Getting started with emotion

Emotions are how we experience life.

Every moment of it, the good times and the tough ones. They run our homes, workplaces, schools and clubs because everyone we meet is emotionally driven, including us.

If you think about it, it’s not just the obvious emotional moments. Our surface behaviour and narrative is driven by emotions underneath.

That’s why understanding emotions and learning how to work with them is a fundamental part of helping us live a life that we feel good about.

Emotion is in our nature, but nobody taught us how to work with it

Most of us were never taught about emotion and how it impacts our world, and that can mean we react more than respond. But when we learn how emotion drives us, how we feel about our life changes for the better in ways that compound over time.

Our relationships feel more connected. The decisions we make feel more aligned with what we actually want. We carry less accumulated regret, and we spend less time wondering why we keep doing things we didn’t quite mean to do.

It’s important to say that emotions are in our nature and play an important role, so being less reactive and more deliberate isn’t about suppressing and fighting against our feelings. It’s about listening to them, giving them respect and where it’s right and possible, making deliberate choices.

Emotion is more predictable than we realise

The good news is that emotion uses a system we can learn to understand. It isn’t random and being reactive isn’t a personal failing. Once we can see how the system works, we can start to work with it, rather than feeling like we’re being carried along by something that feels out of our control.

Most of us use the words emotions and feelings as if they mean the same thing. In everyday conversation that’s usually fine. We say we feel angry, tired, or overwhelmed, and everyone knows roughly what we mean.

When we’re trying to understand ourselves more clearly though, the difference between the two starts to matter. Not because we need perfect definitions, but because more accurate language gives us a better way to work with what’s happening inside us.

When we can name something more precisely, we have a better shot at understanding it, and understanding changes what we do with it.

Feelings are the broader picture

Feelings are the language we use to describe our whole inner experience.

Emotions are a specific category within that

Emotions are one part of how we feel. They’re the signals that tell us something matters. At the top level, our emotions are anger, fear, disgust, surprise, happiness and sadness.

From there, more specific feelings branch off. Anger might come out as frustration, irritation or protectiveness. Fear might appear as anxiety, panic or hesitation. Sadness can take the shape of grief, disappointment or loneliness.

So the difference is that feelings cover all of the components of being us. Emotions are one important part of that.

Why this matters in practice

Our behaviour is shaped by more than one kind of feeling at the same time.

We might think we’re emotionally anxious when we’re actually tired, hungry and overstimulated. The thing we read as anger could turn out to be embarrassment, or fear, or something requiring us to protect a boundary. What looks like a lack of motivation can be a depleted body and an overwhelmed mind rather than anything to do with what we actually want.

When everything gets lumped under “I feel bad,” it becomes hard to know what to do. Do we need rest, food, a conversation, a boundary, perspective, or something else? Different feelings ask for different things. The more clearly we can name what’s happening, the more deliberate our response can become.

We don’t only feel emotions in our minds, our body is involved too. Every emotion comes with a physical signature, even when it’s subtle enough that we miss it in the moment.

If we slow down enough to notice, our body is often the first place an emotion comes through. Tension in our jaw before we’ve named the irritation. A tight chest before we’ve called it anxiety. A flush of warmth before we recognise pride or embarrassment.

Our body knows what we’re feeling slightly before our conscious mind does, and that gap is a moment for our conscious mind to step in if needed before we react. Something we cover in a later module.

The physical signs to notice

Emotions show up in our body through tension, energy, heart rate, breathing, temperature and the speed our thoughts are moving. Each emotion has its own combination.

Anger often arrives as heat and a kind of forward pressure, like our body is pushing something. Anxiety can feel like a tightness in our chest, a knot in our stomach, or a restlessness that feels uncomfortable to sit with. Sadness tends to be lower and heavier, often in our throat or shoulders. Joy is lighter, more open, with our breathing slower and our body less braced.

We don’t need to memorise the map. The point is to know there is one, so when something is happening in our body, we know to ask what we’re feeling rather than either react to it or assume it offers no value to understand.

How emotions behave

Emotions don’t all behave the same way. Some come quickly and pass quickly, like a flash of irritation when someone cuts us off in traffic. Others turn up quickly but stay, like the anxiety before a difficult conversation that is still there an hour later. Some build slowly, like the low-grade resentment that creeps in over weeks. And some linger underneath everything else for days at a time, colouring how we read every situation we walk into.

The intensity isn’t fixed either. The same emotion can feel like a quiet hum or something that takes over our whole system. A bit of frustration in a calm moment is a different experience from frustration when we’re already tired, hungry and behind on something important. Same emotion, different volume.

