Emotions- why do we need them, and what when things go wrong

People likely already know, we can experience positive and negative emotions, and what and how we experience these emotions will fluctuate throughout the day, week, and over time- this is part of our normal functioning.

Emotions are a barometer of how people feel and function; when we feel good, it generally means everything is in balance.  But stressful situations can tip this balance, changing our emotional status to imbalanced. If this is a short-term situation, it can be generally easily addressed with constructive emotional regulation strategies. However, f stressful situations are repetitive and/ or long-term, it generally results in negative consequences for our mental and physical health while also impacting our social relationships.

What is experienced as a stressful situation depends on a person and the situation. But navigating the maze of understanding what needs to be done to re-stabilize one’s own emotions and how to deal with stressful situations can be daunting.

Emotions are a natural part of our life

So, first of all, emotions are a natural part of our everyday life. All of our emotions including the positive and negative emotions help us guide our decisions, and make our lives more colourful. Negative in this context just means the opposite of positive- no judgment is attached to the term ‘negative emotion’.

Emotions have a function- they guide our behaviour

In other words, while our positive emotions may seem more fun and more relevant to our emotional well-being (i.e. feeling stable, happy, content), it is important to realize that all our emotions have a function- including our negative emotions. In short, all emotions, the positive and the negative ones, have evolved to fulfill the function of guiding our behaviour by communicating to us about the state of the world around us and our relationship with it.

For example, the function of anger in the face of injustice can be the impetus to drive changes. Anxiety is designed, based on evolutionary theory, to keep us safe as it signals danger.

However, all emotions require us to interpret what is actually happening- this is true for negative as well as positive emotions. And if our interpretation of our emotions is incorrect, then this can interfere with successful functioning, and potentially reinforce the challenging emotions and feelings (e.g.using avoidance in situations where avoidance restricts you more and more).

Strategies to deal with our Emotions

Other challenges in this context can arise from utilizing destructive strategies to deal with ‘unwanted emotions’.

But what happens when emotions begin to interfere with a person’s well-being and successful functioning in everyday life? One important question that needs to be asked is what actually drives these emotions, and not only how, but also, why do they interfere with well-being.

Sometimes, albeit not always, people may not be aware of the reasons that drive their emotional status.  At other times, a person may well know what actually happened and why negative emotions ensue, but regulation of emotions may be challenging- no fun.

And some emotions will have no direct solution like feeling anxious about what will happen in the future, and so it may be unclear how to move forward.

As a result, there are many factors that impact emotional well-being, and as a professional, identifying what drives the challenges is of vital importance. These underlying factors that drive a person’s emotional state are NOT always emotional in nature, and therefore sometimes another treatment is indicated. To make this very clear, if a person has cancer, it is devastating and will have a negative impact on the person’s emotional well-being (and everyone around). But emotional treatment would not be sufficient (albeit emotional support would be indicated).

Similarly, nowadays our world is highly complex and requires a high level of thinking work such as absorbing knowledge, organizing information, remembering new information, and so on.  To illustrate, a simple task of going to the grocery store requires orientation, remembering what one wanted to buy, inhibiting impulsive buying (buying stuff one did not need), monitoring one’s budget and one’s time as needed (all of these are considered part of thinking functions).  If a person cannot complete such a task successfully, the person usually will experience at least some negative emotions.

Helping people clarify the reasons that drive their negative emotions, and how to address them, is an important piece of therapeutic care at Mind your Brain. This includes addressing cognitive difficulties by utilizing principles of cognitive rehabilitation for people whose thinking has been impacted by a brain injury.

If you are someone who is dealing with challenges following a concussion or another brain injury, you could continue reading here

If you are a caregiver of someone with a brain injury, resources can be found here and you can read more here

If you are a caregiver of someone with physical injury, cognitive decline, or dementia, you find additional information and resources here

How and why to address emotional distress

Jane came to see me because she was worried that the intensity of her negative emotions was starting to interfere with her daily life.   She was about to enter a Ph.D. program and worried that she would not be able to control her emotional reactions.

Early on in therapy, we learned that Jane had successfully used coping strategies as a teenager and young adult, but these she realized were not working anymore.

Jane volunteered that during her teenage and early adult years, she used coping strategies, which she eventually recognized to be maladaptive – maladaptive coping strategies help to alleviate the immediate distress.  For Jane, her initial strategies included smoking and eating in excess, which allowed her to distract herself from her emotional plight.  However, such maladaptive coping strategies only cover up stressful emotions as opposed to actually dealing with emotions effectively.  While this may sometimes be an appropriate response (distracting oneself), if it is the sole approach to dealing with stressors or stressful situations and one’s own emotional reaction to it, distraction is not the most effective strategy to successfully deal with life’s situations.  In addition, keeping negative emotions bottled up over longer periods of time can result in harmful consequences to a person’s functioning in society.

Upon coming to Canada and entering graduate school, Jane began to change her approach to include constructive strategies- these strategies refer to coping mechanisms that help a person to deal with stressors successfully by addressing stressful emotions and situations in ways that allow resolving these emotions, thereby supporting a person’s mental health.  For Jane, these strategies included going to the gym and losing weight, and stopping smoking.

However, although Jane changed her approach to dealing with life stressors now using constructive strategies such as going to the gym, she continued to experience difficulties understanding how to manage her emotions.  For example, she exercised excessively to the point of injury.  She feared the intensity of her emotions and was worried that her inability to decrease the intensity would also lead her to engage in excessive drinking. Her emotional distress arose from the intensity of her emotions and her secondary worries that she might not be able to stop her behavioral reactions. Again, she began responding to her intense feelings by attempting to suppress them.  For example, she told herself that the emotions and/ or the underlying issues did not matter.  As a result, her intense emotions expressed themselves in increasing stress, which showed up in her physical health.  She began experiencing difficulties with sexual arousal, sleeping quality, and a general sense of anxiety regarding her future ability to deal with life demands.

