Emotions and Their Purpose
All emotions, even uncomfortable ones, serve an important purpose in our lives.
Fear
Fear is nature’s alarm system. It lets us know that we might be in danger and helps us take the steps we need to protect ourselves. It provides a sense of urgency to act, often without thinking.
Example: Imagine you are crossing the street when you notice that a car is coming straight at you. This situation would instantly prompt fear for pretty much everyone. The feeling would be associated with physical sensations that prepare the body to flee such an unsafe situation, like an increased heart rate to pump blood to the arms and legs and pupils dilating to scan for danger. In this situation, you would likely jump out of the way onto the sidewalk. If you felt nothing, you might continue to walk leisurely across the street, possibly being run over. So, as you can see here, the uncomfortable emotion of fear actually plays an important role in keeping us safe.
Anxiety
Anxiety is the emotion that helps us prepare for the future. Anxiety alerts us to important or potentially dangerous situations that might occur. This emotion also prompts us to focus our attention on whatever is causing the anxiety so that we can prevent or decrease a negative outcome (or “threat”).
Example: Feeling anxiety before a big presentation at work or school lets you know that this task is important. It also prompts you to begin preparing so that you’re not caught off guard. Imagine if you didn’t feel anything as the day of this presentation approached. You probably wouldn’t feel motivated to practice and might not be prepared for difficult questions from the audience.
Sadness
Sadness is the emotion that naturally occurs after a loss or setback related to something or someone that is important to us. Sadness also appears when we notice significant differences between the way our life is and how we want it to be. Sadness is associated with physical sensations like heaviness in the body and feeling tired. Sadness signals the need to pull back so that the loss or setback can be processed. Sadness also naturally draws others toward us to provide comfort and support.
Example: We might feel sad about a job because we find ourselves not progressing like we had hoped, or we feel sad because we are experiencing struggles in a relationship that we really care about or the loss of a loved one. For example, feeling sad after a break-up lets you know that the relationship (or aspects of that relationship) was important to you. Withdrawing to process what went wrong and what characteristics you want to look for in a new relationship may help you find greater success with a future partner. This emotion also signals to others that we may need support and comfort. Humans are social animals, which means we sometimes need help to get back on our feet and sadness serves the important function of drawing others towards us.
Anger
Anger is the natural response when we feel we (or people we care about) have been wronged in some way. Anger (and the similar emotion of frustration) also occurs when we feel like we are being blocked from achieving important goals. This emotion alerts us that our boundaries have been crossed and motivates us to do something about it.
Example: Imagine you discover that your phone company has been charging you hidden fees for months and expects you to pay them right away or they’ll shut off your service. Feeling anger in this situation lets you know that something unfair has happened— you shouldn’t be expected to pay for services you
didn’t use. This anger would also probably prompt you to speak to a customer service manager to demand that the charges be reversed. Here the emotion of anger also signals to the other person that they have frustrated or wronged you. Anger has a bad reputation because it is can be associated with destructive behavior like yelling and breaking things. It is important to separate this possible response to anger from the experience of the emotion itself. It is very important to pay attention to anger when it occurs because it signals to you that you may need to defend yourself.
Guilt/ Shame
Guilt and shame occur when we fall short of some standard. Guilt occurs when we feel like we did something wrong and is based on our actions. Guilt helps people maintain important relationships by prompting us to make amends or apologize. Shame occurs when we feel like we are wrong or less than and feel “lesser in value.” Shame prompts us to withdraw from others. This withdrawal may give a person room to think about how they might achieve their goals going forward to feel better about themselves in the future. In both cases, these emotions motivate helpful behavior. However, our thoughts can produce inappropriate or excessive shame/guilt that becomes harmful to us.
Example: For example, you might feel guilty if you forget to pay your friend back after borrowing money. Guilt in this situation would likely prompt you to make amends by apologizing and getting your friend the cash. However, you may be unable to pay a friend back because you don’t have any money, which may trigger feelings of shame.
Positive Emotions
Positive emotions, like happiness, excitement, and pride, also communicate important information. Positive emotions help us identify what we value in life and how we want to be spending our time.
Example: If you pick up a new hobby that brings you a lot of joy, what are you likely to do? Keep doing it!
Sometimes people try to avoid positive emotions because they’re afraid that once the emotion ends, they’ll feel even worse than they did before. Or they’ll prevent themselves from getting excited because they worry that if things don’t work out, they’ll feel more disappointed than if they hadn’t gotten excited in the first place. Sometimes people with depression avoid positive experiences like socializing because they find it distressing that they don’t enjoy these experiences as much as they used to. Without positive emotions, though, we wouldn’t know what direction to go in our lives. It is important to allow ourselves to feel the full range of emotions, negative and positive.
Summarizing the Importance of Emotions
As you can see from these examples, emotions serve a necessary role in our lives. All of these emotions communicate very important information about the world around us and motivate us to act. Without them, we’d be unable to move successfully through life. In fact, we evolved to have emotions because they’re so important for the survival of our species. Emotions are hardwired into us— even if we wanted to, we’d be unable to push them away completely. That’s why this treatment focuses on accepting emotions and responding in more helpful ways when they come up.