Paying attention to how emotions feel in our body and how they behave over time means we catch them earlier, before they’ve fully taken hold, and we stop assuming every strong feeling means the situation in front of us is the cause. Sometimes our body is carrying something from earlier, and the current moment is just where it landed.

Our physical, mental and emotional states aren’t separate systems. They’re three parts of the same one, and they shape each other constantly. Once we can see how they’re linked, a lot of what feels random about our day starts to make sense.

Tiredness is the simplest example. When we haven’t slept well, we’re more likely to feel irritable, anxious or overwhelmed by things that wouldn’t have bothered us the day before.

It’s not that the situation is harder, it’s that our system has less capacity. The same conversation, email, or the same kid asking the same question, lands differently depending on whether our body has what it needs.

It works in every direction

Physical states change how we feel emotionally and mentally. Hunger makes us shorter-tempered, a bad back makes us less patient, or a sleepless night flattens our mood and narrows our thinking.

Emotional states change how we feel physically and mentally. Anxiety raises our heart rate and makes our breathing feel more laboured. Excitement gives us energy and sharpens our focus. Sadness slows us down and makes our limbs feel heavier than before.

Mental states change how we feel physically and emotionally. An overwhelmed mind creates tension in our shoulders and a sense of dread that has no specific source. A clear, focused mind tends to calm our body and soften our emotions.

This is all “normal” and how our system is built to help protect us and to experience life. The mistake is treating one of these states as the cause when the others are doing most of the work.

What this means in practice

When we feel bad and can’t quite say why, the answer is often in a state we haven’t named. We assume the irritation is about the person in front of us, when actually we’re running on four hours of sleep.

Our assumption is that the anxiety we feel is about the tough meeting we’ve got, when actually we’ve had three coffees and no lunch. We conclude that we’ve lost interest in our passion, when actually we’re depleted and need a few proper days off.

Once we know the states are connected, we can get better at identifying what’s really going on. All our feelings are valid, it’s just having the knowledge to see what’s going on means we can make better decisions to address them.

This also gives us something practical to do. If our emotional state is heavy, sometimes the most useful intervention isn’t emotional at all. Sleep. Food. A walk. Water. A break from the screen. These things sound too simple to matter, but they often shift our whole system because the system is more connected than we perhaps realise.

Emotions get looked after inconsistently. Sometimes we treat them as something to manage, contain or get past. Other times we treat them as the truth of a situation, the thing that has to be acted on right now. Both miss what emotions are actually doing.

If you think about it, our emotions aren’t a malfunction or an inconvenience. They’re a system that’s been with us for a very long time because it works. Every emotion is carrying a signal about what matters to us, what feels safe, unfair, or worth protecting. The trick is learning to recognise and read the signal.

Emotions are information

Anger usually means something feels unfair, or that a line we care about has been crossed. Anxiety tends to mean something feels unsafe, even when the threat is social or internal rather than physical. Sadness shows us that something mattered. Pride tells us we’ve acted in line with something we value.

Even the feelings we’d rather not have are pointing at something worth our attention.

This is part of why the goal isn’t to get rid of emotions or push past them. The signal is something we should respect and listen to.

Ignoring it means we miss the information, and acting on it without thinking means we let the signal decide for us. Sometimes that’s how things play out in an intense situation, but the objective is to understand them and be more considerate with our response.

We can listen without acting

A useful way to think about it is that emotions are information, not instructions. When we feel anger, the anger is telling us something matters. Our job is to read what it’s pointing at, not to act on it as if the feeling itself is the answer.

That’s the heart of it. Every emotion is carrying a message about what’s going on for us. The more accurately we can read the message, the more useful the feeling becomes.

Reading the signal is a practice

Most of us were never taught any of this, so it’ll take practice. We’ll misread feelings, react too quickly, or only work out afterwards what our emotion was trying to tell us. That’s part of how the practice goes. Every time we name a feeling more accurately, we get a bit better at reading what it’s trying to tell us.

When we feel emotions, they are doing their job. They have been designed to bring us to life. So it’s most definitely not about suppression or being perfect. It’s really about learning to read and translate yourself more accurately, so that you can make choices that align with the life you want to live.

In module 5 we looked at how emotions are information about what matters to us. This module asks the next question: is that information always accurate?

The short answer is no, but our feelings are always real, that part isn’t in doubt. When we feel angry, anxious, embarrassed, hurt or proud, the feeling is genuinely happening and it’s telling us something. What we sometimes miss is that the feeling can be real and still not be reading the current situation correctly.

