Your Emotions and What They Mean

Your emotions fulfill an important function within the mental space that you consider “you.” Unfortunately, many or even most people seem to not understand what emotions truly are or what they are for. Emotions or “emotional people” are therefore the subject of much consternation, discussion, and no end of poetic prose (set to music or otherwise). In this essay, we will try to articulate your emotions’ true nature and give you some clues as to what you can use them for and what you can do about them if they are becoming bothersome.

But first, what they are not: your emotions are not an excuse for you to do whatever whim strikes in the moment. “I was angry” or “I was afraid” are no excuse for bad behavior. Even under the most strenuously emotional circumstance, you are still in full control of your body, your limbs, your fingers, your face, and your words (at least as much as you normally are). There is nothing about your nervous or muscular systems that change function during an emotional moment, and therefore your actions while you are feeling emotions are just as right or wrong as they would be if you did them while you were calm. Secondly, your emotions are not some mysterious form of weather that blows in unaccountably or unpredictably. That is not to say you can’t be surprised by them, but their causes are specific and known, and there is not a whole lot of mystery left to them. Thirdly, your emotions are not a wide, unknowable, ever changing collection of complex interweaved feelings that cannot be catalogued. There are, to my knowledge, exactly 6 human emotions: Fear, Anger, Sadness, Glee, Bliss, and Disgust. We have hundreds of names for various emotions, but they are all either a synonym, a measurement or degree, a highly specific situational version of, or a combination of the six listed above. And each of the six operates on a predictable formula.

The actual nature and purpose of your emotions is to serve as signals to your Operative Mind that something is happening in your surroundings that is worth paying attention to. They are dashboard lights or control panel gauges designed to get your attention and deliver a small payload of information, and that’s it. They do not cause you to do anything, or prevent you from doing anything¹ . They are not natively attached to actions or reactions. It is quite common (possibly universally so) that in the course of growing up, we attach certain reactions or actions to an emotion, for example “when I get afraid, I’m going to make myself small” or “when I feel angry, I’m going to make sure the subject of my anger learns never to cross me again.” These are merely pre-wired decisions, however, and as pre-wired decisions can be wired to any trigger, it is not the emotions themselves that are the true cause. Emotions in their most naked form are information only, that you can then use to make better decisions about your life in general and more importantly about what is going on around you in the moment.

Each of these emotions gets triggered when you perceive something as being true. Whether that thing is true or not is a completely different question. If you think porch pirates stole your package delivery, you will feel angry even if it eventually turns out it was a helpful family member who moved the package for you. Similarly, if you mistakenly think you’re going to lose your job, you might feel Fear or Sadness, even if you are misreading the situation and there is no actual threat to your employment. It’s important to keep that in mind because your emotions are not fortune-tellers. They don’t give you any information about the outside world. Just because you are hurt or angry doesn’t indicate that someone actually did anything wrong or attacked you, for example. Your emotions only highlight and bring attention to what you already think about your circumstances. They are not evidence that what you perceive is actually true.

It’s also true that each of these emotions at their extreme expressions do create a physiological reaction that can be quite distracting. Glee will cause laughter; Sadness, crying; Anger will make you feel hot and powerful; Fear will make you feel ice in your chest; Bliss will cause a warm peace, and Disgust can even evoke nausea. I am convinced these are just adaptations that your mind has developed to make sure you don’t miss or ignore these emotions in their extreme form. The more strongly you feel the emotion, the more important your Cognizant Mind is finding it, and the more insistent it will be that you acknowledge it. Mostly, though, these are minor distractions once you understand what they are for. It is not only possible, but common for people to obsess over the experience of their emotions and to become thoroughly consumed by what they are feeling at the moment. This is not inevitable, however. Once you know and understand what your emotions are telling you, you can read the gauge, absorb the information it is telling you, adapt or account for it, and then ignore it until you receive a new reading. This reduces the distraction level to momentary, but it requires not only the knowledge contained here, but also a level of self-possession to be purposeful and direct in how you react. It is very achievable, however.

So let’s look at each of these emotions and what they can tell us about our own perceptions, and along the way, we will discuss how to stop or reduce feeling them in any given moment if you wish.

