Change negative emotions and physical tension
Emotions can occur at all kinds of moments. Sometimes we don’t even notice what causes them. Your mood affects everything. How you think and how you feel, what you do and what you decide not to do. It affects how you respond to events and others, how you connect, or not. Emotions and physical tension can have a lot of impact on us and others. But how do we change (negative) emotions and physical tension?
Neuro-science and emotion
Emotions seem to lead a life of their own and that is not just a feeling. This has now also been demonstrated with new neuro-scientific research. Emotions appear to “work” very differently than previously assumed. Current ideas about what emotions are, how we can recognize them in body language, and where they come from don’t seem right! Much of our current knowledge about what emotions are, how they arise and how this creates our emotional life comes from 1950s research. And that research appears to have quite a few “errors” in it.
Our senses
Our 5 senses play a central role in psychological en developmental theories. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling. Senses aim to record external stimuli and that is super convenient. Because when you think about it properly, our brain is locked in a black box we call our head. Our senses are needed to inform your brain about what is “out there” in the world.
“Feeling” is divided into: sense of touch (touch, pressure and vibration), thermoception (hot and cold), nociception (pain), balance and proprioception.
Interoception
There appears to be a direct relationship between the feelings in our body and how our emotions arise. “Feelings in the body” is a fairly new area. For example, the theory of movement speaks of propriosepsis or kinesthesia, which means “the ability to perceive the position of your body.”
However, much more appears to be happening in our body. When you think about it, our senses inform us about “what is happening in the outside world”. But there are also senses that inform us about “what is happening in our body“! This is called “Interoception“.
What happens in our body is also the outside world for the brain. I have already described this in my book Happiness is Depressing from 2019 (2016 in Dutch). And it now appears that the information that is coming from our body seems crucial for the emergence of emotions.
How emotions emerge
In our bodies there are is a constant stream of subtle changes. Your heartbeat changes, your muscle tension, breathing, feelings of pressure in your stomach or other organs, throat or neck, for example, and it changes all the time. These changes can be very subtle and sometimes very emphatic. Research shows that these changes are closely monitored by your brain. This is important because your brain is constantly measuring whether your body is doing well. This is perhaps the most important thing for your brain! New neuro-scientific research has now been able to demonstrate for the first time that these unconscious (subtle) physical changes directly influence the development of our emotions. This has never been demonstrated before and the underlying mechanism shows us that our emotional world “works” completely differently than previously assumed.
These new insights expose completely new ways of working with unwanted emotions and physical tensions. Arguing. Relationship problems. Stress (at work). Emotions that you cannot suppress. If counting to 10 proves too difficult. When you’re too sensitive to impressions or atmosphere. Do you have inexplicable feelings in your body that you cannot change? Can you feel rejected, feel small, insecure? Persistently sad, gloomy, depressed. Too irritated and so on.
Do you suffer from the any of the above feelings and do you want to learn how to permanently change them with a revolutionary new method? Go to Relation Emotion Therapy and Coaching for the more about this subject.
Looking for a coach?
You can also work on these issues with coaching. Go to the Life Coach page to make an appointment. Talk to you soon!
Wassili Zafiris
