Emotions & What Follows

Emotions are natural feelings that every person feels, emotions drive anger, help express happiness and joy, show passion and empathy and or sympathy towards something or others. Emotions cause us as people to relate to one another, to feel and interpret what another person may be or is feeling. Emotions are natural and can be volatile, they can cause tragedy and misfortune in society or communities but it can also bring the biggest changes in the world pushing people to make change happen.

Emotions and what follows, emotions cause people to have a cloud over their view of the world or even their everyday life, emotions evoke a certain blindness to people either seeking answers or simply looking for the simplest truths. When someone is full of anger and rage they can’t hear nor will they listen to someone trying to speak reason into them as the emotions they are feeling and wanting to express are overwhelming and volatile. It isn't until you can get the person’s attention that they usually calm down, breath, and realize what it is they are doing, whether scaring people or about to hurt someone.

When it comes to Happiness and Joy as emotions, it isn’t any less blinding, people don’t see these emotions as possibly dangerous. Without close attention to who is around you and how much of this “love” you are giving out, you can end up getting screwed over big time by not noticing who you surround yourself with. Being focused on the feelings of security and a good time that you wouldn’t notice the manipulation happening to you and the advantages being taken by those around you.

The brain works in mysterious ways, like when you feel happiness and joy, your brain is releasing drugs like serotonin and dopamine, making your body feel an almost overwhelming sensation which we respond in laughter and smiling etc. When you get angry the brain releases

cortisol and adrenaline and noradrenaline which act as fight or flight chemicals causing your body to prepare for any circumstance that could be life threatening. The reason I said the brain works in mysterious ways is because when you become angry or happy, the brain will release these chemicals that then alter our own perception of what is happening around us. It changes our perspectives and sometimes views on people or the world, causing change.

The brain uses our emotions to cause change in our bodies or to “force” us to make a change in possibly our routine or just moving someone out of our life. Emotions are hard to control and if they have so much influence to be able to change our perspectives or view points then what more don’t we know that they can do? This to me is a harder question to answer then the meaning of life and what happens when we die; the reason for this is because I have a harder time controlling emotions then I did justifying my own answer to the two biggest questions most people have in the back of their minds.

Emotions cause me to have different ways of thinking on a regular basis and this isn't because I can’t control my emotions but because I choose to listen to what I am feeling then just ignoring it and acting like everyday is roses and sunshine. I am eighteen years old and I have been through a good amount of traumas and misfortunes, not to say some I did bring upon myself; I have felt emotions and felt the emotions behind those on the surface. At a young age with really not a lot of life experience I have to say that I have gone through a lot of emotions and either expressed or reflected into a lot of them. Emotions are their own person in a sense, you choose which “mask” or “person” you want to be when dealing with a situation or reacting to one and those emotions “take over” in a certain sense.

When you become emotional, you can of course become quite quickly irrational or very excitable, all depending on the person, surrounding(s) and or environment and most importantly the mood before you became emotional. I make the “mood before you became emotional” an important point because if you were stressed and tired and your “lover” or friend or whoever starts in anyway becoming irritating, it’s nothing personal but you're gonna lose your mind a little bit on them if they don’t chill. If you are in a great mood and the same thing happens (becoming irritated) you would more than likely have a much better approach and attitude toward the person when asking them to bring it down a notch or two.

Recently i became emotional, I have not put a hole in anything around the house in a good amount of time (not to make it sound like it was a normal or reoccurring thing at one time) but I had a melt down a recently and a trigger was hit and I put a hole in my bedroom drywall. I now will be learning how to re-drywall the hole and this is a lesson I am reflecting on, the lesson is controlling the external anger and controlling the mind when enraged. This has been a problem for me in my life for quite a long time but I have come a super long way in the past fifteen years, and emotions are powerful but control must be instilled or chaos will surely take over.

Understanding the emotions that help drive us to survive and change our lives for the betterment of us is a crucial thing I believe that everyone should take the time to do. If no one ever understood why they felt a certain way and couldn’t express or communicate it to something or someone, we would all go madly insane, some probably murderous as unfortunate as it is to say. The truth of the matter is that people today seem not to understand or even lightly think into the emotions they express, someone gets mad or feels mistreated they usually now go out and hurt people; someone gets a raise and gets this rush of emotions and buys a new car they

in the long run can’t afford and end up in debt. Emotions make people irrational and misguided, they need to harness and control the feelings they have inside.

In psychology I have been learning that emotions can come from two different places, first being-external stimulus which can be first, culture. Situational and degree of expression differences can lead to different performance on emotion. Also, ethnicity can be a sector of influence due to how the person is treated and or discriminated against or even at all. Second is social conventions, compared with the direct expression of emotions in the United States, where when a child is upset they have a tantrum and are treated to; in Japanese culture for example emotions are expressed much more indirectly. Next is emotional contagion which is defined as one becomes influenced by the emotions of others around them or in other words, people’s mood(s) can impact other people around them and change their emotions.

The reason I like psychology is because it explains why emotions happen in a way that makes sense to me. Psychology has an interesting and less holistic view of how the mind, body and emotions work. In psychology emotions work because of the limbic system which is comprised of the hypothalamus, thalamus, amygdala, and the hippocampus which is the area of the brain involved in emotion and memory. The hypothalamus activates the sympathetic nervous system that is a part of any given emotional reaction or situation. The thalamus is the sensory relay center which projects neurons to both the amygdala and the higher cortical regions. The amygdala is the home of emotions, to remember its role I think of a upset girl named Amy, because the amygdala plays a role in processing emotional information and sending that information. When we get angry it’s usually our amygdala that is upset or panicking.The

hippocampus completes the process by integrating the emotional experience(s) with cognition or the prefrontal cortex.

The reason I decided to write about emotions is because it seems like today you can’t really find anyone talking about or even thinking about emotions and how or what they do to us and possibly others. When I went to the a rich area near Martinez California close by where my mom grew up, she told me that there were a lot of teen suicides at this high school and in this rich community. When i heard this, it absolutely shocked me, mostly because if you are rich, what do you have to be so upset about so i asked my mom and she then explained that these children's parents usually don't give them the emotional support they need so they look to each other (other students and or friends). They know nothing more than the other, so it becomes a Mean Girls movie in real life and unfortunately some aren’t strong enough to withstand the judgement and mistreatment of their “peers”.

In conclusion, I personally know what discrimination, racism, bullying and harrassment all feel like, I even know what defemation of character and reputation feels like. I have been in rough spots in my life emotionally, come close to bad decisions and worst outcomes, not only for myself but also those I love. The difference I believe between me and a lot of people today (especially in my generation) is that no one seems to stop and analyze their feelings, their internal emotions and reflect on how it is affecting themselves and the people surrounding them. It takes a lot of strength to reflect back on the wrongs you’ve made, but to me it takes more strength to control yourself before making the wrong decision in the first place, controlling and harnessing emotions, and understanding what follows the expression of the emotions themselves.

Source/Works Cited:

Learning, Lumen. “Introduction to Psychology.” ​Lumen,​

courses.lumenlearning.com/wsu-sandbox/chapter/emotion/.