Even though we know that all of these emotions are important in the normal course of everyone’s life,
sometimes they can come up in the wrong situations and they can feel too intense to be productive.
So how do our emotions go from something useful to something overwhelming? The short answer is in the way that we respond to them. In order to begin to explore how this process unfolds, let’s first break down what happens when we feel a strong emotion. Every emotional experience can actually be broken down into three components— what we think, how we physically feel, and what we do. Paying attention to this process is the first step in understanding how the experience of an emotion can go from informative to overwhelming.
The three components of emotional experiences are:
1. Cognitive (What You Think): Your thinking in any given situation can really color how you feel about it. If you tell yourself that you don’t deserve to be in a loving relationship, you might feel ashamed or sad. The relationship between thoughts and emotions goes the other way, too. For example, when you feel sad, you’re more likely to have thoughts about the situation being hopeless, or being inadequate (“I always mess everything up”).
2. Physiological (How You Feel): Every emotion is associated with a physiological response. In other words, your body goes through physical changes every time you experience an emotion. For example, fear is often accompanied by a faster heart rate, a tensing of the muscles, and maybe even shortness of breath. Remember, fear’s job is to protect you from danger, and these physiological changes are the body’s way of getting ready to take action. Anxiety may be accompanied by sweaty palms, muscle tension, or perhaps a knot in the stomach. These changes alert us that something important is looming and that we should prepare. Sadness may be accompanied by a sensation of extreme tiredness and heaviness in the limbs, prompting us to withdraw.
3. Behavioral (What You Do): Whenever you feel an emotion, it is accompanied by the urge to act. We discussed some of the ways these behavioral urges can be helpful (e.g., jumping out of the way of an oncoming car in response to fear, standing up for yourself in response to anger). Sometimes, however, the things we do in response to strong emotions may not seem very useful.
Three Component Model of Emotion (ARC)
Emotions do not just come out of nowhere, even though sometimes it might feel like they do. Every emotional experience is triggered by some event or situation, which causes a person to react and respond. In turn, these responses have consequences. Sometimes it is difficult to identify these triggers, but with repeated practice, they can be identified.
The “As” (in the acronym ARC), or antecedents, are the events or situations that trigger emotional experiences. Triggers can be either something that has just happened, something that happened much earlier in the day, or even something that occurred in the past and is re-triggered. Finding patterns in the situations and events that prompt emotions may help you to feel less like you are on an unpredictable emotional rollercoaster. Being aware of your triggers can also help you prepare in advance when you know you might be faced with one. Finally, antecedents also can include things that make you vulnerable to experiencing emotions more strongly, such as being tired from a night of poor sleep, hormone changes, being hungry from not having time for lunch, or being generally stressed from a busy couple weeks at work.
Example: The woman who receives the text message from her friend cancelling their dinner plans had an argument or was rejected by a loved one in the morning, it could influence the way she thinks about and approaches the situation with her friend. She may be more likely to assume that she is “lame” and that this appraisal is indeed shared by her friend and the cause of the cancellation. She may not have reacted in the same way if the argument earlier in the morning had not occurred. The “A” in this case would be both immediate and distal— for example, receiving the text from her friend (proximal) and the argument with a loved one earlier in the day (distal).
The “Rs,” or responses, to emotional experiences include all of the responses that occur across the three main components of emotional experiences: thoughts, physical sensations, and behaviors.
The “Cs,” or consequences of emotional responses, are both short term and long term. When we experience strong emotions, they leave lasting impressions and influence how we respond to similar situations in the future. As humans, we repeat things that make us feel good and try to avoid things that make us feel bad. Unfortunately, the short-term consequences of unhelpful emotional behaviors are often negatively reinforcing (i.e., they lead to an immediate reduction in uncomfortable emotions), causing people to engage in similar behaviors in the future. For example, when someone leaves a party early because they are experiencing a great deal of social anxiety, this response results in an immediate reduction in anxiety, which reinforces this behavior in the future. This pattern of leaving parties early, or not attending at all, then results in long-term consequences like feelings of loneliness and isolation. However, this avoidance of situations and events because they might bring up strong emotions is what leads to problematic interference in your life.
Emotion Self-regulation
1. There is an optimal level of emotional arousal, which varies the situation/task; too little and too much emotional arousal are both dysfunctional.
2. The ability to regulate one’s emotions and level of emotional arousal is necessary for adaptive functioning.
3. The ability to self-regulate emotion derives from early attachment experiences with caregivers.
4. Effective emotional self-regulation requires both the ability to access, heighten or tolerate emotion; and the ability to contain or distance emotion.
Adaptive Strategies for Accessing Emotion Include:
Attending to emotion-related bodily sensations
Remembering previous emotion episodes
Presenting oneself with vivid emotional cues (words, images)
Enacting emotion expression and action tendencies
Monitoring level of arousal in order to maintain safety
Adaptive Strategies for Containing Emotion Include:
Self-soothing (relaxing, self-comforting, self-supporting, self-caring)
Seeking support and understanding from others
Using containing or distancing language or imagery
Temporarily distracting oneself with other activities
Naming and understanding emotions
Controlling expression of emotion (letting out a little at a time)
