At our core, beyond reasoning or sensibility, we experience the world around us through emotions. These feelings are the same base feelings as any other mammal, though they express differently.
Basis
Biochemically, a feeling is a hormone reaction triggered by a response to environmental stimuli based on a particular belief synthesized through experience. This stimulus can come from our perceptions, or simply from our physical state. These feelings provoke impulses that drive our decisions and purposes.
In one sense, feelings are low-level forms of logic, but framed on reactionary premises instead of well-formed ones.
Our impulses also form into thoughts of their own, which can also trigger our beliefs as we think them, meaning we can feel things from noticing our feelings. All of it is even messier because our beliefs only have a loose relationship to reasoning or reality.
Even analytical, logical people are bound by their feelings, though they’re often afraid of their feelings guiding them.
All feelings are driven from either a core belief that’s either a love or fear of something, and they represent in relationship to fulfilling one of six basic needs in an approximate progressive order:
- Certainty – assurance you can avoid pain or gain pleasure
- Uncertainty or Variety – the need for new experiences
- Significance – the need to feel important, special, or needed
- Connection or Love – feeling closeness or united with something
- Growth – extending ability or understanding
- Contribution – helping others in some capacity
The need fulfillment (and its associated feelings) work through our needs in pairs:
- We first look for certainty (to feel safe), then uncertainty (to feel a sense of adventure).
- Then, we look for significance to feel we matter (what we do), but at the same time see love and acceptance (who we are).
- Finally, we look to grow (inward development) and contribute (outward development).
Bias
Feelings create bias, and we tend to call things that are heavy with feelings “personal experiences”. So-called “personal experience” makes us very prone to deceiving ourselves in many directions. When we experience trauma, we have feelings we’re unaware of that profoundly affect our lives long after the events have passed.
We can discipline ourselves to focus on reality more, but have no direct control over the feelings that flavor our thought. We must experience our feelings to find what beliefs drive them (which is frequently painful) and there’s no shortcut to understanding them.
Most people never break their bias from the feelings they first sensed. This can be trained, but it requires tons of analysis.
When they’re sincere, feelings are our soul’s lifeline to reality. Without feelings, we don’t really identify ourselves within reality, and it can create an existential disconnect if we persist in a prolonged state of non-feeling.
Classifications
Most feelings are based on a few key primitives. To make them easier to see, they’ve been placed in bold.
Joy comes from perceiving things that add value to our lives, especially when it appears to be new or meaningful. While we often attribute good things to joy, mentally well people find joy in habitual things without provocation. Taken too far, though, the pursuit of joy becomes addiction.
It’s worth addressing that “happiness” can mean two different things. It can either mean joy, or the general absence of desire. To live well, someone should have either of them approximately 30-70% of the time during any given day.
Sadness comes from perceiving a loss. While it can apply to almost anything, it’s usually over the loss of a friendship or of power.
When we feel a significant loss, we always cycle through five stages of grief. While each stage can last for years with a great loss, we can feel each stage for a small loss for less than a second:
- Denial – uncertainty the thing happened
- Anger – certainty the thing happened but a feeling of injustice about it
- Bargaining – attempting to negotiate to regain the thing
- Depression – imagining the void of the thing in our lives
- Acceptance – reluctantly admitting reality
Surprise is when events don’t follow our expectations. We can attach it to other feelings to create anything from excitement to horror, but it always corresponds to things we don’t understand before they happen.
Disgust is when we feel repulsed by something, and is the basis of social taboos. When directed inward, it becomes guilt and shame, but it’s the foundation for being productive.
Anger is when we react to a perceived injustice or when we fear losing power. Generally, it’s a catch-all feeling when we don’t understand how to feel otherwise.
Anger is a secondary emotion because it requires two beliefs at once:
- Belief of loss or perceived loss.
- A belief that the loss was unjust.
Compared to others, the feelings of boldness/confidence and fear are far more pervasive, and create the foundations of our personality. Further, while love can refer to affection, it sits more as a habit of giving inherent value to something.
We also mix-and-match feelings far more than any other animal:
- Anticipation and exhilaration is when we expect something fortunate to happen, and disappointment is when it didn’t.
- Confusion is when we desire to know something but don’t.
- We feel closure when we don’t know something, but don’t desire to know it.
- Anger requires trusting our decisions matter, or it’ll become despair or depression.
- Boredom is the combination of curiosity and anger.
- Regret is when we wish we’d have done something different.
If an experience was particularly influential (especially if it was traumatic), we our feelings can persist to frame our beliefs, which can create secondary feelings with much more power over our actions:
- Fear, long-term, becomes anxiety.
- Sadness, when overused, becomes depression.
- Regret long-term becomes shame.
There are hundreds of words to capture every feeling, especially as the object of our situation changes (and provides further associated feelings), and they’re still not precise enough to be accurate to capture most of the sensations.
Focus
We can only feel what we’re focused on, which is frequently trying to “fix” the world around us. If we’re simply running through a habit or distracted by doing two things at once, we won’t feel anything about something.
