Right In The Feels
Emotional Awareness
Emotions are a bear to deal with. They influence our thoughts and behaviors more than any of us might like to admit. This is usually done with such powerful automaticity that it can be hard to grab ahold of our learned responses to situations we find ourselves in or patterns of thinking we engage in. These little hamster wheels spin in the backgrounds of our minds, influencing the direction of our actions constantly like our own little internal Deep State.
It can be difficult to manage and rearrange these emotions of ours first because they are at their root, a powerfully hardwired adaptive force. This force keeps us safe from danger and alerts us to potential opportunities in the environment. In addition to that evolutionary biology emotion act like algorithms we have for navigating the world. Algorithms which are influenced so early in life that we are often unable to remember points of origin for them, assuming there is a single point of origin for the emotional patterning we exhibit.
Having a better understanding of where our emotions come from and what they do for us can help us more effectively wrestle with them, maybe even dance with them. With better awareness comes better potential for action and is often the underlying theme of Check Engine Light, before things go to shit. Let's start this short peek behind the curtain of emotional origin with some evolutionary history.
Smelling the Roses
While the cocktail of emotions doesn’t have a singular anatomical home, the closest thing is probably the limbic system of the brain. If your brain were an apple, the limbic system would be the core. This area of the brain is made up of the hippocampus, hypothalamus, thalamus, and amygdalae (not a typo—you have two). These parts of the limbic system have specialized functions ranging from memory to thermal regulation to the modulation of emotional states.* As a point of reinforcement, these areas do not work in isolation but coordinate to produce a variety of behaviors. One interesting thing about this region of the brain is that it evolved from the olfactory system, the part of the brain relating to smell. Once upon a time, the olfactory and limbic systems were united in structure and function in what was known as the rhinencephalon, or “nose brain.” To this day, many of our mammalian cousins rely more heavily on their sense of smell to get information about what’s going on in the world.*
When dogs meet, they don’t look each other in the eye, shake paws, and say, “How ya doing? I’m Sparkles.” They sniff each other. The strong instinct to investigate their environment with their noses is how canines, rodents, and other mammals get most of their information about what’s going on around them. Their feelings about potential threats, available food sources, and mates come primarily from their ability to smell them. In fact, in order for those mammals to maintain psychological health, they need opportunities to access novel smells in order to explore their environment and get appropriate stimulation. This type of enrichment is essential for Canis familiaris but is unfortunately withheld from them in favor of kenneling and leash-yanking. Interestingly, even though we’re not as driven by this system as our canine counterparts are, sense of smell still plays an important role in our emotions, mental health , and even cognitive stimulation.
As time went on, primates and humans evolved and became more visual creatures, but we still carry some evolutionary residue in our modern anatomy that has a direct effect on how we feel and interact with the world. You don’t decide if you should be on the lookout during our morning walk by smelling who else peed on the mailbox, but our psycho-emotional state can be reliably altered through exposure to smells. Whether it’s the smell of baked bread that puts you in Grandma’s kitchen and makes you feel a sense of warmth and joy, or the smell of burning trash that brings you back to your time in Baghdad, scent matters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, long-term anosmia (loss of smell) was a known effector that could exacerbate symptoms of anxiety and depression in people who were already vulnerable to those psychological states. It’s clear that these deep evolutionary structures have a marked effect on our internal state. Over time, what originated as relatively straightforward solutions to standard biological problems have become complex systems and networks that exert serious influence on the way you experience life and interact with the world around you.
Not Just Whimsical Affectations
Affective neuroscientists like Jaak Panskepp seek to understand emotional behavior through the lens of biological history. They look at the invariant nature of fundamental mammalian drives that anchor core motivations for adaptive behavior. In his book Affective Neuroscience Panskepp identified seven key emotional patterns: SEEKING, LUST, CARE, PLAY, RAGE, FEAR, SADNESS. These terms are not defined in the colloquial sense of simple description of an internal sense but rather adaptive behavior patterns found in mammals that can be mapped as physiological realities in the brain.
This is a departure from the psychological view of emotion prior to this revolution in emotional thinking where human affectations were the realms of poets and storytellers. Science had no way to measure this reality so it was of no consequence. It turns out the more we learn about the human brain through modern affective neuroscientists like Mary Helen Immordino Yang the more we find how deeply our emotions influence not only our internal dialogue and felt-sense of the world, but that these core motivations have deeper influence on advanced social conditions like ethics and the structure of learning than we previously thought.
Kid Stuff
Early development plays an essential role in the shaping of our emotional landscape. While I don't think that statement is front page news to anybody reading this, recognizing our own emotional architecture from early life and the impact it has on us later in life is another thing altogether. Early life (and maybe even pre-birth) cuts deep grooves on the malleable brain of a person. Our plastic little brains are on the lookout for the conditions in our environment that help us and the things that might hurt us. The experience of powerful negative emotions notches out pathways that keep us from repeating the same "mistakes" that might make us feel like that again.
Much of our temperament and biases gets formed very very early. We come into this world with some hardwiring in place, then whatever slice of reality we live in gets a say. These two things push and pull on our emotions and over time we develop stable solutions to the problems that face us. That doesn't mean the solutions we find will necessarily serve us for the long haul, or help us be more wise, intelligent and fulfilled human beings.
A clear illustration of this is the need for children to receive attention from parents. Attention is the most potent social currency we have (a lonely genius from Harvard changed the world when he realized that). So the behavior that garners attention from our caretakers at various stages in life tends to stick. Sometimes this turns out for the better. Sometimes not.
Emotional programming of all sorts is being engrained in us constantly through our interaction with the world and our perception of those interactions. These programs even when they don't work well, still work to help us adapt to problems and do the most important thing there is-keep going. But that doesn't guarantee that we are as effective in the world as we can be. That requires another layer of awareness altogether, some that comes with age and some that comes with maturity.
Running In Drag
Sometimes these deep biological motivations and drives can go haywire and hijack our attention, derange our coping mechanisms, and wear out our physiology. You can be emotionally tired. These loops of thinking, feeling, and behavior cycle in the background constantly. When they go awry it can be like trying to run a race with a drag parachute attached to your waist.
There must be emotional programming. We don't get a choice in that matter. It's like having a spinal column. What we do get to choose is the degree to which our emotions effect our thoughts, decisions, and actions. Becoming more aware of them doesn't mean just trying to turn them off either. (Though there is a time and place to put the speaker on mute.) It means better knowing your own nature and then taking responsibility for mitigating the negative effects of emotional reactions that don't serve you and leveraging more powerfully the ones that do.
You might even argue that the better job a person has done excavating their own nature so they can run on programs of their own, the more of an "adult" they are. Or at least the more they are powered by more sophisticated faculties. I for one don't think we are ever fully absolved of our emotional predilections. Some things are part of our fundamental nature from go. With that said, however, it behooves to become more deeply aware of those things so that we can better surf the waves of our own emotional reality.
If you like my reading look at my upcoming book! Check Engine Light