Understanding Your Emotional Landscape

Mastering our emotions begins with understanding our emotional landscape, which can be challenging because most of what we feel is a combination of emotions in response to a mixture of external and internal stimuli. Finding the right thread to pull is often complicated by our minds’ desire to protect us from ourselves. For better or worse, our brains develop a wide array of protection techniques that are designed to hide who we are from ourselves. When we study this, we learn that this is a function of the brain’s hardwired filtering system designed to help us make snap decisions. The brain’s desire is to be quick and efficient, and contemplation of self is neither of those things.

We need to train our brains to slow down and allow us to conduct deeper investigations of situations and our reactions to external and internal stimuli. One of the ways the brain develops efficiency is to react to situations based on the past. This means we are rarely reacting to just the present. Viewing life through the lens of what has happened to us is actually an inefficiency, and once we teach our brain this, we are better able to reduce how much the past impacts us. We can use the brain’s desire for efficiency to aide our ability to understand our internal stimuli and automatic emotional responses. By asking ourselves “what is our brain relating this experience to”, we can better understand our filters and world view. If we then follow it up by asking ourselves “what is our brain protecting us from”, we can better understand what is reinforcing our world view.

Looking at what our brain is trying to accomplish and teaching it news ways to accomplish the goals of efficiency and safety will allow us to create automatic responses that are actually efficient and improve well-being. Shifting out of safety mode takes work, and efficiency is generally the best way to teach ourselves new modalities of thought. Realizing that we don’t need to be protected against ourselves, who we are, and our past is a process. Stopping and asking yourself “what are the automatic connections that I am making and how do they impact how I feel” will unravel the complexities that are creating your emotional truths. Examining if those truths serve you will allow you to understand and master your emotional landscape.