Letting reason intercept emotion

11/25/13
Brain has physiological (breathing, digesting food etc), emotional (eg. urge to win an argument even when we are wrong) and rational (eg. let me not spend my last bit of money on booze) functions. In the evolutionary context, recognizing harmless events as threats even at the cost of erring favoured survival more so than erring by dismissing real threats. So, we were naturally selected to latch on to negative perceptions - for example we remember unpleasant experiences more frequently than positive experiences. We can alert our brains when we feel a negative emotion such as anger, frustration, fear, avarice etc.. by naming the emotion we feel precisely without any judgement (eg. I am jealous that a coworker found a better job). Expressing the feeling in language brings the higher functions of the brain (language, reason etc. )to be stimulated by the experience. Language is handled by that part of the brain which also provides for rational thinking. The same can also be done in case of postive emotions, but it is more important to regulate our selves under the spell of negative emotions (eg. car driven badly by a fellow road user). By alerting our selves to the negative emotion we experience, we give the logical brain to come up with responses that are more effective in the real world.