Emotions

Fear is an emotion induced by perceived danger or threat, which causes physiological changes and ultimately behavioral changes, such as fleeing, hiding, or freezing from perceived traumatic events. Fear in human being may occur in response to a certain stimulus occurring in the present, or in anticipation or expectation of a future threat perceived as a risk to oneself.

Fear is closely related to the emotion anxiety, which occurs as the result of threats that are perceived to be uncontrollable or unavoidable.

Anxiety is an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behavior such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination. It includes subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over anticipated events.

Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry, usually generalized and unfocused as an overreaction to a situation that is only subjectively seen as menacing. It is often accompanied by muscular tension, restlessness, fatigue and problems in concentration. Anxiety is closely related to fear, which is a response to a real or perceived immediate threat; anxiety involves the expectation of future threat. People facing anxiety may withdraw from situations which have provoked anxiety in the past.

David Barlow defines anxiety as “a future-oriented mood state in which one is not ready or prepared to attempt to cope with upcoming negative events,” and that it is a distinction between future and present dangers which divides anxiety and fear. Another description of anxiety is agony, dread, terror, or even apprehension. In positive psychology, anxiety is described as the mental state that results from a difficult challenge for which the subject has insufficient coping skills.

According to Viktor Frankl, when a person is facing with extreme mortal dangers, the most basic of all human wishes is to find a meaning of life to combat the “trauma of nonbeing” as death is near.

Social phobics do not fear the crowd but the fact that they may be judged negatively.

Lust is a psychological force producing intense desire for an object, or circumstance fulfilling the emotion while already having a significant other or amount of the desired object. Lust can take any form such as the lust for sexuality, love, money, or power.

Annoyance is an unpleasant mental state that is characterized by irritation, and distraction from one’s conscious thinking. It can lead to emotions such as frustration and anger.

Reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will… it can never oppose passion in the direction of the will… Reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

In Buddhism, emotions occur when an object is considered as attractive or repulsive. There is a felt tendency impelling people towards attractive objects and impelling them to move away from repulsive or harmful objects; a disposition to possess the object (greed), to destroy it (hatred), to flee from it (fear), to get obsessed or worried over it (anxiety), and so on.

In stoic theories it was seen as a hindrance to reason and therefore a hindrance to virtue. Aristotle believed that emotions were an essential component of virtue.

Not only is the envious person rendered unhappy by their envy, but that person may also wish to inflict misfortune on others to reduce their status.

Younger adults, under the age of 30, have been found to envy others social status, relationships, and attractiveness. This starts to fade when a person hits their 30s. Typically, at this point in life, the person begins to accept who they are as an individual and compare themselves to others less often. However, they still envy others, just over different aspects in life, such as career or salary. Studies have shown a decrease in envy as a person ages; however, envious feelings over money was the only thing that consistently increased as a person got older. As a person ages, they begin to accept their social status. Nonetheless, envious feelings will be present throughout a person’s life. It is up to the individual whether they will let these envious feelings motivate or destroy them.

Frustration arises from the perceived resistance to the fulfillment of an individual’s will or goal and is likely to increase when a will or goal is denied or blocked.

There are multiple ways individuals cope with frustration such as passive-aggressive behavior, anger, or violence, although frustration may also propel positive processes via enhanced effort and strive.

Three main elements in hatred:

a negation of intimacy, by creating distance when closeness had become had become threatening
an infusion of passion, such as fear or anger
a decision to devalue a previously valued object

Self-harm is a condition where subjects may feel compelled to physically injured themselves as an outlet for depression, anxiety, or anger, and is related with numerous psychological disorders.

Resentment can result from a variety of situations involving a perceived wrongdoing from an individual, which are often sparked by expressions of injustice or humiliation.

What we resent reveals what it is we value, and what we have come to expect (or hope) from others; it may also reveal to what we see ourselves as entitled to: that is, how our expectations or our surroundings are organized or measured. Only an amoral person (a person who didn’t have values or concern for the well-being of self or others) could not experience resentment.

Resentment can also function to warn against further, future, harmful and unfair situations from occurring again.

Resentment is most powerful when it is felt toward someone whom the individual is close to or intimate with. To have an injury resulting in resentful feelings inflicted by a friend or loved one leaves the individual feeling betrayed as well as resentful, and these feelings can have deep effects.