Feelings can read a situation wrong

Our feelings work off the information our system has. Some of that information is the current moment, but a lot of it is pattern recognition from earlier in our life.

We feel rejected by a brief reply, when actually the person was just busy. A question about our idea lands as criticism, when the person was trying to strengthen it. We feel unsafe in a conversation because something about it reminds our system of a moment from years ago, even when the current situation is nothing like it.

The feeling is doing its job. It’s flagging something that pattern-matched against an older experience. The problem is that the pattern isn’t always right about what’s actually happening now.

This isn’t about distrusting ourselves

Once people hear “feelings aren’t always accurate,” there’s a risk of swinging too far the other way and starting to doubt every feeling we have. That’s not what we’re saying.

It’s not about overriding our feelings with logic or talking ourselves out of what we feel. It’s about giving our feeling room to be heard, while also checking whether we’re reading the current situation correctly.

A useful question to ask is: is this feeling about what’s in front of me, or is it about something this reminds me of?

Sometimes the answer is the current moment, in which case the feeling is doing its job and we can act on it. Sometimes it’s an older pattern being triggered, in which case the feeling is still telling us something, just not about the person in front of us.

What this looks like in practice

Take the example of a colleague who challenges our idea in a meeting. The feeling that arrives might be a flash of defensiveness or even hurt. The feeling is real and we don’t have to pretend it isn’t.

But pausing to ask “what’s this actually about” can change what we do with it. If our colleague was being deliberately undermining, our defensiveness is accurate and probably worth voicing carefully. If our colleague was being constructive and our system read it as an attack because of an old pattern, then acting on the defensiveness would create a problem that doesn’t need to exist.

It’s the same feeling, just different responses, depending on what we work out it’s actually telling us.

It takes time for us to develop the skill of being conscious in the moment. Sometimes we only see what was going on hours or days later, and that’s ok. Every time we ask the question, we get a bit better at understanding our patterns and reactions.

When we’re in a relationship of any kind, our emotional worlds overlap, and we affect each other. That’s not a problem, and is often really positive, it’s how connection works. But it does raise a question that most of us were never given a clean answer to: when we feel something difficult, whose feeling is it, and who’s responsible for what?

The answer matters because we can get this wrong in a couple of ways. Sometimes we take responsibility for other people’s feelings that aren’t ours to carry and sometimes we expect others to take responsibility for how we feel when it’s not on them. Both create problems that look like the other person’s fault but aren’t really.

A simple line that holds most of it

We’re responsible for our own feelings and behaviour. Other people are responsible for theirs. We’re both responsible for the impact we have on each other, and for raising that thoughtfully when it matters.

That’s the principle. It sounds simple and it mostly is, but it gets blurred quickly in real life. So it’s worth slowing down on what each part means.

What it means to own our feelings

Our feelings happen inside us. They’re influenced by what’s going on around us, but they aren’t caused by it in the way we sometimes think. Two people can experience the same event and feel very different things, because the feeling depends on what each person brings to it. That means our feelings are ours to understand, and ours to work out what to do with.

This doesn’t mean other people’s behaviour doesn’t matter. It does. But it’s our responsibility to understand our feelings and choose what to do with them. Handing that over to someone else, asking them to manage our emotional state by changing their behaviour, doesn’t usually make us feel better and move forward positively.

What it means to take responsibility for impact

At the same time, our behaviour affects other people. If we said something that hurt someone, the hurt is theirs to feel, but the saying of it was ours. We can’t fix the feeling for them, but we can take responsibility for what we did, name it, and not do it again.

This is the bit most of us get confused by. We either go too far one way, taking on the other person’s feeling as if it was ours to fix, or too far the other way, dismissing the impact because the feeling belongs to them. Both miss the point, the feeling is theirs and the impact is shared.

When something matters enough to raise

Sometimes it’s important to let someone know that their behaviour impacted you. They can then choose what to do with that. But not every feeling needs to be voiced.

If we choose not to raise something, then we need to let it go too, rather than store it as resentment that comes out later. That can be hard to do, and can require a deliberate choice and set of actions to leave it where it is and move on.

When something does need to be raised, doing it thoughtfully matters. Not in the heat of the reaction, not as a way of making the other person responsible for fixing how we feel, but as a real attempt to communicate the impact and listen to theirs in return. That’s how relationships stay honest and connected over time.

