Human beings are thinking creatures as well as emotional beings, often guided and motivated by our emotional response to people, events and circumstances. Emotional meaning can outweigh logic in our decision making and sense of well being depending on our personality, thinking patterns and values. Understanding your emotional states and how they influence you, how you respond and react, and learning to not only fully experience the realm of human emotional response, but also how to regulate and gain power over your emotions is paramount in achieving balance and maximizing joy. Understanding emotional needs and managing expectations are necessary tasks to achieve this mastery.
The complexity of our brains evolved as an adaptive response to changing environmental and social conditions to give us survival advantage and to allow us to thrive as a species. It is this ability to adapt, adjust and modify our behavior and thinking, as well as our conscious awareness of these processes that make our species unique. Understanding the interaction between logical cognitive processes and feeling emotional reaction to thoughts, events and circumstances gives us insight into our motivations and a better ability to regulate or balance our response and behavior. Thinking and feeling influence each other. We can modify our emotional state with thought and intentional action, just as our thoughts can be modified by the feelings we get in any given situation. Understand that these feelings are generated often in response to sensory perceptions that don't register consciously. As we understand the evolutionary basis of certain feelings, we realize they can be maladaptive and excessive relative to our current environment. Our perception of threat and our natural negative bias, or tendency to remember bad outcomes more strongly than good ones, are survival adaptations that cause us to be excessively anxious and worried in response to modern day situations which often warrant less cause for concern.
Discovering your emotional needs, the things that comfort you, as well as the things that excite and motivate you is an important step of self awareness that will assist your ability to fully appreciate and experience the emotional spectrum as well as regulate it to relieve excessive suffering and pain. We all have some common emotional needs, but the degree of importance we place on them varies. We all need some sense of safety and security, some novelty and variety, to feel valuable, connected and loved. We tend to thrive on a sense of progress and growth. Most people are motivated by a sense of autonomy or freedom, a sense of mastery or uniqueness, and a sense of purpose or meaning. By understanding your particular relative needs you can prioritize your actions to help meet them. This prioritization will give you a better sense of control and balance over your own emotional state as well as allow you to fully experience the feelings and emotions that are generated on your journey of need fulfillment. On balance, they will tend to be more positive than negative as you explore your self determination.
As we navigate our way through the world, we incorporate values into our thinking and this influences our emotional responses. We are also endowed with some genetic values or logic that influence our behavior by using emotion as a guidance system. Sometimes the logic of gene propagation or natural selection steers us in ways that we may not otherwise choose. This guidance system is particularly powerful with respect to partner relationships, mating, parenting, sexual behavior and social status. Some understanding of the logic of evolution is useful in deciding and controlling how you feel and act. Often our values, whether consciously or not, set up our expectations for the behavior of others. It is certainly necessary for a civilized society to have value expectations of everyone in order to remain civilized and functioning cooperatively. Yet, in our daily interactions, we can often have expectations of others that are not met, and lead us to feel disappointed, dismayed or angry. Depending on the nature of the infraction, it serves us to examine our value judgment and whether our expectation is fair with respect to the other person or group. People have a strong tendency to try to control the choices of others. In order to free ourselves from disappointment and anger it is necessary to release our attachment to many forms of control and manipulation. We need to respect the freedom of choice of others. If we foster in ourselves the conditions that will attract others to meet our needs of their own volition we will be relieved of much disappointment.
Lastly, the daily practice of stilling the mind will give you the ability to recognize thought and emotion more acutely, to be more aware of their influence on you, and free you to choose rather than be directed by random thoughts and feelings. As you develop the ability to quiet the mind through daily practice, you will not only gain a greater sense of peace and tranquility, you will gain a greater sense of self control and mastery that will increase your effectiveness in all of your human endeavors. This practice has been found in all civilizations to be a soothing and healing remedy and is the single most effective way to find and maintain your emotional balance.