A practical approach to regulating your emotions

Do you find yourself, constantly worried about uncertain things, or unnecessarily getting angry, or feeling jealous just about anything? Do you want to improve yourself to deal with these negative emotions better ? Let’s try to scientifically understand what’s happening to your brain & body during these states of overwhelming emotions & how you can train your brain to deal with these.

Are you consciously creating these emotional states ?

Just think of the last time you got angry at something, or the time when you were worried & anxious about some uncertain event. Do you think you had a say with respect to these emotion generation ? Take a pause & think, did you ask your brain to get angry at someone (or) get worried about an event. Well, the reality is, these things just happen without you consciously taking a call. You don’t get to decide when you become angry (or) when you should get worried. It happens naturally, at least for most of the people, as they let it happen. This is so natural, that people feel that being emotional means being less rational.

So if you’re not actively controlling these feelings, then what is happening under the hood ? If you heard a sound resembling gun shot, why is it that you start feeling nervous, your blood pressure going up, heart pumping at a much faster rate ? Let’s get a bit into how your brain works to understand these.

How your brain works ?

Recent understanding of brain shows that we humans view the entire world in a simulation predicted by our brain. Your brain constantly tries to predict & make sense of huge amount of data thrown at it. Your brain takes these external inputs from various sensory inputs & tries to create a simulation based on your concepts for things. Let’s simplify this. Now take a look at what’s in your hand. A mobile phone ? Okay, now imagine you hand it over to a caveman or a newly born baby. What would they see ? Do they see an object with which they can talk to others who are far away, an object to listen to music, an object which is called mobile phone ? Hell no. All they would be seeing is a shiny object which shows their own face. In essence, what you saw is way different from what a caveman would see, even though the sensory inputs (pixel brightness is exactly the same). When your brain saw those pixel inputs, it tried to use your experience (called concepts) & created a simulation where you are able to perceive it as a mobile phone. Your brain predicted that it is a mobile phone & hence you perceived it. Now what happened when a sound resembling gunshot was heard ? Same stuff. Your brain, based on past experience created a simulation where you made sense of those pressure changes as a gun shot.

• Talk about learning from making mistakes. (alien world)

Interoceptive network

• Predictions from past
• How body budgeting regions are dumb ? as opposed to other predictions like visual (snake)

How to deal ?

• Solution is in learning from making mistakes (what does this translate to )
• Awareness, Philosophy (axioms, hacks, rationality etc.), Caching => Training

A framework to train your interoceptive network which is responsible to predict body budgets by giving rational feedback whenever it makes blunders.

• Do you realise that you’re in an undesirable state (something that’s negatively impacting your tranquility), that it happens very naturally & you absolutely cannot control yourself. Let’s understand what’s happening & how to train your brain to start taking control
• Emotional states like anxiety, jealousy, grief might feel like they’re needed & sometimes they indeed are needed for survival, but do you get overwhelmed by them, causing you do perform tasks in an inefficient manner & also negatively impacting your tranquility ?