Fear

It is probably fairly obvious that the Fear emotion happens when you perceive some sort of threat to you. What is perhaps less obvious is that the threat does not need to be a physical one or a threat to life and limb. You can fear a loss of social standing (embarrassment, social anxiety), losing someone important to you (jealousy) or having to accept something about yourself that you don’t want to be true (identity fears). Fear is a wholly unpleasant emotion to most people, and it manifests itself more frequently than most people want to admit, either to themselves or others. I suspect that this derives from a misconstrued notion of bravery that falsely equates bravery with a lack of Fear. Therefore, anyone who wants to consider themselves or wants others to consider them “brave” will often deny that they feel Fear, even when it is written all over their face. This is silly, not only because Fear is a basic human emotion and is a normal part of every human existence, but because bravery is the act of doing what needs to be done in the face of Fear, not in the absence of it. So refusing to admit you feel Fear is actually suggesting that you are never brave. Regardless, Fear is likely the emotion we feel the most often throughout the day (it is critical to our self-defense mechanisms after all), and it is much better acknowledged and understood than ignored or denied.

The way to defeat Fear is to face and accept the threat for what it really is. I have developed some easy-to-follow steps that, if followed fully without cheating, will remove any Fear from your experience - no matter the circumstances - and are simple enough to remember and follow even in the middle of a full panic. If you find yourself feeling overwhelming or unusually persistent or recurrent Fear, however, you are better off examining your Belief System, and hunt for lies that are causing the fears to crop up so regularly.

Anger

Anger is your Cognizant Mind’s way of letting you know that one of your goals is blocked. That might sound overly simplistic. When I first heard this explanation, I thought it ridiculous. Obviously Anger is a lot more complicated and nuanced than that. But the more I tried to find examples of when it doesn’t apply, the more I began to realize that it truly is that simple. Your goals themselves might be increbily complex and intricate - that’s true - but when you really examine yourself, you’ll realize that in every case where you feel Anger, someone other than you seems to be blocking one of your goals. If someone accuses you of wrong-doing at work, it blocks your goal of having your coworkers respect and trust you. If your lover lies to you or cheats on you, it is blocking your goal of living the future you are imagining with them, or more specifically your goal of being able to trust them. Sometimes your goals aren’t particularly noble. Such as when you get angry at your child because they won’t clean up their room, and your goal (if you’re brutally honest with yourself) is to be able to control them absolutely to do whatever you want without having to take the effort to explain to them why or take their own child-like goals into account. Your goals aren’t always the most pure, but if you are honest with yourself, you will find that when you are angry, it is always because you think some goal, some objective, something you want - is being blocked by an outside person.

Another important note on Anger, is that, despite what our society will tell you, there is nothing inherently wrong with feeling Anger. As stated above, Anger just means that one of your goals has been blocked. It accounts not at all as to whether that goal is valid or not or whether that person has the right to block your goal in the way that they are. It is perfectly rational to be angry when someone wrongs you. We all have a goal to live in a society where we can trust each other to be decent, and when someone acts in a way that threatens that objective, Anger is the correct and normal response. I think Anger gets a bad rap because some (possibly many) people use their Anger as an excuse for bad, aggressive, or otherwise antisocial behavior. And some unskilled thinkers then reach or adopt the conclusion that the solution to that problem is for everyone to never be angry. This is errant, of course, but, ironically, this causes them to have a goal of no one in their vicinnity (including themselves) to ever experience Anger, which is inevitably blocked by someone being human and experiencing that particular human emotion - which in turn blocks the goal of the original person and then triggers Anger in themselves, which can then make them more angry by blocking their goal of not feeling Anger! The better truth here is that people are responsible for their actions no matter what emotions they are feeling, and we should be trying to curb the behavior, not the built-in emotional mechanisms intentionally designed as part of the human experience.

