Nomenclature: Feelings, Mood and Emotion
Technically speaking, Feeling, Mood and Emotion are all different, but often people use them interchangeably. We will try to be accurate here, but be aware that most people don’t recognise the distinctions.
A Feeling is the response you get to a stimuli, event or situation. Feelings are generally informative, adding to what you know about a situation. That feeling should shift as you consider a new thing.
A Mood is the average of how you have been feeling. A strong or persistent Feeling may colour your newer feelings, or this may be giving the greater contribution to your decisions. You may have a sad Mood today, AND be happy that I asked you how you are.
An Emotion is what other people think you are Feeling. You may be Feeling Angry, but projecting (emoting) being happy (Joy) and so I will think that your Emotion is happy, mistaking that projection as how you Feel. Emotions can lie. We are not required to show people how we Feel, nor tell them what our Mood is.
Primary Feelings
We humans have 6 Primary Feelings.
- Joy
- Fear
- Anger
- Disgust
- Sadness
- Surprise
These are biological signals from our Amygdala to our pre-Frontal Cortex to inform us about the situation before us. They impart only three qualities:
- Feeling Type: the type of feeling you are having
- Feeling Strength: the strength of that feeling to this situation
- Feeling Response: the default action for that type and strength, which your prefrontal cortex (thinking) may override
Our Amygdala’s job is to keep us alive first, and developing second. It is more important for you to be alive than happy, because not-alive is a dead end. That can lead to emergency actions that work to preserve you, but not necessarily what we would call a good outcome. Our Amygdala tries to fit the Feeling to the circumstances based on pattern recognition, which itself is a combination of biological impulses and our prior experience in response to what we sense.
There are three areas in that statement that can go wrong, leading to our feeling type, feeling strength and feeling response can be mistaken, which then leads to unwise decisions and actions.
Sensory
We have an estimated 5 billion sensory inputs to our body, which get whittled down to the top 100 or so by the time it hits our cerebellum (hind brain), which our Amygdala considers when pattern matching for “safe” and “not safe”. If you do not sense the new thing, your body cannot report it to you. If that sense perception of the thing is not what is kept when reporting to cerebellum, your Amygdala cannot report it to you. If your central processing system mis-codes the thing, then you will mistake what it means.
If we do not correctly sense the occurrence, we cannot correctly assign a feeling to it.
Biology
There are three major types of biological effects on our feelings.
- We can have a feeling due to a signal from our own body attempting to get our attention, which we can mistakenly externalise, such as hunger, pain or exhaustion.
- Philic (love for) / Phobic (fear/hate for) response to stimuli. This is often a low level biological response which can be temporarily overridden, but often not.
- Biological condition, such as cardiovascular (heart), respiratory (breathing), Neurotransmitters (mental ill health), hormones (adrenaline, sex hormones, diabetes etc) and others.
Perception / Memory / Prior Experiences
We can have a Feeling Response (Emotional Reaction) to something that is occurring outside of you right now, or to an active memory of when something happened to you before, or to an active projection imagination of what you may go through in the future. This will be based heavily filtered through your past experiences and your biological response to that particular type of stimuli.
This history filter is what informs us about what the sensory input, recalled event or projected future mean to us, and thus which Feeling Type we assign to it, what Feeling Strength this example represents and what Feeling Response we should automatically do.
Fortunately, we can reprogram this, which we have detailed in our page on Retraining the Brain.
Feeling Type: Understanding our Primary Feelings
Fundamentally, our Primary Feelings are about maximising our survival. They are there to help us recognise the situation that we are in, solve the problem and then act in a way that we survive, and hopefully, thrive.
We can quickly transition form an uncomfortable primary Feeling to a secondary Feeling and not recognise our primary response. Unfortunately, this often leads to unwise behaviours which decrease our quality of life.
Humans can feel a large range of secondary and tertiary feelings. Many of these are subtle variations of the basic 6 biological Primary Feelings, such as Love is a variant of Joy; while some of them are not connect to these in any direct way, such as pride.
