How do emotions affect one’s experiences?

Emotions are a central part of information processing. With the help of the emotions, the brain gives a meaning to things.

An emotional reaction emanates from the brain and creates a certain physiological response and activity in the body. This means that the emotions are felt in the body, so to speak. For example, your legs may feel like jelly when you get scared.

The bodily emotional reactions are mediated, among other things, via the autonomic nervous system. The reactions are usually unconscious.

What the brain reacts to and how strong the reactions are depends on previous experiences and the perceptions that have been formed from them. The reactions can also be influenced by innate characteristics.

The symptoms give rise to feelings

• Troublesome feelings and symptoms as well as stresses and setbacks often give rise to strong negative emotions.
• Common feelings caused by symptoms are helplessness, anxiety, frustration, sadness, anger, hopelessness and feelings of worthlessness.
• Emotions are a normal reaction to various challenges. They are not dangerous, nor are they a sign of something abnormal. On the contrary, it would be abnormal if the psyche did not react at all to challenges or setbacks.

Emotions affect the symptoms

Although people talk about positive and negative emotions in everyday life, all emotions are important and valuable. Emotions in themselves are not dangerous, but they can be stressful.

Together with thoughts, they can also lead to a vicious circle where the symptoms increase.

This creates a vicious circle

Bodily sensations, such as dizziness, fatigue or nausea, can lead to thoughts that one is seriously ill. The thought evokes feelings of fear and anxiety.

These feelings affect both behavior and what attention is directed towards. The altered behavior, such as withdrawing and seeking confirmation, also increases attention.

Both a changed behavior and being more vigilant and alert lead to more sensations in the body. As they increase, the worries increase further and the vicious circle worsens.

An example of a vicious circle:

Symptoms: dizziness

Feeling: anxiety

Symptoms: nausea

Feeling: fear

Identify your feelings

There are individual differences in how strong emotions you experience and how well you can identify them.

Some feel that they do not feel any strong emotions. There are also those who experience emotions more as something happening in the body than as psychological emotional experiences. In such cases, it can be difficult to identify emotions.

But you can learn to become better at identifying your feelings.

By identifying their feelings, it becomes easier

• to distinguish them from each other
• to distinguish between emotions and the body’s reactions
• to regulate their emotions.

It is therefore possible and profitable to practice identifying and naming your feelings.

Exercise: Identify how the emotions express themselves in your body

Why?

You examine your feelings and learn to identify them and let them help you manage and accept them. In this way, you can reduce the excessive stress that your emotions cause.

How?

Write down or draw where in your body the following feelings are felt. To help you, you can use the image of a body (PDF) below.

Try to describe where and how in the body the sensation is felt as precisely as possible. Also describe if the feeling originates from one physical point and ends in another.