About
Emotion is involved in more of everyday life than most of us realise, and most of us were never really taught how it works.
This course is a short introduction to what emotion is, why we have it, and how it influences the choices we make day to day.
Modules
- What is emotion?
- Why do we feel emotion?
- How do emotions impact our life?
We use the word “feeling” for loads of different things. We say we feel tired, we feel anxious, we feel off, we feel like we probably need to eat something. That’s fine in normal conversation. But if we’re trying to understand ourselves a bit better, it helps to slow it down and be clearer about what we actually mean.
One simple way to look at it is in three parts:
- The physical side of how we feel: tired, hungry, tense, run down.
- The mental side: overwhelmed, distracted, calm, shut down.
- The emotional side: angry, anxious, relieved, excited, sad.
They’re connected, but they’re not all the same thing.
Emotion is the part that’s responding to what’s happening around us or within us. It’s the bit that tells 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.
You don’t need to memorise a list of emotions for this to be useful. The main thing is that when we say “I feel bad” or even “I’m fine,” there’s usually more going on underneath that. And the better we get at noticing what it actually is, the easier it is to respond properly instead of just reacting.
Think of the last time you said “I feel bad” or “I’m fine.” If you had to break that down into your physical, mental and emotional state, what was actually going on?
Emotions aren’t random, and although it can sometimes feel like it, they’re not an inconvenience we’ve just got stuck with. They’re there for a reason. Even the ones we struggle with are usually telling us something.
One way to look at emotions is that they’re a kind of language. They’re how we read the world, and how we read ourselves.
A lot of the time, emotion is our first clue that something matters. Anger can be a sign that something feels unfair. Anxiety can be a sign that something doesn’t feel safe or settled. Sadness often tells us we’ve lost something, or that something meant more to us than we realised. Pride can show us what feels meaningful, or what feels in line with the kind of person we want to be.
None of that means every feeling is automatically right, but it does mean it’s worth paying attention to.
Think about your emotions as information.
That’s why emotion matters so much. It’s part of how we make sense of what’s happening to us. It helps us notice what feels wrong, what feels good, what we care about, and what we’re trying to avoid. Without that, we’d be missing a big part of how we understand our own lives.
The tricky part is that most of us were never really taught how to understand emotion, how our own interacts with others, and what to do with it all. So we either react too quickly, ignore it, try to talk ourselves out of it, or possibly worse, we can’t quite see how it’s driving us. Usually that just stores the problem up for later. The useful bit is learning to stop long enough to ask, “What might this be telling me?”
When someone snaps at their partner over something small, the snap isn’t really about the small thing. It’s usually a signal that something else has been building, often something the person hasn’t fully worked out yet.
This is worth learning about because emotion is involved in far more of our everyday life than most of us think. Emotion runs the world. It shapes what happens at home, at work, in friendships, in family life, and in the private conversations we have with ourselves. Even when we think we’re being completely rational, emotion is often somewhere in the mix.
And it’s not only there in the big moments, like grief, heartbreak, exam results or getting a promotion. It’s there in the everyday stuff too. It’s in what we reach for when we’re stressed, how we react when something small goes wrong, who we text back, who we avoid, and the excuses we make for ourselves afterwards.
Emotion is involved in really ordinary moments. Sometimes we don’t immediately recognise it’s influencing us.
Saying yes when we really wanted to say no can have a lot to do with fear, guilt or the need to keep people happy. Pulling away from someone can look cold on the outside, but underneath it might be hurt, embarrassment or self-protection. Staying too long in something that isn’t working is often emotional as much as practical.
We tell ourselves it’s logic, but it’s often more than that.
What looks like ambition in someone can sometimes actually be fear-driven insecurity.
So the point of understanding emotion isn’t to become less emotional, or to somehow get rid of difficult feelings. It’s to get better at noticing what’s going on before it runs the show. When we can do that, our reactions start to make more sense, our choices get a bit clearer, and we have a better chance of responding in a way we actually feel good about later.
Think of a recent decision that didn’t quite go the way you wanted it to. If you look back at it now, what emotion might have been doing the steering?