Emotion

Emotions. As cool and romantic as we want them to be, emotions don’t come from the heart, but the brain. The effects, however, can definitely mess with the heart, and every other part of your body for that matter. I don’t think this will be a long post, and it probably won’t make too many people happy. Today we’re talking about what emotions are, what they do for and to you, and touching on the question, “are emotions necessary?”

Emotions come from the brain, and they are responses that humans and other living things have to certain neurotransmitters going through the body. Emotions are often characterized by certain traits: a smile shows happiness, crying shows sadness, shaking shows anxiousness. This is what emotions literally are. To speak in a more “emotional” sense, emotions are “feelings.” Your body feels and reacts to certain things in certain ways. If you accomplish something positive, you feel happy. If you see and hear the rain, you feel calm. If you see someone in pain, you feel sympathy. Emotions are also just feelings, and they’re often associated with “the heart” instead of with neurotransmitters, because for some reason people think that happiness is more than serotonin, sadness is more than a lack of serotonin, love is more than oxytocin and vasopressin, and stress is more than cortisol. However, scientifically speaking, that's what they are.

Now then, what do these neurotransmitters, or emotions, do to you? Well, a better question is what can’t they do to you? They control your fight-or-flight responses, they can increase and decrease your heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, and immune system capabilities. They can make you shake, heck, they can raise your chances at dying earlier, they can keep you up at night, and they can destroy your stomach (figuratively). Of course, emotions can also do positive things. They can make you feel amazing, help ease physical, mental, and spiritual pain, help cope with negative experiences, and other beautiful things. I’ve talked about a lot of neurotransmitters and a lot of emotions/feelings and their effects over the course of the past two-ish years, and I could go through more physical effects of emotions forever and still not finish, because science is continuing to study this deep subject. However, the effects on the body are one thing. On a deeper level, that’s a little harder to study, emotions affect your thoughts. They make you think and see the universe in certain ways; they affect your perception, your beliefs, your cognition. They affect your mind, whether it be the optimism and positive thinking when you’re happy or the deep, dark… red thoughts when you’re sad. It creates your reality, the way you live, the things you say, the things you do, the way you do them. Emotions run deep into human life.

As humans are what we are, with our ability to ponder, contemplate, and self-reflect, the question “Are emotions necessary?” has come up often. I believe the objective answer to this question is “No.” Of course not, we don’t need emotions to live our lives. We can all be logical beings. Morality can be erased and replaced by rational thought without regard for anything but our survival and flourishing. However, this question is in itself often an emotional question. When I hear this question come out of someone’s mouth, it’s usually due to his/her feeling some sort of negative emotion and not wanting to feel it anymore. Whether emotions are or aren’t necessary doesn’t matter. Humans are not simply thinking beings, nor are we simply feeling beings. We’re both, but we are feeling before we are thinking as senses get passed through the limbic system (emotions) and then move through the brain into the prefrontal cortex (rational thought). Logically speaking, we want nothing superfluous, and we don’t want to think about or spend time on anything that we don’t have to. Therefore, given the fact that humans have emotions and the fact that we can’t do anything about it, the question, “are emotions necessary?” is a superfluous, emotional question. We have emotions, and all we can do is learn how to control them and use them to our benefit, in a positive way for us and all other humans and beings upon this Earth. So the logical question is “How do we best utilize our emotions?”

That’s all for this week. This post ended up being a little longer than I thought, but I think I said a few nice things in here, so it’s fine. All said, emotions are reactions to neurotransmitters in our brain that are mainly fired when senses pass through the limbic system in the temporal lobe of the brain. Emotions do a lot of things to you, both positive and negative, and the question “Are emotions necessary?” is an unhelpful question. Instead, we should be asking “How do we best utilize our emotions?” Thank you for reading through. I hope you all have a wonderful and very positive emotions for the next week when I see you again. Peace.