Resentment can have a variety of negative results on the person experiencing it, including touchiness or edginess when thinking of the person resented, denial of anger or hatred against this person, and provocation or anger arousal when this person is recognized positively. It can also have more long-term effects, such as the development of a hostile, cynical, sarcastic attitude that may become a barrier against other healthy relationships; lack of personal and emotional growth; difficulty in self-disclosure; trouble trusting others; loss of self-confidence; and overcompensation.

Confidence is a state of clear-headed either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective. Confidence comes a latin word fidere which means “to trust”; therefore, having self-confidence is having trust in one’s self. Arrogance or hubris, in comparison, is the state of having unmerited confidence — believing something or someone is capable or correct when they are not. Overconfidence or presumptuousness is excessive belief in someone (or something) succeeding, without any regard for failure. Confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy as those without it may fail or not try because they lack it and those with it may succeed because they have it rather than because of an innate ability.

The concept of self-confidence is commonly used as self-assurance in one’s personal judgment, ability, power, etc. One’s self confidence increases from experiences of having satisfactorily completed particular activities.

Self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem, which is an evaluation of one’s own worth, whereas self-confidence is more specifically trust in one’s ability to achieve some goal.

Humiliation is the abasement of pride, which creates mortification or leads to a state of being humbled or reduced to lowliness or submission. It is an emotion felt by a person whose social status, either by force or willingly, has just decreased.

Whereas humility can be sought alone as a means of de-emphasize the ego, humiliation must involve other person(s), though not necessarily directly or willingly.

Pride is a hard thing to swallow and at the root of all pettiness is a sense of pride. Pettiness finds a way to “one up” someone. By being a person that is above all that, it just proves you’re an emotionally mature person that doesn’t stoop to other people’s pettiness.

Trust me, I know how satisfying pettiness can be, especially when someone is being rude to you first. At the end of the day, holding your head up high and not lowering yourself to other petty peoples’ level will give you a sense of self confidence, assurance and petty-free pride.

The most important of these skills, and power’s crucial foundation, is the ability to master your emotions. An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power, a mistake that will cost you a lot more than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings. Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly, you cannot prepare and respond to it with any degree of control.

Anger is the most destructive of emotional responses, for it clouds your vision the most. It also has the ripple effect that invariably makes situations less controllable and heightens your enemy’s resolve.

Related to mastering your emotions is the ability to distance yourself from the present moment and think objectively about the past and future. Like Janus, the double-faced Romain deity, you must be able to look in both direction at once, the better to handle danger from wherever it comes.

Pride is an emotional state deriving positive affect from the perceived value of a person or thing with which the subject has an intimate connection.

Pride is the love of one’s own excellence.

Pride: a feeling of deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one’s own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired.

What is the biggest force that prevents us from all living slower lives?

Fear: fear of failure, of scorn, of missing out and the fear of being alone with ourselves.

Happiness is just having something to look toward to.

Fear organizes us for flight; anger for attack.

By studying many people who had panic attacks it was noticed that they tended to interpret their bodily sensations during an attack as signs of impending catastrophe: breathlessness was taken as a sign of impending suffocation; a pounding heart suggested imminent heart attack.

Emotion is a sum of energy that occurs, or is set off, in a person by a meaningful experience. Its chief characteristic is its energy. Emotion itself is morally neutral; it may be good or it may be destructive, depending on where and how it is invested. To be really excited about something can bring much emotion, and it can sustain some beautiful things in one’s life. There is also much emotion involved in depression: One is wringing one’s hands or walking circles on the rug, hunting for something to be miserable about. Emotion defined as energy is relatively easy to understand.

It is more difficult to describe feeling. This is a word that is used far too generally and imprecisely, and therefore it almost loses its usefulness. I am going to use the word feeling in a precise way to describe a specific experience. Feeling is the act of valuing. It is not necessarily hot and volatile like emotion, but it is that rational faculty which assigns value to an experience. This is then sense in which Jung uses the term in his definition of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition.

One thinks about something, makes an intellectual appraisal of it, understands it, but by so doing there is not yet feeling about it. There is no sense of judgment nor any valuation, so one has not related to it yet. The act of thinking is quite different from the act of feeling. To feel is to assign value to an experience.

Then there is mood. This is a thorny one, for mood is a strange thing. It is like a small psychosis, or possession. A man’s mood comes from being overpowered by the feminine part of his nature. Mood is beautifully described in Hindu mythology as Maya, goddess of illusion. Mood is being overwhelmed or possessed by some interior feminine content in one’s unconscious. When seized by a mood, it is as though a man has become an inferior woman. Modern slang puts it aptly: He just becomes bitchy, that’s all.