Most of our feelings come from purposes we’ve subconsciously built and from an experience’s novelty. If we learn something becomes impossible to control (e.g., death) and have gained extreme understanding of it, we can slowly release that control in our own way.
We tend to be very unaware of our feelings until we experience results from them, which is why we need emotional outlets and conversations about topics we feel strongly about. Generally, the feelings hold power over our decisions proportionally to how unaware we are of them.
All feelings have an object in mind, at least when we first perceive that object. However, we can often forget the source later, which will leave a neurological haze of generalized thought that triggers that feeling again without much explanation.
When a person isn’t self-aware of a feeling, they usually staple a quick decision to it. People frequently redirect feelings to another source, which psychology calls transference or projection.
If a feeling persists and is reinforced with understanding, trauma, or desire, it becomes a conviction.
Our feelings are the basis for intuition. Intuition is an instinctual reaction that streamlines how we respond to things, built around the stories from our subconscious understanding of reality.
Patterns
When we feel something, continuing in feeling it without any restraint will intensify our feelings about it even further.
When our feelings our configured to experienced patterns, we have what’s called an “intuition” for something.
Intuitive thinking is extremely useful, in its place. It’s the basis for how we form habits, and experts in most fields develop intuitive skills and understanding that make their job easier and faster.
At the same time, intuition has severe risks. It’s only reliable when proven patterns have come before it. Otherwise, we’re acting on memories that aren’t accurate. If we persist on those past thoughts, it’s likely we’re imposing our past trauma into present decisions as well.
Further, intuition is really difficult to analyze. If our self-reflection ever becomes a judgment of what we feel (instead of merely acceptance), we’ll redefine our intuition to new beliefs about what’s “right”, even when it’s not. Over time, we will make that distorted state of imagination become our new “normal” (i.e., “dysregulation”).
Application
If you want to change your feelings, change your physical state. Furrowing your brow will make you think harder, standing up straight will make you more confident, walking faster will make you more productive.
We can differentiate between our bias and reality by distinguishing what we’re feeling and when. By imagining how we’d perceive if we felt differently, we gain further perspectives and heighten our understanding without needing others’ input.
Most of our feelings would be precisely accurate if they were based on all available information, without imagined information included. Therefore, the best way to perceive fairly is to note when we’re being irrational, then scientifically process all information that’s contrary to what we feel:
- Jumping to the worst possible conclusion (catastrophizing)
- Thinking in extreme all-or-nothing values (black-and-white thinking)
- Using general words like “always” or “never” to describe a specific event (overgeneralizing)
- Predicting the future instead of waiting to see what happens (fortune-telling)
- Focusing on the negative/positive aspects while ignoring the others (mental filtering)
- Discrediting a positive/negative thing or adapting it into the inverse (disqualifying)
- Globally self-declaring oneself as a failure/success, worthless/perfect, or useless/important (labeling)
- Listening more to gut feelings than observable reality (emotional reasoning)
- Taking an event or person’s behavior personally (personalizing)
- Making rigid rules about self/people/reality with words like “should”/”must”/”have to” (demanding)
- Declaring something as unbearable when it’s attainable and worth tolerating (no frustration tolerance)
Decisions based on feelings are a type of “temporary insanity” that are about 20-40 IQ points lower than our rational thoughts, but simple awareness of them is critical for wellness. In fact, the secret to most awareness involves simply acknowledging and identifying our feelings through language without taking action.
Sensational things hit our feelings more, and we should be distrustful proportionally to the sensationalism. This isn’t easy because anger gives us the impression that we have power, so we’re easy to influence toward things that make us angry.
Below everything else that we perceive, we feel. Those feelings define the components we can logically assemble into our perceptions. They’re the raw information we must synthesize, but also must never forget where we got them.
We can only feel things if we believe we’re a participant in that thing, or it’s new to us. If we see ourselves as simply an outside observer of everything and constantly educate ourselves, we’d have very few feelings about anything.
Anger is very useful to get things done, but it ruins our finesse. The only times anger is justified are against objects that can withstand it (e.g., lifting weights) or against people who are performing evil. Otherwise, we must instead acknowledge the fears that drive that anger. “Letting off steam” is simply adding anger onto anger.
Living by feelings, even anger, is an inherent risk. It means we don’t understand things clearly enough to be rational, and it’s possible we may be wrong about something and not know it.
If we’ve suffered trauma, we must work through all the feelings we’ve experienced to attain the good life, at least until we’ve linked them with what our soul is experiencing.
Restraining feelings can serve to suppress our feelings, at least to a degree, but comes with the risk of stifling action in the process. On the other hand, changing beliefs over time will dramatically change how we directly feel about something while maintaining our means to keep persevering.
Even while the object of the feelings changes, our feelings are the same as anyone else’s, so we can easily understand our feelings by observing others’ feelings (“surrogation”). The only alternative is self-reflection, which is difficult to perform because our minds aren’t entirely tethered to reality.
The long-term adverse feelings of depression, shame, and anxiety aren’t bad to have, but they represent a long-term viewpoint that needs changing. This requires us to constrain our adverse emotional states to a minimum possible range to make room for other emotional experiences.