Interpretation of emotions

Again, the latter response suggested that the emotions and the underlying drivers of these intense emotions were not addressed, and therefore could not be resolved.

Thus, when Jane came to see me, it became clear that the two challenges that continued to plague her were related to a) the interpretation of emotions, and b) the regulation of emotions.

All emotions are part of normal life! We all experience emotions. When these emotions are positive emotions such as excitement, happiness, satisfaction, gratitude, pride, interest, or other such emotions, we enjoy them.  However, when we experience negative emotions such as grief, guilt, sadness, anxiety, anger, remorse, or other negative emotions, we usually do not enjoy these, and we, therefore, attempt to resolve them in ways that oftentimes are learned from our environment through observation.  Like Jane, people may interpret negative emotions as not worthwhile in general or may fear them.  Importantly, how we deal with these emotions depends on how we interpret emotions in general, and how we interpret the specific emotion.

So, how did I help Jane?

First, I provided Jane with education surrounding how emotions generally work in order to provide her with a framework from which she could address her emotional experience independently, whenever she needed to.  This approach also allowed her to learn to accept all emotions for what they are: a tool in our toolbox to observe and utilize in a deliberate fashion such as not stepping too close to a cliff without a fence. Have you ever noted fear when stepping too close to the edge of a cliff?  If so, your fear likely cautioned you or made you step back, and thus helped you to make a decision to survive- a positive outcome! Secondly, I listened to Jane’s story, validated her experiences, and intervened when appropriate to suggest more appropriate and effective strategies.

In general, all emotions, the positive as well as the negative ones, are worth our attention because they are a normal part of the human experience.  Emotions have evolved in evolutionary time in order to guide behavior.  It is their function to guide our behavior, independently of whether the experience emotion is positive or negative.   In short, emotions allow us to make decisions that ensure and support our survival.   In other words, attempting to ignore or suppress negative emotions will not eradicate them but rather will rob us of the helpful information that an emotional response is trying to signal to our consciousness.  As a result, rather than fighting to not experience an emotion, it is more helpful to accept our emotions and investigate them as needed (see emotional regulation below).

Having said that emotions have a function, we can ask ourselves what are these functions or the benefit of our emotional experience?  For example, the function of anxiety is generally seen as keeping us safe from danger.  The function of anger is to right a wrong. Emotions of course come with their physiological counterpart.  The short-term physiological response that is connected to the experience of anxiety includes an increase in heart rate, dilation of pupils, and increase in muscle tension, among others, allowing the body to respond effectively to an environmental threat.  So, there are many circumstances, in which negative emotions are justified; in those circumstances, emotions help us make decisions and may drive or focus the energy and motivation for taking necessary actions as in the case of justified anger or anxiety.

The need for emotional regulation and what happens when emotions go rogue?

As mentioned above, emotions can be misinterpreted or misjudged, or, at other times, clients may fear, reject or ignore their negative emotions.  Both of these challenges can happen because people may not have had the chance to learn to accept emotions as a normal part of life.  The latter also likely precluded learning how to interpret, and regulate one’s emotions appropriately in the face of a specific situation or given stressor.  As such, misinterpretation or rejecting and ignoring one’s own emotions can lead to generalizing the emotional signal to other environments and thereby lead to impaired decision-making, impulsive behavior, and miscommunication, which in turn can cause increased stress and decreased quality of life.  A vicious cycle ensues with long-term consequences that can include physiological, cognitive, and emotional difficulties that eventually can interfere with successful functioning in life.

Emotional regulation:

How did I help Jane to learn to regulate her emotions? 

Initially, I met Jane with the acceptance and reassurance regarding the normalcy of her emotions, which in itself decreased her apprehension about her emotional experiences (e.g. intensity of emotions); and with it, the consequences of her stress: her sexual arousal, as well as her sleep quality, improved.

However, it became clear that what was needed was an approach that allowed her to understand when to use which coping strategies to regulate her emotions as appropriate to a situation or stressor, and assist her in becoming aware when she was falling back into using old patterns of rejecting her own emotions instead of investing time into investigating her emotions by asking herself questions.  So, instead of telling herself “It does not matter!” when she found herself in emotional distress, I guided her in learning how to investigate her emotions that would allow her to correctly interpret them, and then implement an appropriate coping strategy or techniques to address unhelpful thinking patterns.   Questions could include:  ‘What is driving my feelings or emotions?’ and ‘Is my emotion giving me accurate information about the state of the world right now?’.

Given the complexity of our society, there is a myriad of different possibilities and situations in life that a person may interpret as stressful.  Accordingly, there are different ways to approach such identified stressors or situations.  Allowing oneself to observe and investigate one’s emotional response is the key to effectively and successfully directing one’s actions consciously and identifying appropriate strategies. With this new level of awareness can come more satisfactory outcomes, and eventually improved emotional well-being.

Jane is now successfully engaged in her Ph.D. studies.

If you would like to learn more about emotions and their functions in guiding our behaviours, you could read on Emotions- why do we need them, and what when things go wrong

Heike works as a clinical therapist in Vancouver, offering services online.   She also offers a free consult to explore your challenges and possible solutions.  If you would like to book a consult, you can contact her at heike@mindyourbrain.ca