Ugh! Who likes emotions? They’re so stupid and useless!
Not!
This myth couldn’t be further from the truth! Emotions actually give us A LOT of useful information.
They’re wholly primal, meaning they’ve existed since we’ve existed and for survival purposes. Luckily most of us are no longer running away from hungry lions and tigers and bears, but our emotions are still helpful in guiding us. When we pay attention to them, life runs more smoothly and in our favor. But when we don’t, things are usually more difficult and we feel even worse.
So if emotions aren’t actually useless and stupid, why the heck do we have them?
Emotions motivate us to take action
Each of our emotions has an action urge that’s “hard-wired” in our biology. Getting back to those lions, tigers, and bears, (Oh my!) if one of those suckers was to hunt us down we’d need our fear to tell us to get to safety as quick as possible in order to survive! Emotions save us time when we need to act in important situations and don’t have time to think things through. They help us overcome obstacles. Both obstacles in our minds and in the environment.
Emotions communicate important information to us
They’re like signals, or alarms, that something is happening that we need to pay attention to. This is what people mean when they talk about their intuition or a gut feeling. The inner knowing of something because of how we feel in our body.
Emotions are key to survival.
Of course, we don’t want to blindly trust every emotion we have, but they can be helpful if they get us to check out the facts of a situation. It’s important to remember that while our emotions can provide us with helpful information, they don’t necessarily tell us everything we need to know about a situation and in and of themselves, they aren’t facts about the world.
The physical sensations (or feelings) we experience are facts. And the emotion, the label we give that collection of feelings, is a fact.
But that doesn’t mean we know all the facts about the situation simply through the emotion we’re experiencing.
For example, just because we feel afraid doesn’t necessarily mean we’re in any real danger. If we were to act on that fear without assessing the world around us to see if we’re actually in any danger, we may act in ways that aren’t helpful, or maybe even harmful, to us. We want to be careful not to use our emotions to justify our thoughts or actions on their own so that we don’t cause ourselves more problems.
Emotions communicate important information to others
And they influence those around us.
Our facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice are hard-wired to our emotions. They communicate faster than words.
Which again, very important if we’re in danger.
Or some other situation where it’s very important to communicate quickly to another without words.
Our emotions communicate to others.
Of course, this might not be ideal in every situation, especially if you’re someone who wears their heart on their sleeve. Like when our boss says or does something we think is ridiculous and you can’t hide your eye rolling.
Still, it’s very helpful, even when we don’t need to protect ourselves from danger, as it connects us to others and builds relationships. This is why people on the autistic spectrum or whose neurodiversity limits their ability to express and read nonverbal communication, struggle more in social settings.
I hope I’ve convinced you how important emotions actually are because I’m going to have a lot more content on here about all the different emotions and how to be mindful of them so you can use them to your advantage!