How Emotions and Feelings are Formed and You Can Control Them

If you don’t dismiss a thought as soon as it appears on the canvas of your mind, its pursuit will manifest itself as a desire or an emotion—either a positive or a negative one, depending on how you feel about it.

Very few people are aware of how feelings are created. Even though we are constantly confronted with them, we rarely, if ever, stop to consider why we are experiencing particular emotions and what led to the development of those feelings in the first place. To begin, it is important to distinguish between two distinct types of negative emotions. The first category consists of uncontrollable negative feelings that crop up out of nowhere.

These are the feelings that help you stay alive, such as the terror that our ancestors experienced when they came face to face with a saber-toothed tiger. The second category of negative feelings consists of those that are fabricated in the mind by the process of mentally identifying with one’s thoughts. These feelings aren’t always brought on by external circumstances, though those things certainly can play a role.

These feelings tend to linger on for a longer period of time than the first type. The following is how they function: A fleeting notion pops into one’s head. You can relate to that train of thinking. This identification elicits an emotional response from the reader. As you continue to connect with that notion, the associated feeling will gradually get more powerful until it eventually becomes one of your fundamental emotions. Let’s look at few examples:

• You are having financial issues, and every time your attention wanders to a topic relating to money, you associate yourself with those concerns. As a direct consequence of this, your anxiety over money has increased.
• You and your buddy parted ways after you got into a disagreement with each other. You find that you can’t quit mentally reliving the event over and over again. As a direct consequence of this, many months have gone by, and you still haven’t contacted to apologise to your buddy.
• At work, you embarrassed yourself by making a mistake, and now you feel bad about it. You keep going back to thinking about the same thing over and over again. As a direct consequence of this, your emotions of inadequacy become even more intense.

Your propensity to continuously identify with negative ideas is what enables such thoughts to become even more powerful. The more you dwell on the difficulties you are having with your finances, the simpler it will be for you to come up with solutions to comparable problems in the future. Your sentiments of bitterness will become more intense if you keep playing the disagreement that you had with your buddy over and over in your brain.

In a same vein, if you keep thinking about the error that you did at work, you are inviting emotions of humiliation onto yourself and making the problem worse. When you allow ideas space to exist, they will expand and become important focuses of concentration if you let them. This is the goal. This straightforward method of identification makes it possible for apparently harmless ideas to exert their influence on your thinking.

Your affiliation with your ideas, and more crucially, your interpretation of those thoughts, is the source of the misery that you experience in your life. Now, let’s take a closer look at the process through which your feelings are developed. You’ll be better able to cope with bad emotions, and at the same time, you’ll give good feelings room to develop. The following is a formula that may be used to describe how emotions are formed:

Interpretation + Identification + Recurrence = Intense Feeling

• When you interpret a situation or a notion based on your own life experiences, this is known as interpretation.
• The act of identifying oneself with a particular concept as it occurs is known as identification.
• The act of thinking the same ideas over and over again is known as repetition.
• When you have felt an emotion so often that it has been ingrained in your identity, you are said to be experiencing a strong emotion. After that, you will feel that feeling anytime a relevant idea or experience brings it to mind.

Emotional development may occur as a result of the cumulative effects of interpretation, identification, and repetition. On the other hand, if one of these components is removed from the equation, the power that these feelings have over you begins to diminish.

To summarise, in order for an emotion to increase in intensity and length, you first need to interpret an event or a thought, then you need to identify with that idea when it emerges, and lastly, you need to repeat the same thoughts over and over again while simultaneously identifying with it. Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s go further into each part of the formula.

1. Interpretation

Interpretation + Identification + Recurrence = Intense Feeling

Your perception of the circumstances is always the root cause of your negative feelings. Because of this, it is possible for two distinct persons to have quite different responses to the same incident. It’s possible that one could be completely untouched, while the other will be a complete disaster. For instance, rain may be considered as a gift by a farmer, but it would be seen as a curse by someone going on a picnic since it would make the food soggy. This is due of the significance that they ascribe to the occurrence.

