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The Tree of Life

How Emotions are Not Built-In but Made by Us Ourselves

Updated: Oct 24

It is incredible that the old knowledge on emotions, that I have studied thoroughly during my last professional management training in London only a few years back, based on the Goleman’s Triune Brain model, is no longer relevant. What we know now is that we do not have the mammalian brain in us anymore.

The fact that emotions are not built-in but made by us ourselves, and consist of many basic components, I still find surprising and revolutionary.



How emotions are constructed by individuals - blog article discussing the theory that emotions are not innate but created by personal experiences and perceptions. Learn how emotional awareness can enhance personal growth and well-being.
How emotions are constructed by individuals

How are emotions built?

First experiences (inputs) are being categorised into concepts in the brain in early childhood (in the process of learning and creating patterns), and next screened through sensations, to then be translated into emotions. And all of that is happening at an incredible speed as well. Therefore, we can say that the brain reacts (in a process of making predictions) before we even make a conscious decision what to do next, in certain circumstances.

 

Problematic Emotions

Equally interesting for me is the problematic subject of emotions.

Blocking negative emotions, trying to resist them, actually causes the prefrontal cortex (part of the brain) to stop dealing with them, which is not helping us but rather the opposite, creating a brain harming process.

The quickest, most effective way to solve emotional issues is actually naming, accepting and reframing them, which helps to reduce the emotional charge (emotional response of the amygdala) and as an result acting in a more thoughtful way, finding new ways and coming to solutions.

 

The Brain is Making Transactions

The brain’s main function and purpose is to ensure that we grow, survive and reproduce, all in line with the concept of costs and benefits, very much like ‘brain transactions’. Whatever or whenever we make a withdrawal, we need to next make up for it . The body budget (very much like our household budget) needs to be in the positive.

In learning about how it all works and how it is interconnected – the way all of our body functions are able to affect emotions – was one of the biggest discovery points and learning points for me, when studying neuroscience. Not only am I have starting to monitor my internal processes according to the body budget systems, but I have also introduced it and have been practicing it as a valuable tool with my clients in therapy.

It is certainly vital for our mental fitness and wellbeing to master our emotions, increase their granularity and practice mindfulness as a way of keeping the body budget in good shape, which can finally translate into our physical and mental health state.

 

The way the brain creates concepts

Living our daily lives, using the brain 24 hours a day, we seem not even to consider how incredibly intelligent and sophisticated the brain’s mechanisms are, to enable us to do what we want to do in life. One of such mechanisms is known as creating ‘concepts’.

This is how new experiences provoke the brain to combine the experiences into new concepts, thus forming new more complex ones. New concepts (gained from learning new words, watching movies, going on trips, trying new foods etc) drive new predictions, which in turn regulate the body budget. And, then the body budget finally determines how we feel in return. So complex and simple at the same time.

 

Emotions, Body Budget and Chronic Pain

A chronically imbalanced body budget though releases and increases Cortisol and inflammation, creating a truly vicious circle in that brain as a result.

This very fact proves helpful for me in understanding my client’s pain and related health issues. Both physical health as well as the brain inflammation process, can also manifest itself as difficulties with concentration and remembering things, which are main factors in the stress and anxiety treatment approach.

Trying to take medicines to cure this situation might not appear to be best solution in such cases, not to mention that they can actually create more problems.

 

The realisation of what our brain's real problem often is, that our body budget is seriously long term over-drawn, may be a true turning point for us.

Because, what a brain often needs is something called ‘correction’. In the language of neuroscience, by using the correction process, the ‘prediction error’ in a disturbed brain can finally be fixed. And this changes everything.

This also relates very much to overall learning and teaching on mindset, especially how adaptive challenges require deeper shifts in thinking and behavioural patterns. The tool of reappraisal in challenging situations and destructive thoughts, how it helps to alter the meaning we give to a particular situation appears to be most useful here.

Changing a belief system, or a mindset, in fact, directly influences the meaning we give to stress in general.

 

Stress Can Also Be Good For Us

Nevertheless, the fact that stress is also important to us and can play an important role as a positive factor, is another interesting point. Most people do not realise how believing stress is bad can seriously influence us and can even increase the risk of death. It is rather incredible how merely changing the view from ‘stress is bad’ to ‘stress is good’ can prolong our lifespan.

Changing our belief system, or a mindset, is in fact about changing the meaning we give to stress in general. Without a certain level of stress in our lives, we wouldn't be as driven to accomplish things. Stress acts as a motivator, pushing us to take action and pursue our goals.

 

Relationships Change our Emotions

Talking about relationships we usually think about our adult ones.

Neuroscience knowledge on the brain tells us to look at that subject in a wider perspective though; relationships as not only an adult-to-adult ones (even if looking at the wider sense of this word), but also how infants and children relate to their caregivers is another important aspect of that subject. How much the quality of our life, certain behavioural patterns, or even the ability to form attachments is being imprinted in our human brain, depending in large on our upbringing, early life experience and the environment we grow up in.

There is therefore a big chance that the battles we experience in our adulthood, and which we have struggled with for years since our childhood, we will continue to struggle with in the future. Unless, of course, we realise it, accept it and reframe it, so that things can be delt with successfully in our brain.

This might be hard to do on our own, but certainly it is very much possible to deal with it utilising the right therapeutic tools.

 

Lack of love and positivity in general, experienced as early as in an infancy period, may directly be the reason for our adult emotional life struggles, creating various kinds of insecure attachments.

 

That Beautiful and Incredible Super Powerful Machine – the Mighty Brain

It is absolutely fascinating how areas of our brains are interconnected, cooperate with each other, talk to the gut and the heart, gather information, and regulate our system in the main, big task: to help us to survive and pass life over to future generations.

 

My main reflection here though is, how the enormous power of our brain and mind, both the immediately available and the untapped potential, is largely not appreciated, is underestimated, or not understood by us ourselves – the very owners of that Mighty Brain.

 

In Every Cloud There is a Silver Lining

The remarkable and valuable fact here though is that our mind, especially the infinitely intelligent unconscious one, is something we can actually impact upon and change. It possesses the ability to be trained, to learn, to respond and to develop. Past experiences of life and learning create a kind of a database, an unconscious reservoir of knowledge and experience, which is something we can reach for whenever needed in the future. But that is also something which cannot be changed.

 

Nonetheless, the overall good news is that we actually do have the ability to influence and improve the quality of our life and the future, in a process of conscious decision making and practicing mindfulness, breaking the old patterns that have held us back from success and create new experiences, a new conscious reality to live in. You can create and make a new, lasting change.

 

And this is where NLP and hypnotherapy steps in and make it possible for that to happen.


Find out how to start this process on my website: www.nlp-lifechanges.co.uk

 

        

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