If you do find yourself feeling Anger, and wish not to anymore, your path is simple: either remove the block, or remove the goal. Sometimes, there are things you can do to unblock your goal. You can find another way around the obstacle, or you can convince someone else to change their behavior such that they are no longer blocking you. If you can do this, of course, your Anger will immediately dissipate. The other path, though is just as valuable. Sometimes removing the item blocking your goal is something that is outside your garden, and even possibly outside your influence. In this case your only options are to stay angry - which is rather unpleasant - or to remove the goal: to give up on trying to make it happen. That’s not to say you can not or should not still want that thing, but that you give it up as something you personally are trying to achieve. When you reach that acceptance - that it is something you can wish for, but cannot make happen - the Anger likewise evaporates. Though, especially if you have been planning on that goal coming true for quite some time, the loss of that perceived future might subsequently cause you to feel Sadness.

Sadness

Sadness is the reaction when something about your life has just gotten worse. Importantly, notice I didn’t say you feel sad when your life is bad but when it has just gotten worse. It’s about the direction of movement, not the absolute measurement. You can feel sad even when you’ve got a pretty good life in general. Also note that the definition of “bad” or its opposite “good” are defined solely by you in this context. It doesn’t really matter how you define “good” or “bad” as far as this emotion is concerned, only whether recent events match up with whatever you consider “bad” to be. If you consider the thing that just happened to have made your life worse, you will feel sad. The scale of the descent and the suddenness of your awareness of it will determine how sad you feel. Things getting really bad really quickly will result in heavy amounts of Sadness - which we typically label grief.

The emotion of Sadness requires simultaneously the most unpleasant, most effort-intensive, and the longest-lasting maneuver to rid yourself of it of any of the emotions. Unfortunately, there’s nothing for it. You have to drink the bucket.

Glee

Interestingly, while Sadness is a very pure emotion (we all know when we are sad and know clearly what the word “sad” means), happiness, which we accept as the opposite of Sadness, is much more muddled. I believe this is because we have applied the word “happy” to two distinct, but often coincidal, emotions. And thus we can be “happy” in one instance, but feel something different from when we are “happy” in another. To help clarify, I will choose to use two different terms for the different emotions: Glee and Bliss. Glee is the true opposite of Sadness. It is the emotion you feel when something in your life just got better. It is the emotion that makes you laugh out loud at its utmost and is at the heart of why we enjoy humor and music And just like Sadness, it is not about your life getting good; only better. That is the reason why people at the bottom of the social or economic ladder can often be the happiest people you have ever met. Because their life is so low, almost any change is a good change. And consequently it’s also why some of the richest, most successful people we know of are often the most miserable. Once you’ve reached the top, it is much more difficult to find ways to improve your life. So you will find account after account of people at the top feeling a very flat existence without any of the joy they felt during their rise.

It’s useful to know that, while you probably don’t want to get rid of Glee, there are things you can (and probably will) do that will achieve that end. Glee and Sadness are sisters who act in similar ways, and much like Sadness, when you experience Glee from a certain upturn in events, you are drinking it from a finite bucket. The more you roll the event over in your mind, the stronger the emotion wells up inside you, and the sooner it fades away. Soon, you will find that thing that made you feel like clapping like a little kid no longer has any punch left to it. You feel nothing about it, and it becomes just another event in your history. Likewise, if you try to sip the feeling judiciously, you can savor it for a long time, at the expense of never feeling the big rush of overwhelming joy. Neither of these is wrong. It is only a matter of personal preference. But it helps to know what you are choosing between.

Note that Glee is an emotion that we are especially prone to borrowing from, which, if not accounted for, can also make it seem like this emotion isn’t playing by the rules.

Disgust

Disgust is the feeling that lets you know what you are observing or imagining is something that you feel is bad in its very nature. Not that it threatens you (Fear), or that it has done something bad to you (Sadness), but that it in its very existence is bad for the whole system in which we live. It often serves as an early warning sign for things that are poisonous or would make us sick, or warns us off the creepy suitor. In short, the primary difference between Disgust and Sadness or Fear is the scope. Fear and Sadness are both about how the subject affects you, whereas Disgust is about how it affects your world or others around you.