To summarise, in order to experience unpleasant feelings, your interpretation of a particular event is required in addition to the event itself. Without your active participation, the incident cannot by itself give rise to unfavourable feelings. The question then is, why do you continue to have such bad emotions? I suppose the reason behind this is because the actual world does not live up to your expectations.

• You have a preconceived notion of how reality should be, but it ends up being very different.
• You make plans to go on a picnic and hope that the weather will be nice, but it ends up raining.
• At work, you have your sights set on a promotion, but it never materialises.
• You’ve started a side company with the hopes of turning a profit, but things aren’t going as planned.

Your perception of the world causes you to experience unhappiness in your life. In and of itself, the truth can never be depressing. It is important to emphasise this point. In the next part, which is headed “Changing your tale,” we are going to have a detailed conversation on how you can adjust your perspective.

Identification

Interpretation + Identification + Recurrence = Intense Feeling

Let’s shift our attention now to the second component of the formula, which is identification. A method of identification is required in order to ensure the continued existence of an emotion across time. Emotions can only be sustained so long as you continue to pay attention to them. The more you concentrate on your feelings and allow yourself to connect with them, the more potent those feelings will become. People often have the want to identify with their feelings, and when they do so, they discover that they are unable to detach from those feelings.

They don’t understand one of the most fundamental realities of this life, which is that your feelings do not define you. Your feelings will come and they will go. Accept this fact. If you find yourself stating, “I’m sad,” remind yourself that this is an inaccurate statement. Because your emotions are not the same thing as who you are, nobody has ever felt sad. They could fool you into thinking they are you, but like clouds in the sky, they won’t stick around for long. Imagine that you are the sun, and that the sun is always there, regardless of whether or not you can see it, or whether or not the cloud is hiding it from you.

You are not your feelings. You are not sad; rather, you are just having sensations that you may name “sadness” at a certain moment in time. You are not sad. This is a significant point to make. I really hope that you can recognise the difference. One other approach to look at your feelings is as the clothing you choose to wear. How would you describe the emotional garments you’re wearing right now?

Are they the garments that bring excitement? Depression? Sadness? Keep in mind that the clothing you are wearing right now are likely going to be different tomorrow or a week from now. How much you love your clothing, which represent your feelings, will determine how long you keep wearing them (how connected you are to your emotions, in other words). An feeling does not have any inherent strength.

The fact that you identify with it, whether consciously or unconsciously, is what gives it force. Because of this, a feeling that is ignored will, over time, become less noticeable. Try your hand at the following workout: Get occupied doing anything that requires your undivided attention if you find yourself becoming furious. You’ll notice your fury soon diminish. On the other hand, if you give your mind too much attention to the angry sensations you are experiencing, those feelings will continue to intensify until they become one of your primary emotional states.

Recurrence

Interpretation + identification + Recurrence = Intense Feeling

As we’ve seen, your emotional state is directly influenced by how you choose to perceive a situation or a concept. It is also common knowledge that thoughts and feelings become into emotions when a person identifies with them. Now, if you keep doing that procedure, your mind will get conditioned to experience these particular feelings if you keep doing it (positive or negative). For instance, if you concentrate your thoughts on what (you think) a buddy did to you, emotions of resentment will develop in you over time.

As a consequence of this, you can harbour resentment for a number of months. This behaviour is common among people. Because they are unable to let go of their negative feelings, they squander their time dwelling on them even if doing so serves no useful purpose. On the other hand, if you detach yourself from your thoughts of anger and only watch them, over time, those ideas will lose their force, and the resentment that is linked with them will disappear.

In point of fact, if you had let go of the idea of bitterness as soon as it emerged, your emotions of wrath would have evaporated nearly as quickly as it took you to realise that you were thinking it. In the next part, “Letting go of your emotions,” we will discuss how you may overcome your feelings and go on.