Emotions and Their Impact on Our Lives

Would you understand if a Japanese person said, “I'm angry, I'm happy, or I'm sad,” to you? Of course not, but would you misinterpret this person's facial expressions if they were expressing these emotions to you? certainly not.

Since emotions are universal and share the same characteristics everywhere, including their forms and manifestations as well as their effects on our lives as humans as a whole, people from different cultures can recognize facial expressions and identify emotions like anger, happiness, sadness, and pain without the use of language or any other form of expression.

We rarely go a day without getting excited about something, though the intensity of these emotions varies from time to time. Sometimes our emotions are simple and sometimes severe, and this is due to several factors and different situations.

The first is the nature of the situation and our personal characteristics, as they are closely related to our needs and reflect the instances, processes, and results of our satisfaction with these needs or not. As a result, it plays a significant and major role in our lives, which inspired us to write this article about emotions and their impact on our lives.

What Are Emotions?

Emotion is actually a very broad concept that encompasses all different emotional states. It covers all emotions that reflect an individual's feelings of pleasure or pain, including sadness, anger, joy, and everything in between.

The majority of contemporary psychologists view emotion in a different, more constrained sense, and they consider emotion to be an emotional state that must have three key characteristics:

1. Extreme psychological tension and a direct impact on the state of the organs. Numerous physiological conditions, such as breathlessness and low blood pressure, are present along with this tension. Of course, these disorders vary according to the intensity of the emotion.
2. Emotion is an unexpected and emergency emotional state that does not happen as a result of any planning on the part of the person, as it surprises them and prevents them from thinking. For instance, your emotions might be stable and you're emotion-free outside of the house, but as soon as you step inside, you might be surprised to see one of your kids playing with important files you own, so this might make you feel upset and angry, which might lead you to act in a way that you'll later regret once your emotions have subsided.
3. Emotion is a fleeting emotional state that does not last for a long time. You will notice that the person will eventually return to calm after experiencing intense emotion, and the internal volcano that was erupting just moments earlier will have subsided. For instance, if you were walking down the street and a dog suddenly appeared in front of you, you would be startled and experience a moment of fear before returning to your normal state.

Based on those three characteristics, we can conclude that emotion is a sudden physical and psychological state that occurs suddenly and causes psychological and physical disturbances in a person.

We can distinguish between emotions and other emotional states and feelings using this definition. For instance, love isn't viewed as an emotion but as a permanent state, while desire and sadness are emotions. Misery is not an emotion either.

The relationship between emotion and feelings, as well as the relationship between emotion and emotional state, will be discussed in the following, along with an explanation of what chronic emotion means.

The Relationship Between Emotion and Feelings

There is a lot of confusion between emotions and feelings, so it is said that tenderness is an emotion and love is an emotion. The truth is that every sentimental organization that revolves around a specific and relatively constant subject is a feeling, not an emotion, like a mother’s love for her child.

The Relationship Between Emotion and Mood

The mood is a low-intensity emotional state, and though it is a transient condition, it has a long-lasting effect on the person, and it may go away and come back again. In short, moods are just emotions that are less intense and last longer.

For instance, when you lose a loved one, you will likely feel sad. This is an emotion. However, if your sadness persists for a while, it changes to sorrow, which is a state of mood.

Chronic Emotions

Emotions become chronic when the conditions that gave rise to them continue to exist, such as the persistence of fear-causing factors, as happens in wars, or the continuation of bad economic conditions at home that arouse anxiety and anger. So, emotions become chronic and are closer to anxiety and mental illness.

Causes of Emotions

We might wonder why emotions arise. In fact, in order to be able to respond to this question, we must first investigate the causes behind emotions. Here are some of these causes:

1. Provoking a motive in a person suddenly and unexpectedly, especially if the excitement is intense and the motive is primary, will cause the emotion to be so intense that the person will be unable to act or think. An example of this is the state of panic that you experience when a speeding car surprises you as you cross the street.
2. Preventing someone from achieving their goal or meeting one of their basic needs. If everything goes according to plan, the emotion does not occur. For instance, if you wanted to buy a necessary item but were unable to, you would feel the emotion, and your urgency to buy it would grow.
3. Emotions are also triggered when needs are met unexpectedly and without expectation, such as when you get a promotion at work without being expected or when a student expecting to fail succeeds.

