized in a webinar by author Renee Jain. (Learn more about her at GoZen.com.) Her work helping children have emotionally healthy lives is powerful and effective because she knows how to say useful things simply.
🗯️ “Emotions are temporary messengers.” — Renee Jain
Even just those two words – temporary and messengers – tell us so much about what to expect from our emotions and how to engage with them well.
An emotion’s primary purpose is to carry information. As a messenger, an emotion bears with it ideas and data about your experience of reality. When joy arrives, it has the potential to tell you something. The same is true with shame, fear, hope, and irritation.
Day to day we mostly engage the other purpose emotions have: we use them for energy. Our emotions are what help us feel like doing things. Whether it’s gratitude making us feel like saying thank you, or anger making us feel like holding someone accountable, that emotional messenger arrives with the energy to DO SOMETHING.
🗯️ Maybe you can tell I’ve started working on a book about Emotional Growth Tactics. Stay tuned on the Wild + Brave Blog for more research snacks and wild ideas designed to help you Find Your Brave. Want to help me with emotion research? Answer a couple of questions to help me write a better book!