You’re Not Stuck With Your Emotions: Neuroscience on Feeling and Choice

I was just listening to a neuroscientist saying that not all cultures experience emotions in the same way.

What does this mean for us?

It means that we experience an emotion as sensations in our body, but then we interpret those sensations. It happens so quickly that we assume that it is all the same thing.  

Some are fairly consistent.  But many others are not. 

Those sensations don’t necessarily have to mean what we’ve always assumed they mean.  We have more choice in our emotions that we might think.

Did you know that often anxiety or nervousness feel the same in our bodies as excitement?  The difference is how we interpret it. 

Wow.

But once we have those interpreted emotions, we can’t just change them around.  We still need to allow and process them through our bodies.  

After we do that, then we can use awareness to catch an emotion at an earlier place.  

Sometimes we catch emotions when we realize things aren’t happening the way we want in our lives.  Then we figure out what we’ve been doing to cause those results. 

Then, what we were feeling when we did those things.  

And we give ourselves compassion at whatever point we catch ourselves.  And when we get things early enough, it is at that point that we can decide how we want to interpret those sensations in our bodies.  

It usually takes practice and help to notice and to create believable interpretations. 

So be patient.