Getting Emotive About Human Emotions

I'm going to talk about something today which is potentially common knowledge, as we are all human, we are all alive, therefore, we all have a head full of restricting, scary and beautiful emotions.


So why are we such mental cases when it comes to our emotions? Why can't we just have the head space of a lizard? Just poke our tongues out to suss out what's going on around us and get on with it.


Of course the answer is simple, survival. We would never have evolved into the wonderfully intelligent beings that we are without our emotions, they are instincts of survival. 


Emotions help us with our decision making. We tend to make most decisions based on whether you will gain pain or pleasure from the outcome. Fear means you won't smile at a crocodile and sadness means you will avoid ending a treasured relationship unless you absolutely have to.


Emotion is the instinct that helps us survive not only mentally but physically too.


If we didn't have the emotion of love, we might let any old muppet look after our baby, therefore exposing your offspring to greater risk and reducing human survival rates. Without the emotion of guilt (or fear of the law), we might just kill a housemate out of irritation for eating our ice cream and not think twice about it, again less human survival rates.


Just hundreds of years ago in medieval times, people would have no qualms about killing over a few scoops of ice cream. There was a lot less guilt about killing, less fear of death and less value placed on life. Luckily, from expanding education came knowledge on how to best take care of our emotions and reduce the negative affects they have on individuals and society. 


Not to be naive though, of course sadly there are still plenty of places around the world which lack in education but of course have the same emotion as any other living person, there is just less knowledge on how important it is to control emotions and how powerful emotions actually are.


Fear is a key survival feature to humans, without good old fear we might just walk into a habitat of wolves and tell them what large features they have. It's fascinating to think that there are actually some people out there who are completely without fear. They lack a brain structure called amygdala. There is one particular woman in the United States who is assisting scientists in hope that studying someone who is immune to fear could help those whose lives are destroyed by it. She had a knife held to her throat and spooked out her attacker by speaking so casually and calmly.


Someone once asked me "Why is it considered normal for people to sit on a bus looking so miserable? Why is someone suddenly perceived as weird if they are extraverted with a joyful emotion?" I didn't have the answer then but I think I have it now and it all comes down to emotions. If you think about it, most of our emotions unfortunately aren't positive ones. We have fear, sadness, anger, guilt, shame, envy, hatred, embarrassment, frustration, grief, pity, pride, regret and many more negative feelings with a contrast of just a few positive ones such as happiness, joy and cheer, which are essentially the same thing and then feelings towards people like compassion, hope and forgiveness. There are simply more negative emotions to be felt than positive and in this cruel world of war, torture, hate, crime and killing, it's not likely that someone on the bus is going to be pepped up if they are reading about the war in Iraq or the starving children in Africa. And even if it was your birthday and you were on your way to the movies after having a delicious pancake breakfast and rocking the new leather jacket your girlfriend gave you, this emotion could change to sadness or sympathy in a second if you saw or heard something gloomy. 


Emotions can change in an instant, sometimes you can control them and sometimes you can't. Sometimes they are temporary and sometimes they will last a lifetime. It's just the nature of the beast.


Mostly I think, in my immediate surroundings anyway, people will just be feeling content. Not happy, not sad, not angry, just content. And this is why we are all cursed with this ceaseless and dull common greeting which goes a little something like this:


"Hey, how are you?"
"Good thanks."


Really we should just answer with "Content thanks" or "Feeling really lousy but I don't want to talk about it with you, thanks."


We tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves with our inner emotions coming through our facial expressions, our body movement, our breathing and our language. Our faces in particular actually have about 90 muscles, 30 of which have the sole purpose of demonstrating our emotions and moods to others.


It's kind of like how a dog needs to growl and bear teeth to demonstrate that they not to be messed with, while we humans can do it with a few minor muscle movements in our face. 


In conclusion, emotions are wonderful things that have helped us survive. They can make you feel on top of the world at times and other times just be a real pain in the heart. But if you are lucky enough to know that the pain is temporary, then you can be thankful for that.