What Are the Manifestations of Emotions?

We can observe emotions through a group of manifestations that reflect on the individual's personality, and we can identify three main aspects that make up each emotion:

1. Intrinsic aspect

This is the side that is connected to the person who is experiencing the emotion, which is only noticeable to them. Every person has the ability to identify their emotional manifestations through the practice of inner meditation that they engage in in their depths. For instance, when I'm angry, I may scream to express my emotions, and I lose my logical judgment of things and behave in ways that surprise me later on.

2. Visible aspect

This includes manifestations of an emotion, such as different facial expressions, external movements, gestures, and expressions that we can see in an emotional person, allowing us to identify the type and intensity of the emotion. For instance, the hands trembling and the face losing color indicate fear.

3. Internal physiological aspects

This includes things that have an impact on a person's internal organs, such as variations in blood pressure, breathing difficulties, and an increase in endocrine secretions.

It is important to note that these three aspects appear as a single, integrated manifestation rather than as independent parts.

Emotions’ Impact on Our Lives:

In order to clarify the impact of emotions on our lives, we will first deal with their impact on our mental processes and then their impact on our health.

Emotions’ Impact on Our Mental Processes

We cannot claim that emotions always have a negative impact on our lives and mental processes. Instead, some mild and simple emotions help to increase the flow of ideas and the propensity to work by encouraging imagination and thought. An example of this is the healthy competition that exists among coworkers. For instance, when you know that a coworker has completed more work than you have, you will feel motivated to work harder and use your creativity to come up with the best solutions.

On the other hand, violent and strong emotions have a negative impact on our lives, and almost all of our cognitive, intellectual, and mental functions are affected, so anger in a sober scientist may be the result of thinking and acting at a level that is below their intellectual level.

How often have we witnessed singers lose track of song lyrics while performing on stage, or how frequently have we personally forgotten the answers to an oral exam due to dread and fear? As emotions can also impact memory. In the same context, how frequently did we use naive words that had nothing to do with the question during the oral exams? This is due to the impact of emotions on the language.

Of course, we cannot limit the impact of emotions on our mental abilities, and what we have mentioned is only the tip of the iceberg.

The Impact of Emotions on Our Health

Emotion has a great impact on health. This manifests in:

1. Psychological trauma and personality disorders

It's a common belief that severe traumas, such as the death of a loved one, significant financial loss, betrayal, or abrupt failure, are reasons for the occurrence of psychological trauma and personality disorders. However, this belief only represents a partial reality.

A person must be ready for this to happen because trauma cannot by itself cause psychological or mental disorders. Numerous factors, such as education, genetics, and others, contribute to this readiness. So, emotions appear as the direct cause, while the underlying causes that have been present in their feelings for a long time do not appear.

2. Physical and psychological diseases

We have spoken about the connection between emotions and the body's internal systems and how violent emotions can disrupt these systems and result in physical and psychological diseases.

When suppressing these emotions for any reason, intense emotions can develop into crises and serious illnesses, such as high blood pressure, ulcers, and other physical diseases of psychological origin.

Some Measures to Control Emotions

We can control the emotions you feel through the following measures:

1. Have a strong will, and keep in mind that emotions will not lead to a satisfactory result, but they will make the situation worse.
2. Change your position (sitting, standing, or otherwise) until you feel calmer.
3. Take a cold shower to calm the body's internal systems.
4. Preoccupation with anything that relieves anxiety.

In Conclusion

Due to their significant impact on our lives, whether positively or negatively, emotions typically receive a lot of attention in scientific, psychological, and medical circles, and since emotions are closely related to a person's personality, they can be used to characterize and express a person's nature.

Therefore, as normal people, we must be able to exert as much control over our emotions as we can, so we can manage them and not let them control us. How many people in this world lost their jobs due to anger, and how many people did not develop due to fear? The examples in this context are numerous and all confirm the same idea: “We must control our emotions and direct them to serve our interests, not the opposite.”