Humans use emotions to interact with their surroundings. Emotions serve as a driver for positive and negative experiences in life. They help humans survive, grow, and thrive in societies.
Emotions could play a huge role in determining one’s overall health and quality of life. The resources like The Human Condition can help you understand the relationship between emotions and the part they play in your life.
What are Emotions?
According to the American Psychological Association, emotions are complex reaction patterns that are influenced by aspects such as behavioral, physiological, and experimental elements using which individual deals with the event before them.
Emotions act as indicators of how humans should be reacting to a situation. For example, in the face of dangerous situations, your body will quickly release adrenaline in your blood and send impulses to various organs to perform a specific function. Similarly, when your body releases dopamine, serotonin, and endorphin, you feel good, happy, and relaxed.
The six big emotions universally accepted are:
- Happiness
- Sadness
- Anger
- Fear
- Surprise
- Disgust
These emotions could also help build meaningful relationships with other humans in society. For example, you could express love, forge friendships or also end up making enemies. Emotions could significantly impact one’s physical and mental health. They provide you with the ability to function in society and act as drivers for your personal goals and desires.
Understanding the Relation Between Humanness and Emotions
Emotions have played a critical role in helping the human species survive through the ages and evolve. Without emotions, the world could be a dangerous place. If one could not feel emotions such as pain, loss, grief, or empathy, there would be no barriers or reasons to cause harm to self or others.
Similarly, if one did not experience positive emotions like joy, happiness, or excitement, what would drive humans to continue working on their goals? For example, your hobbies may include activities like trekking, painting, reading, or sports. The happiness that you derive from these activities drives you to perform them in the first place.
Humans need to understand and be in touch with their emotional selves. Not doing so could lead to destructive behavior in society. Thus, as you work towards learning new skills or developing new physical abilities, it is also essential to broaden your understanding of emotional intelligence.
You can check the resources like The Human Condition to know more about different emotions and how they affect the human psyche.
Importance of Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the capability to identify, understand and control one’s emotions. It is also the ability to identify, understand and influence the emotions in other people.
Emotions have the power to motivate and drive people and urge them to take action in the real world. Thus, you see how prevalent ‘life coaches’ are in today’s world. They teach people how to understand the emotions they are feeling, and the same emotions can be managed for positive outcomes.
Understanding emotions is important because it lets you pick up emotional cues from other people. For example, are they comfortable in your presence, are they scared, are they nervous. These cues could be verbal or non-verbal.
The same understanding helps you control the environment you are in and influence the outcome of situations. For example, if your team is down and out or angry, you could affect the situation with positive emotions and turn a hostile environment into a motivated one.
Scientists cannot all agree on a singular definition of emotions, but they agree that emotions play a critical role in separating humans from other species on the planet. Emotions, both positive and negative, could drive your actions in the real world. Therefore, spend time understanding your emotions and how you can better manage them.
I’m a 20-something stay-at-home mother and wife. I have an amazing husband, a beautiful daughter, two loving dogs, and a lazy cat. I wouldn’t change my life for anything! I love to read, listen to music, cook and blog!
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