“Emotions strongly influence health,” as the Neuroscientist, Candice Pert, indicated in her seminal book Molecules of Emotion – the chemical messengers in our body, called neuropeptides, send signals from our brain, endocrine and immune system in a flow of information back and forth and this directly influences our health.
So our emotions strongly affect how we see our world. For example, if we have have an argument in the morning, then the queue at the supermarket may be the moment when we “lose it” – conversely, if we have experienced a calm and peaceful morning we may find that same queue a place to smile, interact with someone new or let someone else go in front of us who doesn’t have as much. So our emotions frame our perception of the world around us and how we react to it.
So if we have been given labels when we were younger that left us feeling a certain way, those same labels have an influence on our emotions later on and we tend to frame our days and weeks in that way, it influences what we think we are capable of, who we speak to, what we accept about ourselves.
That doesn’t have to be the case though. Why is it we fall in love with a certain film? What is it about the journey of the characters that we love? In literature we analyse the pyramid of a plot (Freytag’s Pyramid) to see the journey the character goes on from crisis point to denouement – we route for them because they reach a point of no return and we want them to succeed and survive.
In the Gift Of Fear, Gavin De Becker, highlights how even negative emotions can be valuable warning signs that something needs attention now – some issues need resolving or a past event needs closure so the more we understand these emotions the better we are at making the right choices – if we avoid them or suppress them they they come back even stronger – but we can learn valuable information from them – and use that to grow to be who we want to be. “A vital part of letting go of negative emotions is learning what we need to learn from them,” so said Tad James and Wyatt Woodsall, Time Line Therapy and the Basis of Personality, 1986.
And so we can use our emotions to teach us what we need to know to move forward, or we can use our emotions to keep us stuck in the past of old unhelpful patterns of behaviours and cloudy lenses on the world around us. I know from experience that you can indeed learn from that overwhelm and fear and anxiety and grow.
If this has struck a chord with you and you would like to discover and learn new ways of experiencing your world, then please do get in touch with me here with a discovery call. The journey is fascinating as well.
