Versatile Emotions: Medals With Two Precious Sides
Your multifaceted emotions are an important part of your psychological life. They are universal and have the ability to condition your mind and body. They can change your heart rate, breathing rate and even the conductivity of your skin!
They are also vital as they promote empathy. You learn to recognize the same versatile emotions in other people. So you see joy, pain and surprise. In general, these feelings are the same in others, but the difference is in the details. There are no two identical faces that have exactly the same wrinkles. Similarly, two people never make a totally identical face. The same goes for our emotions.
The first side of your multifaceted emotions: the message
In the title of this article, we are talking about a two-sided coin. Both sides are equally valuable — but they can also turn against you. So what’s the first side? The first side is the message of your emotions; what they (try to) tell you.
Joy reminds you that something good has happened. It pokes you in the side because it’s time to enjoy something so you can have a good time. A smile spreads across your face and you begin to glow. You bloom like a flower because you want to share what’s going on while embracing this feeling with all your heart.
Joy also tells you that you were right in making a certain choice. It confirms how right your choice was and reinforces its underlying determination. So when you find yourself in a similar situation, you will probably make the same choice again.
In addition, joy also encourages you to be more generous and less skeptical. Once you understand the message it’s trying to get across, you might even feel a little “stupid” because you used to worry so much about anything and everything.
Sadness and disgust
Grief also has something to tell you. It is a sign that you have lost something important in some way. Maybe it’s a friend, an opportunity, or an object you held dear.
Sadness can also be a kind of stop sign. Then it asks you to step on the brakes and think carefully. Often there is something going on that doesn’t exactly fit your story. You will then have to change something, metaphorically turn something around, to make sure it fits. The challenge then is that you don’t injure yourself on the sharp edges of this “something” that just doesn’t fit into your story.
The emotion with perhaps the most powerful message is perhaps disgust. It is a clear and direct reason to create distance between yourself and that which caused the disgust. In that sense it resembles fear, because this too is a feeling that tries to lead you away from an unpleasant stimulus. Only with fear you often do not have to think long about all possible reactions. The most common response is simply avoidance.
Mixed feelings
The three emotions mentioned above are just a few examples of what you’ll find on the first side of the coin. These multifaceted emotions should also make it clear why emotional intelligence is so important. This is about knowing how to listen to your emotions and how to decipher them. However, if it’s so simple, why is it so difficult to implement?
That’s because it’s rare that you experience just one emotion at a time. How many times have you felt delight and fear at the same time? Think back to the last time you started a new, exciting project. You often feel a certain amount of doubt at some point, despite how capable you are!
Or think back to a time when you had a chance to do something. Think specifically about an opportunity that made you turn down all sorts of other things you wanted to do. You may also have experienced that while you were reaching out to new people, you lost sight of others.
The two side of multifaceted emotions: the energy
You have just come home and you feel completely exhausted. Then you walk to the kitchen to eat something and suddenly you see a huge, black cloud coming from the apartment below yours. At that moment you forget your fatigue and take action.
The same happens to students who have an exam the next day. They can study for hours. So many of these multifaceted emotions can give you even more energy than all the caffeine in the world.
The more intense the emotion, the more energy it will give you. This can be very positive if you encounter an aggressive, wild animal in a jungle, so to speak. In the Western world, however, you will have to be a bit more intelligent with your energy. You can do a lot of damage with the energy you draw from anger or rage — both to yourself and to others.
You may say or do something that you will later regret. That way you naturally cause damage that is not only unpleasant, but also difficult to repair. Instead, focus your energy on something else if you can, such as physical exercise. This is a very effective means of regulating your emotions. You can expend your energy in it without harming others or yourself.
The first side or the second side? As you have seen, our multifaceted emotions consist of both information and energy. These are particularly powerful elements that can bring us intense joy, as long as we know how to handle them intelligently.