Most of us have had a moment we’d want back. A snap at someone we love, an email sent in three seconds that took three days to undo, or a yes we regretted before it was out of our mouth. Looking at it afterwards, the strange part isn’t that we did the thing. It’s how little choice it felt like we had at the time.

That’s because our behaviour is largely shaped before we’re aware of it. The reaction is already underway by the time the thinking part of us catches up. This isn’t a personal failing, it’s how our system was built.

Our system was designed for speed

Our brain evolved when threats were physical and immediate. Speed mattered more than accuracy. A noise in the bushes, a movement at the edge of our vision, and our body was reacting before our conscious mind had finished processing what it was. That speed kept our ancestors alive long enough to have us.

The same wiring is still doing its job now, except the threats are different. A pointed email, a tone in someone’s voice, the feeling that we’re being judged or dismissed or overlooked. None of these are physical dangers, but our system reads them quickly and gets us moving before we’ve decided whether we want to move.

The mechanics in three steps

When something triggers us, three things happen in quick succession. Our feelings shift, our body responds, and an urge to act appears. The urge might be to leave, defend, prove a point, please someone, withdraw, eat, scroll or argue. Whatever it is, it usually arrives feeling less like a choice and more like the obvious thing to do.

The whole sequence can take less than a second. By the time we’ve noticed we’re reacting, we’re often already partway through doing it. That’s why “just think before you act” is harder advice than it sounds. The reacting and the thinking aren’t happening in the order that advice assumes.

What makes it worse

Reactions get faster and harder to catch when our system is depleted. As we saw in module 4, tiredness, hunger and stress shrink the small space between something happening and us doing something about it. The exact moments we most need awareness are often the moments we have the least of it.

This is worth knowing because it changes what we can expect of ourselves. Trying to be deliberate when we haven’t slept properly for three nights is going to be harder than trying to be deliberate after a quiet weekend.

The space is still there

Even with all of this, there’s almost always a small moment between the trigger and the reaction. That space, the one we covered in module 5, is where the practice lives. We can’t always slow down our system, but we can learn to find that space more often and use it. That’s what the rest of this course, and a lifetime of practice, is for.

We’ve spent this course looking at how emotions work. What they are, what they’re for, how they show up, how they connect to our body and our mind, and why we react before we think. Now we get to the part that pulls it all together.

The Decision Maker is the internal mechanism that turns our feelings and thoughts into behaviour. It’s the bit of us that takes everything we’ve been talking about, the emotion, the body signal, the urge, the pattern, the old story, and converts it into what we actually do. Whether we know about it or not, this is happening inside us in every moment of our day.

Why it’s worth knowing about

If we don’t know The Decision Maker is there, it tends to run on autopilot. The feeling arrives, the urge follows, the behaviour happens, and we work out afterwards what we did. That’s how most reactions play out. The whole sequence runs without us getting much of a say.

Once we know it’s there we can start to notice the moment between feeling something and doing something with it. The space we talked about earlier isn’t just a theoretical pause in the system. It’s where The Decision Maker operates. The more we understand what’s happening in that space, the more deliberate our response can become.

What it’s not

The Decision Maker isn’t about overriding our feelings or talking ourselves out of what we feel.

We’ve covered this throughout the course but it’s worth saying again here, because the word “decision” can sound like we’re meant to be cool, logical and unfeeling. We’re not. The feelings are still doing their job and the signals are real. The Decision Maker isn’t deciding what we feel, it’s deciding what to do with what we feel.

It’s also not about getting it right every time. We won’t. Some moments will catch us before we’ve found the space, and some reactions will happen on autopilot. That’s part of being human, the goal is about catching slightly more of them, slightly more often, over time.

Three forces: The Warrior, The Willing and The Wise

The Decision Maker is made up of three forces, and at any moment one of them has its hands on the wheel.

The Warrior is the protective one. It’s quick, strong, and ready to defend us when something feels like a threat.The Willing is the connecting one. It cares about other people, wants harmony, and softens situations to keep relationships safe.

Both have an important job, and both can take the wheel without checking in first if we’re not paying attention.

The Wise is the part of us that listens to both, weighs what’s actually going on, and chooses deliberately. When The Wise is at the wheel, we’re not suppressing our Warrior or our Willing. We’re letting them inform the choice rather than make it.

What changes when we use it

What we start to notice can feel small. Like not reacting to a comment someone made, saying no thank you with class instead of yes because we want to people please. But over time, this is how your life starts to feel more like your own. Not because we’ve solved emotions, and not because we get it right every time. Because we’re a bit more in conversation with what we feel, and a bit more deliberate about what we do with it.