Unlock the Power of Your Emotions
Feel your feelings. A simple common statement, yet our relationship with control means many of us think our feelings instead of actually feeling them. Since feeling inevitably includes the entire body, our capacity to feel directly links to our brain's capacity to think.
Over the past 20 years there’s been a revolution in understanding the neuroscience of Cognition, Emotion, and Behaviour. The research field of embodied and embedded cognition studies the dependence of cognition on the body and the environment around it. Essentially, finding that cognition, emotion, and behaviour are ultimately inseparable in our experiences, as well as in our brain and body physiology. So… constraints placed on 1 of the 3 hinder the other 2. Many us though try to shut down emotion, in the brain and/or the body, when it's judged as unacceptable or unbearable.
An attempt to suppress or shut down emotion will dysregulate behaviour and cognition - a.k.a. you literally cannot think and act clearly. Constraining emotion constrains neurons firing in the brain, leaving limited brain pathways and thinking patterns available to you!
Often we are told emotions are opposed to reason. But really this evidence shows a lack of emotion is more likely than the presence of emotion to lead to irrational behaviour. Many confuse the processing of emotion, which may feel chaotic, with irrationality. Yet what’s really surfacing is our limited experience in embodying and processing that specific emotion.
3 ways this limitation can show up:
Cognitive dissonance and denial. For instance, pushing away a loved one who’s abusive can conflict with our internal concept of love, causing uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. Suppressing the body's discomfort from this inner conflict, and the pain of potential loss of love, can limit thinking and responses towards the situation. Externally this can look like denial.
Avoiding a specific emotion through repeated behaviour. For example, if guilting was prevalent in childhood and never processed through the body. Someone as an adult may behave and think towards pleasing others in order to avoid feeling any past guilt that’s accumulated in their system.
Having a dominant emotional response to defend against other feelings. This is commonly seen in anger. Someone defaults to one emotional state they “know”. They behave and think from that emotion as a defence against feeling, thinking, or behaving from any other underlying emotion, like grief.
A lot of the time suppression happens unconsciously. When we bring consciousness to these defences through tuning into the body, however, we can get to the emotional truth. Expanding cognition and behaviour in the process for our authentic wellbeing.