Now we should mention another term: enthusiasm. There is a fine but important difference between mood and enthusiasm. The word enthusiasm is a beautiful word. In Greek it means “to be filled with God.” It is one of the most sublime words in the whole English language. If one is filled with God, a great creativity will flow, and there will be a stability about it. If one is filled with the anima, one may also feel creativity, but it will probably be gone before nightfall. One must be wise enough to know the difference between God and the anima.

There is, however, a point of genius that a woman can bring forth if she is capable of it and willing to do it. If she will become more feminine than the mood attacking the man, she can dispel it for him. But this is a very, very difficult thing for a woman to do. Her automatic response is to let the sword of the animus and start hacking away. But if a woman can be patient with a man and not be critical, but represent for him a truly feminine quality, then, as soon as his sanity is back sufficiently for him to comprehend such subtleties, he will likely come out of his mood.

A woman is much more in control of her moods. She can use them. She tries them on and sees which one she is going to wear. She will even change in midstream if necessary. A man doesn’t have as much control over his moods; in fact, he has almost no control. Many women are masters of the whole feeling department as few men ever are. Much difficulty arises because a woman presumes that a man has the same kind of control over his mood that she does over hers, but he doesn’t. She must understand this and give him time, or help him a little bit.

The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at this capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways. Still more will this be so if he learns to explore, or feel deeply into, his negative states of feeling — his loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression, or fear — without trying to escape from them.

In many so-called primitive cultures it is a requirement for tribal initiation to spend a lengthy period alone in the forests or mountains, a period of coming to terms with the solitude and nonhumanity of nature so as to discover who, or what, one really is — a discovery hardly possible while the community is telling you what you are, or ought to be. He may discover, for instance, that loneliness is the masked fear of an unknown which is himself, and that the alien-looking aspect of nature is a projection upon the forests of his fear of stepping outside habitual and conditioned patterns of feeling. There is much evidence to show that for anyone who passes through the barrier of loneliness, the sense of individual isolation bursts, almost by dint of its own intensity, into the “all-feeling” of identity with the universe. One may pooh-pooh this as “nature mysticism” or “pantheism,” but it should be obvious that a feeling of this kind corresponds better with a universe of mutually interdependent processes and relations than with a universe of distinct, blocklike identities.

Sadness is an emotional pain associated with, or characterized by, feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment and sorrow. An example of severe sadness is depression.

Sadness is one of the 6 basic emotions along with happiness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust.

Laziness may reflect a lack of self-esteem, a lack of positive recognition by others, a lack of discipline stemming from low self-confidence, or a lack of interest in the activity or belief in its efficacy. Laziness may manifest as procrastination or vacillation.

First, you need to be honest with yourself about what you are feeling and why you are feeling it. The key is to identify and label your emotions as you experience them. Associating words with what you are feeling makes the emotion tangible and less mysterious. This helps you relax, figure out what’s behind your emotion, and move forward. If you try to stifle your emotions and tackle your work without addressing them, they will slowly eat away at you and impair your focus.

Love: affectionate, caring, close, proud, passionate.

Anger: frustrated, exasperated, enraged, indignant.

Hurt: let down, betrayed, disappointed, needy.

Shame: embarrassed, guilty, regretful, humiliated, self-loathing.

Fear: anxious, terrified, worried, obsessed, suspicious.

Self-doubt: inadequate, unworthy, inept, unmotivated.

Joy: happy, enthusiastic, full, elated, content.

Sadness: bereft, wistful, joyless, depressed.

Jealousy: envious, selfish, covetous, anguished, yearning.

Gratitude: appreciative, thankful, relieved, admiring.

Loneliness: desolate, abandoned, empty, longing.

Resentment (also called ranklement or bitterness) is a complex, multilayered emotion that has been described as a mixture of disappointment, disgust, anger, and fear. Other psychologists consider it a mood or as a secondary emotion that can be elicited in the face of insult and/or injury.

Inherent in resentment is a perception of unfairness (from trivial to very serious), and a generalized defense against unfair situations.

By accepting life’s suffering, therefore, evil may be overcome. The alternative is hell, at least in its psychological form: rage, resentment, and the desire for revenge and destruction.

