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A Neuroscientist’s Strategy for Controlling Your Emotions

It turns out there’s a right way to second-guess yourself happens lightning-fast. Someone on your Twitter feed makes a big announcement about their career — a cool new staff writing job or a book deal—and before you have a chance to think about it, you’re seething with jealousy. Or are you? 

It might feel like your emotions pop up automatically, but according to renowned neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made, you have a lot more power over your feelings than you think. And that understanding alone is one of the most important tools for gaining control of the feelings that keep you down and hold you back.

Emotions, Feldman Barrett argues, aren’t hard-wired in your brain. Instead, they’re made in the moment. Typically, feelings are the result of three things: your body, your past, and your environment. Using physical sensations, memories, or present stimuli as context clues, your brain forms emotions as “guesses” in response to circumstances. And as with all conjectures, your brain isn’t always right the first time.

Annoying as that reality is, it helps to remember your brain’s entire purpose: to keep you alive. Your emotions tend to jump to extremes in order to protect you, even if those feelings don’t exactly serve you in the moment.

Imagine, for example, you got in a fender-bender a few years ago — and now, every time you ride in a car or hear screeching tires, your brain triggers your fight-or-flight response (and the overwhelming emotions that come with it) because it’s guessing you’re in danger. It’s a fair guess, but it may not be the right one.

Or, say your last boss used to criticize you a lot, and you feel shame about it. Now, you have a new job, but you feel like you don’t deserve it, and you’re always feel worried your supervisor is going to take a jab at you. Is it more likely your brain is wrongly guessing about what to feel, or that your boss is actually a jerk who sees the worst in you?

Of course, it’s not always possible to control your feelings, especially in the case of clinical depression or anxiety. And it’s well-known that numbing feelings isn’t helpful, either. Sometimes, riding out feelings with mindful self-compassion is the best way to move forward.

But if you find yourself feeling emotions that don’t seem accurate (or helpful) for the present moment, you can use your brain to tell yourself a new story. Start with curiosity in those moments. Ask yourself, “Is this how I really feel, or is my brain guessing incorrectly?” Remind yourself your mind is capable of spinning the wrong narrative, and that the inciting event happened in the past.

Or, as Feldman Barrett encourages, you can create totally new experiences. Rather than fixating on a past memory, you can allow yourself to live in the present moment. Your brain, eventually, may override the past association, re-aligning the experience to a different emotion and even changing your “future forecast” to expect different things.

Remember: Most emotions are neither good nor bad; they’re simply clues about what might be happening in your inner world. Second-guessing those clues might lead you to better insight about yourself and, just as importantly, what you need.

By Ashley Abramson (Medium). Photo by Jessica Ticozzelli from Pexels.

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Kimetsu no Yaiba Kimono 👘 icons (200 x 200)

BONUS Chibi Ver.

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teams across generations 💛

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Sakura and her boys.

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Naruto Manga Covers

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THIS GOT MORE THAN 84k NOTES AND I CAN'T ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️

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A collection of Disney pieces I’ve done over the past couple of years. It’s always kind of fun and challenging to figure out what imagery I can depict with each character to create a decorative piece.

Edit: Added a few more ladies to this so I think it needed an update ;)

As always if you’re interested in any of these they’re for purchase here

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Asenimo

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Bnha x KnY

What would the characters’ breaths be?

Credit: yourdrawingpineapple on insta

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late with posting but happy birthday todoroki shouto!!!

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“Above all, love is that power which preeminently divinizes all.”

~St. Maximus the Confessor