If you wish to remove the feeling of Disgust, obviously, the easiest method is just to distance yourself from the thing that is disgusting you. However, that is not always possible or practical. For example, you might feel this towards your boss or another coworker (not necessarily due to poor hygiene, it could be their behavior or attitude that disgusts you). In these cases, you can also remove Disgust by pursuing familiarity. We are often disgusted, for example, by the sight of blood or images of an open incision into a human body. This makes sense, because to our evolved brain, this looks like a serious injury and is obviously an inherently bad thing. But to those who study medicine, especially surgery, these images hold no more Disgust than a piece of notebook paper, because they’ve spent years becoming familiar and understand the deeper nature of these things and how they work, what their function is. Similarly, if you found a puddle of putrid green slime on the sidewalk, you might feel an intense feeling of Disgust, but a bacterial biologist might find it fascinating and want to take it back to their lab for study. So if you cannot distance yourself from someone who disgusts you, try instead forcing yourself to get to know them better. Try to put yourself in their shoes and find out what happened in their life that made them this way. It won’t by any means cause you to like what they do or want to incorporate it into your own life - likely not. But you may come to understand them, and possibly even pity them. From there, finding a way to work with them is a more trivial matter.

Bliss

Bliss is the opposite of Disgust. It is the feeling you experience when you are observing or imagining something you find wholly good. And like all the other emotions, this is purely subjective on how you define good. Some people feel it looking at a newborn baby. Some at a finely restored muscle car. It is what you feel when you enjoy a sunset or a truly beautiful woman. It is a sense of rightness and goodness in the world that brings a feeling of peace. Bliss is the frequent companion of Glee, for obvious reasons. Things that are inherently good for the Universe are also often good for you, though not always. Glee makes you want to giggle and clap your hands. Bliss makes you want to smile and sigh.

Interestingly, at its extreme form, we re-label Bliss with one of the many definitions of the word “love.” When we love someone (what we would usually call “truly loving” them), it is at its core a recognition that - taken on the whole - this person is truly good and the universe is better for having them in it. This applies not only to people. When we say things like “I love ice cream” or “I love a good Sunday nap.” What we are expressing is an emotional feeling of Bliss toward that thing or activity. That your opinion is that these things are inherently good.

And just like Disgust, familiarity and repeated exposure causes this feeling to fade. This is why couples who have been together for years don’t feel the same passion (though, other definitions for the word “love” take over instead.) Or why a piece of art that used to be so beautiful to you can seem to lose its magic after it has been hanging on your wall for a while. This phenomenon is at the heart of the saying “familiarity breeds contempt.” While not actually true - familiarity reduces both Bliss and Disgust. It can be true that in an early relationship, we might ignore or gloss over the negative personality traits of a person. Once the Bliss of that new relationship wears off, however (through familiarity), all that is left is the stuff we were ignoring. However, as any long-married couple can tell you, if you muscle through that, eventually familiarity removes the Disgust as well, and you’re left with a comfortable hum.

Other Emotion Words

Technically, we have covered our subject matter already, explaining and expounding on the six base emotions. However, in the interest of curtailing objections to my basic premise - that the previous six are the only actual emotions that constitute all others - it might be valuable to mention a series of other words that we normally consider “emotions” and show how they actually fit into the matrix above. This list is clearly not exhaustive, but might start to exemplify the pattern:

Annoyance: Very minor level of Anger.

Anxiety: Low-to-mid-level but persistent Fear.

Bitterness: Low Anger that has been simmering (undealt with) for a long time. Also often used for the actions associated with such a circumstance, or the thoughts or beliefs that might accompany it.

Bravery: While we may say we “feel” brave, bravery is actually a description of action. Being brave is about performing the act that you know needs to be done, even though you are feeling afraid at the time. Explicitly, the only emotion involved in bravery is Fear, as you cannot be brave without feeling Fear.

Chagrin: Very low level shame (see below), or possibly just low level Sadness, depending on usage.

Confidence: An intellectual assessment that you have a high probability of predicting and navigating the future correctly. Being confident naturally reduces Fear, and may also cause you to be hopeful about the future, but is not an emotion in itself.

Contempt: Disgust, specifically for a person, and usually with a little Anger mixed in.