The simple predictive formula is that, by carrying out a coordinated plan, a large coalition can dispatch a lone social outcast at an extremely small risk to themselves by being physically harmed. There are often complexities in the process of forming the coalition, or in deciding that a kill is the appropriate action, but the killing itself is not risky. Once that system is put into practice, it means, of course, that offenders are expected to work hard to avoid the ultimate penalty. Accordingly, a few words from a senior member of the group should be enough to remind anyone of the importance of conformity. Our sensitivity to right and wrong is understandable as an evolved response to the extreme danger of being in the wrong.

Such sensitivity to moral values also became biologically embedded into novel emotional responses. Prominent human emotions not known to occur in animals include shame, embarrassment, guilt, and the pain of being ostracized, all of which are human universals. Involuntary and painful, they have been convincingly explained as mechanisms that show an individual’s commitment to a social group after his or her social standing has been jeopardized.

Resistance feeds on fear. We experience Resistance as fear. But fear of what?

Fear of the consequences of following our heart. Fear of bankruptcy, fear of poverty, fear of insolvency. Fear of groveling when we try to make it on our own, and of groveling when we give up and come crawling back to where we started. Fear of being selfish, of being rotten wives or disloyal husbands; fear of failing to support our families, of sacrificing their dreams for ours. Fear of betraying our race, our ‘hood, our homies. Fear of failure. Fear of being ridiculous. Fear of throwing away the education, the training, the preparation that those we love have sacrificed so much for, that we ourselves have worked our butts off for. Fear of launching into the void, of hurtling too far out there; fear of passing some point of no return, beyond which we cannot recant, cannot reverse, cannot rescind, but must live with his cocked-up choice for the rest of our lives. Fear of madness. Fear of insanity. Fear of death.

This is the most terrifying prospect a human being can face, because it ejects him at one go (he imagines) from all the tribal inclusions his psyche is wired for and has been for fifty million years.

We fear discovering that we are more than we think we are. More than our parents/children/teachers think we are. We fear that we actually possess the talent that our still, small voice tells us. That we actually have the guts, the perseverance, the capacity. We fear that we truly can steer our ship, plant our flag, reach our Promised Land. We fear this because, if it’s true, then we become estranged from all we know. We pass through a membrane. We become monsters and monstrous. We know that if we embrace our ideals, we must prove worthy of them. And that scares the hell out of us. What will become of us? We will lose our friends and family, who will no longer recognize us. We will wind up alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.

Fear is good. Like self-doubt, fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do.

Remember our rule of thumb: The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.

What is anger? Anger is a way to signal as strongly as you can to the other party you’re capable of violence. Anger is a precursor to violence.

Observe when you’re angry — anger is a loss of control over the situation. Anger is a contract you make with yourself to be in physical and mental and emotional turmoil until reality changes.

You can see this occurring most clearly in the case of a 2-year-old having a tantrum. He has lost himself temporarily, and is for the moment pure emotion.

Irrational people are much more powerful than rational people, because their threats are so much more convincing.

It is said that the fear of public speaking is a fear greater than death for most people. The fear of public speaking is caused by the fear of ostracism, the fear of standing out, the fear of criticism, the fear of ridicule, and the fear of being an outcast. The fear of being different prevents most people from seeking new ways to solve their problems.

The primary difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they manage fear.

A genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else around him is losing his mind.

Of all the emotions, envy is the most idiotic. Why? Because it is relatively easy to switch off. This is in contrast to anger, sadness, or fear. Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it. In short, envy is the most sincere type of flattery; other than that, it’s a waste of time.

Essentially, if you think too much, you cut off your mind from the wisdom of your feelings. This may sound a little esoteric — and a bit surprising coming from someone like me who strives to rid my thinking of irrationality — but it is not. Emotions from in the brain, just as crystal-clear, rational thoughts do. They are merely a different form of information processing — more primordial, but not necessarily an inferior variant. In fact, sometimes they provide the wiser counsel.

It’s easy to be bitter.

Help and insight about getting to the core of fear is holding us back. This is the cause of the unfinished novel, of the self-sabotaging aggressive marketing campaign and the speech that goes on too long. It’s at the heart of too much, too little, and too boring as well. You might need confidence in your ‘how’ to deal with fear. You might have found your ‘why’ overwhelmed by your fear. But all the how and all the why aren’t going to help much if we can’t acknowledge that essential driver is, “where is the fear?”Are we so afraid of it that we can’t discuss it?

The number one emotion among wild animals isn’t vanity or happiness: it’s fear. Fear is everywhere in the animal kingdom, because fear is a great way to stay alive. Fear is hard-wired into successful species… it doesn’t need to be taught.

Fear and anger are the two sides to the fight-or-flight response, and as such are our strongest and most basic psychological emotions.

