This Emotional Life:

Its a desire that we all share to lead a rich fulfilling and happy life, but yet you can't always get what you want. Our life seems to be a roller coaster taking us from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair and everyplace in between. All emotions have their own importance, is it? The resilient spirit of human spirit is interesting. Our greatest source of happiness lies in the people around us, the basic need of human beings is love and companion ship, its not things or success. Happiness comes from within. What are the obstacles to happiness? Emotions such as fear, anger, and sadness seems to come in between us and our happiness. There is no pill that can give us happiness. Facing our fears seems to an important thing in our this emotional life.

In amusements parks, all the activities are dedicated to the thing called human feeling. At such places, people are found to happy and relaxed, excited and with fear, exhausted, and relieved and sometimes amused. We like the ups much more than the downs.

Over all the negative emotions are considered to be both are best friend and also the worst enemy.  Science is trying us to understand how such a paradox is possible in humans. When any living things are threatened,  their bodies release hormones that prepare them either to fight back or to flight away. Such a response is crucial for our survival.  We secrete a hormone called Cortical that heightens our auditory and visual perceptions. Such a response is important in saving our lives and now a days such a response might not be needed in daily experienced anger or fear emotions.  When we try to control the effects of such a release of chemicals, then we start a tug of war in the brain between oldest parts (cave mans survival part of brain called amigdilla) and the newest part of brain (prefrontal cortex) that is responsible for making informed decisions tries to calm down the responses triggered by the Cortisol-like hormones.

It is interesting to know that in spite of us knowing the response of fight or flight inducing Amygdilla we still can't seem to control our spontaneous response because of the wiring of the brain. In the human brain, the newest part of the brain is called the pre-frontal cortex, that is responsible for planning our future, to make informed cognitive decisions,  to strategize our decisions.

Why is that we are unable to control our response of fight or flight even though we try deliberately to avoid the feeling to hatred and anger?

This part of pre-frontal cortex has no pathways connecting it to the oldest part of the brain called Amygdilla. Where as the pathways from the Amygdilla to the pre-frontal cortex are very well developed  as shown in the figure.  Therefore the pre-frontal cortex is unable to tell the Amygdilla to cool it and to avoid the unnecessary fight and flight response induced by Amygdilla. Well, of course as time progress we all are in the process of evolving and letting our brain development adapt to the current conditions of living that are unlike the caveman days.

The fact that our brains are not designed to have a complete control over our emotions can have some unfortunate consequences.

I was looking at an interview by a victim of such a consequence of not being able to control the fight response during a party. The person giving the interview was a female who was invited to a party and while enjoying the party decided to go and change the song being played (due to her control-freak behavior, as mentioned by her). As the song was abruptly changed the party host came over and confronted her as to why she had changed the song and this triggered a fight response by this person's Amygdilla and consequently she started hitting the host for no apparent reason. Just because her pre-frontal cortex was unable to send message to Amygdilla to cool off. What seemed very unreasonable to me is that this person, started crying as she was describing the incident of she being unreasonably angry. I just couldn't help but thinking that a women's cry is louder and can be easily misjudged to be distress response by her, even though it might not be so. I have  no idea why she cried during the interview, even though she understood that she was a control freak and that her fight response was not appropriate towards the party host. But to any outsider who is unaware of the series of events that lead to her fight response, they might easy consider the party-host to be fault of mistreating the lady (just because the lady cried at the end of the scene). This is my summary of the interview and my audience of this blog are encouraged to see this PBS episode to make things clearer from their point of view.  This person concludes this narration by saying that what she did goes against her values and against what she is. She acknowledges that she feels hurt because her response in this incident, perhaps her response was again out of her control as it was mentioned earlier (due to the hard-wiring of the brain itself)

It is often observed by us all that after an intense argument one feels terrible and often depressed. Anger is not a helpful or appropriate emotion and leads to a regret at a later point of time. Anger is never constructive or useful to the world, in fact it can bring a personal havoc. Well, people mistakes every day in their after all, we are being human.

Can we learn to control our emotions deliberately? can we do something called emotion regulation?

James Gross, a Stanford university researcher states that: Emotional regulation is the science of understanding how we can modify our emotions harness their energy and direct them to ways that we would like to.

After an event that triggered a fight or anger response once the  person reappraises and thinks about the past event from a neutral third-person perspective their bodies were observed to become calmer, thus indicating that their is a very important role that thinking and reappraisal plays. If one can change the way they think, they can change the one feels. One technique that the interviewed person uses is to stop and think about the person in front as a human being prone to making mistakes, says things they didn't mean, may be had a bad day gives her a calm perspective and makes her make a better decision.  Such an activity of pausing and  thinking  might be a hard exercise (during the fight or anger response) but it seems to be working for the person talking about her experience.

Psycho-Dynamic Therapy:

It was Sigmund Freud who suggested that emotional problems might be symptoms of something deeper, something more significant, something the mind is hiding from itself. It could be a traumatic childhood experience or something else unpleasant. Freud's therapy to understand the cause of emotional problems has evolved into a thing called Psychodynamic therapy. It deals making aware of the unconscious conflicts that cause problems in daily life. These conflicts are generally hidden from oneself but tend to make ones life miserable. It aims in helping  people in developing insights about how they feel today, about their expectations they have about life and people from their past. Such an insight helps people helps them in changing their behavior and alters their way of thinking in a positive way thus reducing their unpleasant symptoms.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:

There is another kind of therapy that relies on the concept that rather searching for the hidden causes of emotional problems it might be helpful if a therapy helps a person to develop skills that can deal with such emotional problems.  Such a therapy might help in controlling one of the most basic emotions of FEAR.  This episode presents another persons interview about their fear of flying.

Difference between fear and phobias:

Phobia is a fear that is not rational at a given point of time and place. Emotional state is like a paradox, the more we do not want them, the more we experience them