There is no inherently “good” or “bad” feeling. These are informative.
We are not our feelings, although sometimes our feelings can override our choices.
Joy
When our Amygdala reports “safe” we feel content and at peace. We can take advantage of our safety to pursue opportunities and enjoy our selves. Our primary fundamental feeling here is Joy. Joy has many different qualities and subtleties to it when we look at secondary and tertiary levels of how we feel.
At low levels, we may find it hard to get satisfaction in doing things. Often this is a sign of fatigue, often a component to poor blood sugar level or low adrenaline and noradrenaline.
At medium levels we are happy.
At high levels, we can be ecstatic, in love, overjoyed and celebrating. This is fine when the moment is appropriate for feeling this good, but can be problematic when this persistent for too long, or the enjoyment overrides safety, such as mania.
Joy is intimately linked with the bio-chemicals Endorphins, Dopamine and Oxytocin, which we talk about in our Neurotransmitters page.
Fear
When our Amygdala identifies that we are “not safe” it may be due to an expectation of pain, either physical, social or identity. Fear prompts us to do something about the source of pain, either avoiding it (flight), fighting it (fight) or managing it (freeze and faun). This leads us to the four Emergency Survival Response Actions:
- Freeze (don’t draw notice from the threat)
- Faun (make the threat not be threatening any more, eg People Pleasing)
- Flight (it can’t hurt you if your aren’t there)
- Fight (defeat the threat with aggression, which can be physical or non-physical actions)
We have an expanded page for understanding and managing Fear/Anxiety.
The Biochemicals Anxiety is mainly tied to is Noradrenaline, despite antianxiety medication being aimed at Serotonin.
Anger
When our Amygdala identifies that we are “not safe” it may be due to recognising a problem that is going to cause us problems later. This can overlap a bit with Fear, but the difference is that we mostly don’t expect the problem to cause the same kind of direct pain. When there is an active threat, then Anger is often secondary to Fear, the Fight response.
Much like Fear, we have an Anger Response Actions:
- Passive (see if the problem resolves itself; similar to Freeze)
- Passive Aggressive (passive against the problem, venting actions to relieve stress; an extended Freeze)
- Assertive (strongly defending your boundaries, collaborative solution seeking; an element of Faun)
- Aggressive (pushing for your rights, polarising, not collaborative, may be physical but is usually non-physical; an element of Fight)
- Evade / Run (if you can’t fix it, and you can’t win, get out; akin to flight)
We have an expanded page for understanding and managing Anger.
The Biochemicals Anger is mainly tied to is Cortisol and the Dopaminergic Neurotransmitters.
Disgust
When our Amygdala identifies that we are “not safe” it may be due to recognising a problem that is going to sicken us. This could be a physical sickening, such as an infectious agent, or morally/identity sicken us, such as a person’s disgusting behaviour. This feeling fundamentally repulses us, driving us to avoid, contain and condemn the source.
Disgust is the driving force behind phobia responses. Phobia responses are generally not rational, although evidence and logic are good places to start, to help you use your cognition to override your basic disgust actions.
Our default response to disgust is:
- Avoid
- Condemn
- Destroy
Sadness
Sadness is complex. While there is a component of the Amygdala driving Sadness, this feeling is more of an all brain activity.
Sadness recognises change and loss, allowing us to change who we are for our future.
We often mistake Depression as Sadness, and while they are cousins, they are not the same. Sadness is closely related to how we make decisions on change, the stronger version is called Grief.
Biochemically, Depression is more about fatigue and low adrenals, however the absence of Joy (anhedonia, low Endorphins and low Sex hormones) can trigger both.
Surprise
Surprise is the feeling of “pause” we get when our prediction / expectations break. Fundamentally, we predict what is coming so that we have already triggered the actions that we need to be in place to manage what is happening now. We discuss this in full detail in the Grief page. Surprise is the first step in changing in circumstances where our ability to predict what is next has failed.
