What are emotions? Why do we feel them? How do we feel them? Why do we feel them? From anger, to sadness, to happiness, our minds can be a bag of cats on the best of days, all depending on our surroundings and what is happening to us. Read a sad book recently? You might start crying. Watch a presidential speech on TV? You might start shouting in anger and throwing popcorn. Emotions are not only an incredibly complicated mechanism in the brain, but they radiate through our entire body, and are more complicated than just simple neuroscience. Emotions are a physiological arousal that our body expresses in response to our surroundings, yet they are so much more. Emotions drive our everyday actions, motivate our every move. Emotions affect different parts of the brain through chemical reactions in order to control the body. Emotions are, in summary, incredibly diverse, and affect us a lot more than we realize in our day to day lives. 

From a neurobiological perspective, emotions are complex and scientists have been studying them for decades. The main place our emotions function in the brain is in the Limbic System in our brain. The limbic system sits directly on top of the brainstem and is in the very middle of the brain, surrounded by grey matter. It is made up of multiple sections: the amygdala, the hippocampus, the thalamus, and the hypothalamus. The amygdala is the aggression center of the brain, and it not only controls anger and violence, but fear and anxiety too. The hippocampus curves around the thalamus, and is really important for converting short term memories into long term memories that evoke emotions in a person. There are two thalamus on each side of the brain, and they direct all of our sensory input from our five senses—sound, touch, sight, listening, smell—to the right parts of the cortex to be processed, except for smell, which has its own section in the brain. Finally, the hypothalamus is right below the thalamus, and is in my opinion the most important part of the limbic system, because it regulates a lot of functions in the body, including the autonomic nervous system through the release of hormones into the body. One would think that when emotions can all be diluted down to the complex mechanisms in the brain, memories, and the release of hormones and chemicals, they would become simple. 

However, one can’t just look at emotions from one point of view. When taking a social-emotional perspective on emotions and how they affect us and the world around us, things become a bit more complicated. Emotions affect every part of our life. From politics, to music, to art, to even medicine, emotions affect every part of our daily lifestyle. The placebo effect is a key example of emotions playing into medicine and healing: there are examples of your body’s chemical makeup changing based on your emotions and speeding up the healing process for people. When people believed that nothing was wrong strongly enough, their body’s chemical composition and release literally changed to support that. One way to trigger this healing process is to build a relationship with your emotions. It sounds weird, I know, but meditation, and spending time truly getting in touch with our body and emotions can not only calm us down and destress us, but keep us healthy. Meditate, chart your affect and arousal so you understand your emotions better, track your sleep so you know you are getting enough sleep. It will all ultimately help and change how our soul nerve reacts. I’m not a huge fan, but I had to for a class this semester and it did end up helping a bit. The soul nerve, the largest organ in our body, is the main place where our emotions reverberate and turn into physiological reactions. For example, that feeling when your gut sinks or butterflies flutter in your stomach because you are nervous? You feel that in your soul nerve, because this organ regulates functions such as blood pressure, inflammation, and more. Even outside of medicine, emotions are really important in a socio-economic and political perspective. For generations, people of color have been told that their emotions, that the things they feel naturally just like the rest of the world, are invalid, and shouldn’t be expressed. Black women are either told that they don’t show enough emotion, that they are robots, or that they show too much emotion, that they are hysterical and over-emotional and loud. They are told they need to be a superwoman, to do everything at once otherwise they aren’t ready for a job. There is no easy middle ground; society takes a natural, beautiful thing like emotions and twists it, using it for something oppressive and cruel. All this does is built upon generations of trauma that are embedded into the very bodies of people of color; those high cortisol levels indicating stress that many enslaved women used to feel? Those get passed down to their children, and then their children after that, and people are never given a chance to calm down and destress and the trauma of it all just builds upon itself. Emotions are good. But they can also be cruel. They can turn from a bodily reaction to social capital, something to be traded and bartered and valued based upon your skin color, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic status. 

Emotions are multifaceted. Emotions are a chemical reaction and a physical reaction at the same time. Emotions can be a commodity to be bartered or they can be a method of healing. Emotions are, at their core, a very human thing, and as such will always be faced with a dichotomy. Are they good or bad? Do we express them or don’t? Should certain emotions be expressed and others not? Everyone reacts differently. Everyone accepts different emotions, expresses different emotions, feels different emotions. But no matter what, what we feel unites us all. No matter what, everyone’s experience is unique, and everyone will have felt similar to you at one point. Some people might believe that emotions are a reason to separate us based on what we express and feel, but I believe they are a reason to bring us together.

Sources:

Emotions: The Limbic System

Getting to Know Your Brain: Crash Course Psychology #4

Feeling All the Feels: Crash Course Psychology #25

The Drugs Inside Your Head

Resmaa Menakem — Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence

Emotion as Power Capital and Strategy in the Field of Politics