Reactive aggression results from a fear response. Selection against emotional reactivity reduces fear; and reduced fear allows a dog to take a longer, more careful look at a human than a wolf normally would. Subsequent studies of wolves support the notion that reduced fear, more than intelligence, is what enables animals to understand human signals.

Awe is an emotion comparable to wonder but less joyous. On Plutchik’s wheel of emotions, awe is modeled as a combination of surprise and fear.

Awe is a mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder inspired by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might.

In general, awe is directed at objects more considered to be more powerful than the subject, such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Grand Canyon, the vastness of the cosmos, or a deity.

To further compound these negative effects, resentment often functions in a downward spiral. Resentful feelings cut off communication between the resentful person and the person he or she feels committed the wrong, and can result in future miscommunications and the development of further resentful feelings.

Resentment is anger directed toward a higher-status individual; anger is directed toward an equal-status individual; and contempt is anger directed toward a lower-status individual.

Anger being a fire-extinguisher meant to “put out” and prevent immediately harmful situations, from becoming more harmful, while resentment is more like a smoke-alarm: something that is always “on” (and requires energy and emotions to sustain this alarm-system), and is meant to protect us if, just in case, someone or something harmful from the past experience shows up. Resentment and anger differ primarily in the way they are externally expressed. Anger results in aggressive behavior, used to avert or deal with as a threat, while resentment occurs once the injury has been dealt and is not expressed as aggressively or as openly.

Anger is about the immediate situation, whereas resentment is a defensive way to mentally punish yourself, or the remembered offender. Another differentiation is that resentment is rarely about a single specific stimulus.

Scheler considered resentment as the product of weakness and passivity.

Human societies tend to value remorse; conversely, a person who exhibits a lack of remorse is often perceived in a negative light. It is widely accepted that remorse is the proper reaction to misconduct.

The perception of remorse is essential to an apology, and the greater the perception of remorse the more effective the apology.

Embarrassment or awkwardness is an emotional state that is associated with mild or severe levels of discomfort, and which is usually experienced when someone commits a socially unacceptable or frowned-upon act that is witnessed by or revealed to others.

Personal embarrassment is usually accompanied by some combination of blushing, sweating, nervousness, stammering, and fidgeting. Sometimes the embarrassed person tries to mask embarrassment with smiles or nervous laughter.

Modern economic thought frequently distinguishes greed from self-interest.

There are 4 major emotional reactions that are destructive to a marriage: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Among these 4, Gotman considers contempt the most destructive of them all.

Freud defined hate as an ego state that wishes to destroy the source of unhappiness, stressing that it was linked to the question of self-preservation.

Sorrow is an emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Sorrow is more intense than sadness. It implies a long-term state. At the same time sorrow — but not unhappiness — suggests a degree of resignation, which lends sorrow its peculiar air of dignity.

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

The problem with this reasoning is that it fails to take account of one simple fact: difficult conversations do not just involve feelings, they are at their very core about feelings. Feelings are not some noisy byproduct of engaging in difficult talk, they are an integral part of the conflict. Engaging in a difficult conversation without talking about feelings is like staging an opera without the music. You’ll get the plot but miss the point.

We think we are sharing our hurt, frustration, anger, or confusion. We are trying to begin a conversation that will end in greater understanding, perhaps some improved behavior, and maybe an apology. What they think we are doing is trying to provoke, accuse, or malign them. (In other words, they make the same mistaken leap in judging our intentions.) And given how frequently our assumptions are incomplete or wrong, the other person often feels not just accused, but falsely accused. Few things are more aggravating.

We should not be surprised, then, that they try to defend themselves, or attack back. From their point of view, they are defending themselves from false accusations. From our point of view, they are just being defensive — we’re right, they just aren’t big enough to admit it. The result is a mess. No one learns anything, no one apologizes, nothing changes.

Interestingly, when people take on the job of thinking hard about heir own intentions, it sends a profoundly positive message to the other person about the importance of the relationship. After all, you’d only do that kind of hard work for somebody who matters to you.

Feelings, of course, are part of what makes good relationships so rich and satisfying. Feelings like passion and pride, silliness and warmth, and even jealousy, disappointment, and anger let us know that we are fully alive.

At the same time, managing feelings can be enormously challenging. Our failure to acknowledge and discuss feelings derails a startling number of difficult conversations. And the inability to deal openly and well with feelings can undermine the quality and health of our relationships.