Surprise triggers us to pause our next action until we can determine why our prediction failed, or can replace it with a close enough model to predict on again. Surprise is tied to our feeling of uncertainty, which can create problems with our sense of identity and trigger imposter syndrome.
From Feeling to Action
OLD TEXT
Last time, we covered how we can have an emotional experience of a situation, like fear, and how at low levels, that is useful, informative and often exhilarating – that is, we enjoy it.
At higher levels, the fear can push us to consider only three possibilities – Freeze, Flight and Fight, generally in that order.
In an emergency, those choices could save our life – and that is a good thing.
However the job of fear and our ability to predict the future is to avoid that kind of emergency. This involves having a plan to deal with the expected threat.
We will do another video on threat planning.
The purpose of this video is to look at what happens when our fear system mis-detects a threat – either by over-representing the threat – which could be anxiety or phobia; or when there is no threat present and we have either general anxiety at milder levels, an anxiety attack at middle levels or a full on panic attack.
In the last video we talked about how our ramp up system is a sympathetic nervous system response to fear, and to counter it we need to implement a parasympathetic nervous system mechanism. Manually using this built in ramp down mechanism is a body hack.
There are many methods to implement the parasympathetic body hack, but they rely on some fairly specific components. We are going to look at those in this next section.
In brief, there are 5 main steps:
Assessment – is there really something dangerous here. If not
Disrupt the panic mechanism
Quiet the mind with a distraction
Solve the problem
Learn from the experience
- Assessment –
Imagine that our hind-brains have detected a potential threat. Is it real? The hind-brain doesn’t care, it just hits the panic button, which ramps us up for disaster.
The ramp up process has a whole bunch of things that occur that we have no real conscious control over – redirected blood flow, the size of our pupils, biochemicals in our blood stream, accelerated blood flow and pressure, intestinal disruption and accelerated breathing.
Once our body has reached panic mode, it has some expectations – that we will have to act with strong exertion to overcome an enemy, that we are going to be hurt, that everything will be rushed because the disaster is here.
At 10 out of 10 fear, we are in panic mode, while at around 7 we might just be at highly anxious. Either way, our goal is to drop that by a few points.
Step 1 – Is there actually a disaster here? If there is a strong sign of clear and present danger, then go with your instincts for now, because you don’t have time to solve it if the danger is that big. If it is not that big, then this is a false alarm.
Step 2 – Disruption –
Once we have worked out that this is a false alarm, we need to disrupt this automatic mechanism. While we don’t have much control over that big list, we do have some control over our breath – so we will start there.
Humans at rest normally breathe an “in and out” cycle between 12 to 20 times each minute. That is a breath every 3 to 5 seconds – a nice average for most people is 4 seconds, so that is the number we will work on in this video. If you find the exercises in this are a bit fast or slow for you, by all means adjust the numbers for your own comfort.
Two main components of disruptive breathing is that we breathe slowly instead of fast, and that when we can, we breathe deeply into our stomachs.
A few quick breath control methods
The four breath cycle
Breathe in slowly for a count of 4 seconds, now hold it for 4 seconds, now slowly breathe out for four seconds, now hold that for four seconds, now repeat – breathe in for four seconds. It is important to count the seconds in our heads, or when safe, out loud.
Sipping cold water
Get a glass or bottle of cool non-alcoholic drink. The point of this is that you can’t swallow liquid and breath air at the same time. Now, slowly sip the liquid until you have a nice mouth full. Slowly swallow a bit. Now another bit. Now another bit. How many swallows can you get to before it is done? Now take a slow breath cycle and sip some more.
Hot drink exercise
Get a cup of hot drink. Take a deep breath and blow across the top to cool it. Take another deep breath and repeat a few more times. Now sip the hot drink and slowly swallow it. Repeat.