Depresssion: Depression is caused by a lack of hope. Even though depression is something you feel in response to a certain state within your belief system, it doesn’t qualify as an emotion but instead is a name that we give to a particular collection of symptoms, each of which could and often is caused by something that is not depression - sleepiness, lack of other emotions, reduced appetite, sluggish thinking, etc. Emotions aren’t like that. If you feel anger, it is never caused by something other than a blocked goal. Fear never happens unless you perceive a threat. But each of the symptoms of depression can exist in other states that are not depression. More specifically, rather than being a specific signal itself, depression is just a name that we give a particular version of our mind shutting down non-essential functions in an effort to preserve itself when things are going very wrong. It has that capacity and function in any number of scenarios, but as a society, we’ve given this particular scenario a name.

Disappointment: Low level Sadness.

Embarrassment: Fear, specifically of loss of social standing. To demonstrate: if you make a stupid mistake in private, you may feel chagrin, but not embarrassment. If you make that same mistake publicly, however, you feel the Fear of how this might affect the opinion of the people around you, and how that might affect your life going forward.

Empathy: Empathy is not its own emotion, but a built-in social mechanism whereby we identify and feel others’ emotions by proxy, by imagining what we would feel in their shoes. This causes real, genuine emotions in yourself, but empathy itself is just the tranferrence.

Envy: Simmering Anger, specifically that someone else posesses something you don’t, and you believe the inequity is unjust.

Frustration: Mid-to-mild level of Anger.

Grief: Extreme Sadness, often with the connotation of the loss being the death of a loved one.

Hate: This one takes some thinking about, but hate is just the combination of love and Anger. The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s apathy.

Hope: An intellectual position of optimism. This may bring about a feeling of Bliss or Glee.

Horrified: High levels of Disgust mixed with Fear.

Insecure: Fear based on lack of confidence.

Irritation: Minor level of Anger, usually slightly above “annoyance” but less than “frustration.”

Jealousy: Fear, specifically about losing someone who is important to you. Can often also be accompanied by Anger at the person for causing you to feel the Fear.

Joy: Superlative Glee.

Lonely: A physiological response, similar to hungry or sleepy. Similar to emotions, these are feelings inside ourself that give us some data - specifically about a lack of fulfillment of one of our physiological needs. But we don’t refer to these things as emotions, primarily because they refer to a state of ourselves, rather than information about how we perceive the outside world. It might sound wrong to suggest that social interaction is a biological need, but I suggest it anyway.

Love: The word “love” is a quagmire of different definitions and usages. When used regarding an inanimate object (I love ice cream) or a referring to a non-romantic feeling toward a person (I just love that guy!), it usually equates to Bliss. When used about a person in a romantic sense, espectially in a young relationship (“I love you”) it sometimes refers to a rather powerful cocktail of mostly Glee (your life has gotten better by having this person in it) mixed with Bliss at your often glassy-eyed perspective of that person and almost always some sexual attraction. In established relationships, “I love you” might be an expression of Bliss and/or Glee, especially after discovering some new facet of your lover that you had somehow missed heretofor, or it can be used almost as a reaffirming commitment to another, rather than an emotional expression. That’s before we talk about uses of the word that are obviously not emotions like “making love” or “love your neighbor” which are more about actions than emotions.

Nervous: Minor level of Fear

Panic: Fear at such high levels that it kicks in the Fight-or-Flight (or Freeze) physiological response. Often encumbering rational thought.

Rage: Anger at such high levels that it kicks in the Fight-or-Flight physiological response. Often encumbering rational thought.

Resentment: Persistent, low-level Anger.

Shame: Sometimes used as a synonym for embarrasment, but more correctly means a feeling of Sadness or Disgust at your own actions or the consequences thereof.

Stress: Very low-level but persistent Fear. Often about something that is not particularly likely, but would be really bad, such as job loss.

Surprise: Describes a situation where something happened that you did not expect, which can cause other emotions, depending on whether it is perceived as a threat or as something good. It also, absent any threat, causes Glee based on The Most Human Drive, but “surprise” in and of itself is not an emotion, but a state of the intellect.

Terrified: High levels of Fear.

Worry: Persistent, fairly high levels of Fear, often with a connotation of playing with the Fear like a loose tooth.