Unspoken feelings can color the conversation in a number of ways. They alter your affect and tone of voice. They express themselves through your body language or facial expression. They may take the form of long pauses or an odd and unexplained detachment. You may become sarcastic, aggressive, impatient, unpredictable, or defensive. Studies show that while few people are good at detecting factual lies, most of us can determine when someone is distorting, manufacturing, or withholding an emotion. That’s because, if clogged, your emotional pipe will leak.

For some of us, the problem is not that we are unable to express our feelings, but that we are unable not to. We get angry and show it in ways that are embarrassing or destructive. We cry or explode when we would rather act composed and capable. We don’t cry or lose our temper because we express our feelings too often, but because we express them too rarely.

Rational or not, fear is painful and debilitating, and policy makers must endeavor to protect the public from fear, not only from real dangers.

Regret is accompanied by feelings that one should have known better, by a sinking feeling, by thoughts about the mistake one has made and the opportunities lost, by a tendency to kick oneself and to correct one’s mistake, and by wanting to undo the event and to get a second chance. Intense regret is what you experience when you can most easily imagine yourself doing something other than what you did.

My first months on the job, I was filled with terror that my colleagues would discover I was not worthy of their dream team and I would lose my job. I saw firsthand the quality of my colleagues. I would think, “Do I really belong here? How long will it take for them to figure out I’m a fake?” Every morning, I would get into the elevator at 8am and as I hit the elevator button, it was like a trigger. The air would catch in my chest. I was sure that when the doors slid open my boss would be standing on the other side waiting to fire me.

I felt that if I lost my job, I would be losing the most important opportunity of my life. I worked like crazy — deep into the night — and pushed myself harder than I had ever done before. But the fear continued.

You can’t let yourself be scared by a crisis like this, you can’t let it get the best of you, because it’s fear that paralyzes you. Fear cripples you. You always have to take risks.

Emotions are information. They help us know how to respond appropriately to circumstances we’re in and frame what we make of the situation.

It’s normal to feel all kinds of emotions. All emotions have their functions. These functions allow us to survive and avoid dangers.

“All men have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward, sometimes to death, but always to victory” was the motto of the King’s Guard in ancient Greece.

Anger is an unmistakable sign that a person has exceeded his or her tolerance for a situation or behavior. It is an intense and powerful blend of emotion and action that often frightens even the person who is angry. Anger tends to feed on itself. The longer the shouting continues, the more volatile the anger becomes. Such meetings can quickly devolve into shouting matches, so it’s crucial to defuse anger quickly.

We get angry when we feel afraid, sad, threatened, insecure, disappointed — when things are out of our control. Anger elicits a response when other efforts fail to do so, which can give a false sense of control. Anger is uncomfortable for others to experience, so they often do whatever it takes to put an end to their discomfort — which often means placating the angry person by giving what the person wants.

For most people, the expression of anger represents the culmination of feelings they can no longer control. However, the actual event that sends them over the edge is often something minor that might not even be related to the reasons they’re angry. The challenge for you as the manager is to identify and expose the underlying issues.

On the psychological level, fear produces the tendency to over-control. The thinking mind takes over, and our movements are marked by self-consciousness. We are overly cautious and hesitant.

On the physical level, fear produces certain bodily reactions. This is described in stress studies as the fight-or-flight syndrome. Our systems are geared to freeze and stop breathing when we have fear. The blood flows to our big muscles (as if getting ready to run from a saber-toothed tiger), so we lose sensitivity in our hands and make poor decisions with our brain. Adrenaline flows freely, so we get speedy and jumpy. The muscles get tense, interfering with any chance of making a full turn, a full extension at impact, or a full release.

Now check on your breathing — is it deep and relaxed? Chances are it isn’t. Most people respond that they were barely breathing at all. If there was any breathing, it was constricted and very shallow.

This is a natural reaction. Animal freeze at sounds of danger and stop breathing to better hear what is approaching.

The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.

Here is Plato’s analogy: a rider steers wildly galloping horses; the rider signifies reasons and the galloping horses embody emotions. Reason tames feelings. If this fails, irrationality runs free.

If a person explodes with anger at you (and it seems out of proportion to what you did to them), you must remind yourself that it is not exclusively directed at you — do not be so vain. The cause is much larger, goes way back in time, involves dozens of prior hurts, and is actually not worth the bother to understand. Instead of seeing it as a personal grudge, look at the emotional outburst as a disguised power move, an attempt to control or punish you cloaked in the form of hurt feeling and anger.