Breath control works because it disrupts our sympathetic nervous system response by doing something different, and that something is not a thing we would do if we were under attack. It is a clear signal to our hind-brain that it was wrong.
Step 2) Disrupting the behaviour
Step 3) Quieting the mind
I’m going to take the time to talk about time for a moment. Either something is clear and present and very “now”, such as a direct physical attack, or it is “soon” in the next few minutes – definitely less than 30 minutes. If the threat is more than half an hour away, in this panic response plan, it should be considered “forever”. Doing a calm down routine only takes minutes. The benefit of being calm when solving the threat is much higher than being panicked – so do the calm down exercises.
There is a risk of re-triggering panic prematurely when you try to solve the unsolvable with inadequate brain cells. We need to claim back a few more of those points out of 10 and lower the threat arousal system. The previous step was disruption, this step is about distraction.
You probably know some of these from social media. Unfortunately they don’t explain when to use them – which is after you’ve taken the edge off panic with breath control.
So here are a few:
Colours – in your mind, remember the sequence of the rainbow – ROY G BIV.
R is red, look for something that is reddish.
O is orange, look for something orange ish.
Y is yellow, look for something yellow ish
G is green, you know what to do
B is blue.
I is indigo – a dark purple
V is violet – a light purple
Senses – in primary school we are taught that we have 5 primary senses. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching.
Touch – feel the texture of part of your clothes or an object that you can touch that is near you. Look for sharp, blunt, rough and smooth
Taste – what is the taste in your mouth right now? Is it sour, bitter, sweet, salty or umami (greasy)?
Smell – can you smell something? What is it?
Hearing – what is the loudest sound you can hear? What about the softest? The highest pitch? The lowest pitch?
Sight – do the colour exercise we just did, or look for the thing that is furthest away from you and then something close up.
Mind
From 30, count backwards in 3’s until you get to 0. 30, 27, 24…
Think of two movies or stories that you really like. Who are the two characters you like the most? Now what if they met each other?
What are you going to eat for your next meal?
What are all the cards in your wallet – can you remember them? Now pull out your wallet and verify them.
There are quite a few other exercises that can be done, but they all have the common features of being able to be done in public without drawing much attention to yourself and each of these distracts you from the potential threat that isn’t here.
Step 4) Solve the problem
Some threats (including false alarms and retreating threats) can be ignored which means there is nothing to do.
Some need to be monitored calmly to see if they increase, decrease or just stay irritating.
Some need active attention and a management plan. We will cover management plans in another video.
The question to ask yourself is this – which threat is this? And now that you know, what action plan do you pick?
Step 5) Learn from the experience
Part of the anxiety cycle is not learning from our surviving and facing our fears. We got to the end – we survived! Now, what did we learn?
Sometimes we learn that the alarm was false – either because there was no nothing to fear, or the thing we feared was not accurate. By sticking around and facing the possibility of the threat coming, and it didn’t, we learned that false alarms can’t hurt you, and staying is powerful.
Sometimes we learn that we did need to act, but the action wasn’t panic. It was a calmer response with more thought. It is important to acknowledge that this worked, and that this was better than the panic response.
Sometimes we learn that the threat was real, and that we had a truly close encounter. But we survived, so our response was good enough. Good enough is nice, but what is nicer is a calm review of what actions we could do next time that would give us even better outcomes. These are things to practice.
Sometimes we learn that there is nothing we can do and we are just damn lucky that we survived. It is important to recognise that we survived because of dumb luck, and that no one else could have done better, because we had no part to play in this.
Sometimes we learn that our choices were wrong. How were they wrong? How could they be better? What do we need to practice for next time? Did one of the exercises not work well?
Many people don’t review their experience and learn from it. This is that opportunity.
Many people get stuck on reviewing all of their past mistakes and never implement a change. This is the time to break that cycle – figure out 1 to 3 things to change, to practice and do that. Now stop reviewing this experience because you have learned from it.