On a much more immediate level, hurting others always hurts me too. Every violent act in the world begins with a violent desire in somebody’s mind, which disturbs that person’s own peace and happiness before it disturbs the peace and happiness of anyone else. Thus people seldom steal unless they first develop a lot of greed and envy in their minds. People don’t usually murder unless they first generate anger and hatred. Emotions such as greed, envy, anger and hatred are very unpleasant. You cannot experience joy and harmony when you are boiling with anger or envy. Hence long before you murder anyone, your anger has already killed your own peace of mind.

Indeed, you might keep boiling with anger for years, without ever actually murdering the object of your hate. In which case you haven’t hurt anyone else, but you have nevertheless hurt yourself. It is therefore your natural self-interest - and not the command of some god - that should induce you to do something about your anger. If you were completely free of anger you would feel far better than if you murdered an obnoxious enemy.

Up till now, these arguments have had embarrassingly little impact on actual behaviour, because in times of crisis humans all too often forget about their philosophical views and follow their emotions and gut instincts instead.

Like all mammals, Homo sapiens uses emotions to quickly make life and death decisions. We have inherited our anger, our fear and our lust from millions of ancestors, all of whom passed the most rigorous quality control tests of natural selection.

Finally, in a breakthrough moment as they prepare for his coronation, the soon-to-be king snaps and lets loose with all of his fears — that he will fail his nation and become a laughingstock for all of history.

Understanding feelings, talking about feelings, managing feelings — these are among the greatest challenges of being human. There is nothing that will make dealing with feelings easy and risk-free.

Much of the first mistake can be traced to one basic error: we make an attribution about another person’s intentions based on the impact of their actions on us. We feel hurt; therefore they intended to hurt us. We feel slighted; therefore they intended to slight us. Our thinking is so automatic that we aren’t even aware that our conclusion is only an assumption. We are so taken in by our story about what they intended that we can’t imagine how they could have intended anything else.

Framing feelings out of the problem is one way we cope with the dilemma of whether to raise something or avoid it. The potential costs involved in sharing feelings make raising them feel like too big a gamble. When we lay our feelings on the table, we run the risk of hurting others and of ruining relationships. We also put ourselves in a position to get hurt. What if the other person doesn’t take our feelings seriously or respond by telling us something we don’t want to hear? By sticking to the “business at hand,” we appear to reduce these risks.

The problem is that when feelings are at the heart of what’s going on, they are the business at hand and ignoring them is nearly impossible. Emotions have an uncanny knack for finding their way back into the conversation, usually in not very helpful ways.

Unexpressed feelings can cause a third, more subtle problem. The two hardest (and most important) communication tasks are expressing feelings and listening. When people are having a hard time listening, often it is not because they don’t know how to listen well. It is, paradoxically, because they don’t know how to express themselves well. Unexpressed feelings can block the ability to listen.

Why? Because good listening requires an open and honest curiosity about the other person, and a willingness and ability to keep the spotlight on them. Buried emotions draw the spotlight back to us. It’s hard to hear someone else when we are feeling unheard, even if the reason we feel unheard is that we have chosen not to share. Our listening ability often increases remarkably once we have expressed our own strong feelings.

Many of us know our own emotions about as well as we know a city we are visiting for the first time. We may recognize certain landmarks, but fail to understand the subtle rhythms of daily life; we can find main boulevards, but remain oblivious to the tangle of back streets where the real action is. Before we can get to where we’re going, we need to know where we are. When it comes to understanding our own emotions, where most of us are is lost.

This isn’t because we’re dumb, but because recognizing feelings is challenging. Feelings are more complex and nuanced than we usually imagine. What’s more, feelings are very good at disguising themselves. Feelings we are uncomfortable with disguise themselves as emotions we are better able to handle; bundles of contradictory feelings masquerade as a single emotion; and most important, feelings transform themselves into judgments, accusations, and attributions.

Too often we confuse being emotional with expressing emotions clearly. They are different. You can express emotion well without being emotional, and you can be extremely emotional without expressing much of anything at all. Sharing feelings well and clearly requires thoughtfulness.

Denial requires a huge amount of psychic energy, and sooner or later the story we’re telling ourselves is going to become untenable. And the bigger the gap between what we hope is true and what we fear is true, the easier its is for us to lose our balance.

Bitterness shows you where you need to heal, where you’re still holding judgments on others and yourself.

Resentment shows you where you’re living in the past and not allowing the present to be as it is.

Discomfort shows you that you need to pay attention right now to what is happening, because you’re being given the opportunity to change, to do something different than you typically do it.

Anger shows you what you’re passionate about, where your boundaries are, and what you believe needs to change about the world.

Disappointment shows that you tried for something, that you did not give in to apathy, that you still care.

Shame shows you that you’re internalizing other people’s beliefs about who you should be (or who you are) and that you need to reconnect with yourself.

Anxiety shows you that you need to wake up, right now, and that you need to be present, that you’re stuck in the past and living in fear of the future.

Sadness shows you the depth of your feeling, the depth of your care for others and this world.

This matches with how every other form of feedback works: we get a signal expressed to us with the signals available, but it is up to us to trace back and derive from the signal what actually kicked it off.

Think about it this way: when a user gives you some user feedback, you don’t build the thing they tell you to build. Instead, you figure out what was frustrating them about the product that they wanted that thing build, and then you consider what the consequences of implementing various solutions to that underlying problem might be before you decide what to do with the feedback you got.

I don’t do what my emotions tell me to do, but that is no reason to ignore the underlying dynamics that sparked them.

Anxiety arises from not being able to see the whole picture.

I always feared being so exhausted that I might do something incredibly stupid, like accidentally leaving my pistol in a restroom stall — unforgivable — but stuff like that happened. If you have a healthy fear of screwing up, you’re find. Lose the fear, careers or lives are over.

In poker, the term tilt refers to losing control and making detrimental, strategically weak decisions due to negative emotions, such as anger or frustration. Typical poker situations that cause tilt include, but are not limited to 1) losing in a situation where losing is perceivably highly improbable, for example, having a 90% chance of winning a big pot of money, but ending up losing it due to chance (or bad luck). 2) Prolonged series of losses (losing streaks), and 3) Factors external to the game mechanics, such as fatigue, or needling by other players (making provocative or stingy comments). Tilted poker players commonly adopt a sub-optimal and overly aggressive playing style, whereby they almost always end up losing superfluous amounts of money. This can result in losing one’s entire life savings in a single 20-minute session.

Most poker players will eventually tilt, if they play long enough. It is thus not a stretch to state that tilting is the number one destroyer of bankrolls in poker.

Tilting — in addition to being related to the emotions of anger and frustration — is being characterized by strong feelings of injustice. In other words, tilting seems to be a state of moral anger: losing due to bad luck is perceived as unfair, which motivates an aggressive retaliation strategy (in the name of justice), which, in turn, ends in disappointment in self, and rumination over lost resources. This was a particularly common behavioral pattern in inexperienced players.

Putatively, displaying emotions on their faces made communication easier and faster for our ancestors in dangerous environments. The ability to effectively convey or interpret feelings enables quicker reactions in threatening situations. For example, a facial fear expression is a quicker way to signal danger than other more elaborative ways of communication, such as words.

All experience — everything you see, smell, hear, touch, feel, or think — passes through the amygdalae like travelers passing through airport security. There in the amygdalae each experience is instantly and automatically screened for threat.

It revolved around a 30-year-old man who was coping with a cast of frightening characters that only he could see. As Pete describes it, the man “is an accountant or something, and he hates his job, and one day his mom gives him a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid. He doesn’t think anything of it, and he puts it on the shelf, and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them. He thinks he’s starting to go crazy. They follow him to his job, and on his dates, and it turns out these monsters are all the fears that he never dealt with as a kid. He becomes friends with them eventually, and as he conquers the fears, they slowly begin to disappear.”

All buying decision are emotional. In fact, everything you do is 100 percent emotional. The rule is that people decide emotionally and then justify logically.

Fear comes in many forms. We fear failure and ineptitude. We fear embarrassment and the unexpected. Insidiously, fear travels in disguise, largely because we are afraid to admit we are afraid. Only cowards are afraid, and we are afraid of being labeled a coward. We are so attuned to fear that we have become adept at living with it, and learning to hide it from those around us.

The cortex, which is responsible for rational and conscious thought, is a relatively recent evolutionary development. Before the development of the cortex, humans developed the amygdala, also known as the fear system’s command center. The fear system is like a throw switch or a fire alarm or a default mechanism that is able to override the conscious mind in large part because the cortex has few dedicated resources or pathways to influence the fear system, while the fear system has a number of resources to dominate the cortex.

Fear plays trick on memory as well. The brain has evolved to remember fearful situations so as to be able to avoid them in the future. Many chemicals, such as adrenaline, act like yellow highlighters to ensure the brain remembers fearful situations.