How We Process Emotions
As we dive into the concept of a self-image and explore the role that self-image plays in what emotions we feel, it is worth understanding the specific pathway through which our self-image affects our emotional states. Here we will go into more detail about how emotions work and the limits of our abilities to influence them.
Note: When we talk about “emotions” in this section, we mean the term in the broadest possible sense: anything that could be referred to as a “feeling,” or what a philosopher may call qualia.
Emotions appear to be broadly divisible into two categories:
- Lower order emotions: These are emotions that do not depend on our self-images and are either survival related, breeding related, or related to simple reward pathways in our brains. These include things like thirst, hunger, the desire to defecate, pain, lust, the fight or flight response, and addictions. The types of emotions that a fish may feel.
- Higher order emotions: These are the emotions that allow us to live as social animals. These include things like happiness, sadness, envy, anger, pride, jealousy, anxiousness, etc.
Lower order emotions are largely out of our control. They can only be inhibited or endured. When a yogi or someone says they have conquered hunger, what they mean is they have learned to endure and normalize the sensation of constant hunger to a point at which it no longer negatively affects them. This is not the case with higher order emotions, while these can be inhibited or endured, they can also be avoided or otherwise controlled entirely (unless they are the result of a systematic abnormal brain state like PTSD or depression).
It can sometimes be confusing as to whether an emotion is a higher order or lower order emotion because higher order emotions will often hijack lower order emotional pathways “to get the point across.” For example, a person may be so sad their body begins to experience the lower order emotional pathway associated with nausea. Alternatively, a person may be so anxious that they begin to activate their lower order fight or flight response.
This hijacking of lower order emotional pathways can actually be incredibly damaging to our bodies, as they often were not evolved/designed to be activated for extended periods of time (for example: the fight or flight response activates our sympathetic nervous system, which is only designed to be activated for short periods of time, but because this response can be hijacked by anxiety, it can be left “left turned on” and shorten your lifespan by decades if left unaddressed). In these cases, the lower order emotion can be avoided by learning to control a higher order emotional pathway.
It is useful to remember that while both categories of emotions can be inhibited—pushed down so we don’t have to experience them—suppressing emotions is cognitively taxing and will prevent you from inhibiting other impulses. It is also difficult to inhibit emotions if you are already inhabiting something else, like a desire to smoke or eat. Overriding emotions is also a temporary solution as our neural inhibition pathways will inevitably become exhausted. Thus, learning to manipulate our impulses and recurring emotional states is always better than just attempting to suppress them.
As discussed earlier, when you experience something that would lead to a higher order emotion, your unconscious mind checks it against your mental model of yourself in order to determine how you should feel about it. However, before your unconscious mind does that, it builds a story about the incoming information. It is this story that is being directly checked against our mental model, as our mental model cannot directly interact with sensory information. In other words, your mental model cannot interact with a picture you are looking at. It can only interact with the story you create about that picture.
Because it is the story we create about what we experience—and not the experiences themselves—that we check against our mental model to determine our emotional reaction, we can control our emotional reaction by changing the story we are telling ourselves about what we are experiencing. There are several ways we can contextualize any experience into stories that will affect us quite differently. This contextualization is entirely within our conscious control.
Recontextualization is something humans naturally do when dealing with tragedy. For example, when someone’s parent dies, they may mitigate the grief they feel by creating a story about how it was really for the best (“Thank goodness she is no longer in pain”). Or when someone experiences a natural disaster, they contextualize it as part of God’s plan, and because God’s plan is ultimately a good thing, the negative emotions associated with experiencing the tragedy are mitigated.
Recontextualization is particularly useful for dealing with experiences that lead to an inconveniently high level of negative emotion. A good catch-all recontextualization one can use is: “This experience was actually positive, because it made me stronger.”
Another method that can be used for handling powerful, otherwise-unavoidable negative emotions is mindfulness combined with patience. Simply remembering that strong emotions are rarely felt for more than a few minutes at a time can make them easier to endure. (This may not align with your memories of strong emotional states but if you take a moment to time one you will see it is true.)
Finally, despite all the stories we tell ourselves about how “we just want to be happy,” it is important to remember just how much we instinctively desire to indulge in negative emotions when we feel it is appropriate to do so. Next time you are particularly angry about something, focus on just how easy it would be for you to let go of whatever it is you are angry about. It is your choice to stay angry.
When you let yourself get angry (or sad, jealous, vindictive, etc.), you are indulging in that emotion because you feel you have a good excuse to do so. A great example of this is when you share a moderately annoying experience with a friend, they say that you are justified in being angry. This almost always leads to an escalation from mild annoyance to full blown anger on your part, now that you feel you have been given permission to indulge.
There is a trend in pop/pseudo-psychology to claim benefits from indulging in emotional states that have been traditionally agreed to be negative, such as anger, jealousy, and sadness (largely due to the popularity of the children’s movie “Inside Out,” not due to actual research). We need to stress this is not the point we are making. It is generally bad to indulge in negative emotional states. Just because we are naturally compelled to indulge in negative emotions does not mean we are ever justified in doing so or that there is any evidence to suggest that doing so is beneficial. However, we are also not saying there isn’t sometimes utility in allowing yourself to feel a negative emotion if it moves you closer to a goal (e.g., using anger to motivate yourself or using your sadness to socially persuade someone).
Traditionally negative emotional states can admittedly offer some short-term benefits when experienced in their moderate forms (moderate anxiety can produce heightened focus and attention, while moderate anger can create stimulus-induced analgesia, increasing your physical strength and inhibiting the parts of your brain involved in empathy, which makes you more rational). Nevertheless, there is no large or well-analyzed body of evidence suggesting that frequently indulging in negative emotions is in any way an objectively healthy way to live.
There is, however, a very large body of evidence that links frequently indulging in negative emotions to very serious health problems. Sustained anxiety or anger can lead to coronary disease and heart attacks, along with a number of other health issues. In contrast, there are no known health issues to sustained or extreme positive emotional states. In fact, the famous “nun study,” which followed the diaries of 180 nuns, showed that happier nuns lived about ten years longer.
As entertaining and empowering as it may feel, pop psychology is not science and should not be regarded as such. For example, another common meme in pop psychology is the idea that punching things or breaking things will allow you to “let off anger” and help you deal with tense situations—yet repeated studies show that any sort of rumination, be it punching or venting, will only make the associated negative emotion worse.
Overlay States
In addition to higher and lower order emotions, we also experience an independent overlay state. These overlay states are not always given clear names, as they are not as distinct as emotions. Some words used to describe them include: malaise, being “in the zone,” being “in a funk,” being manic, or feeling foggy. Unlike higher and lower order emotions, your overlay state can last for hours or even days. Moreover, these states heavily affect your cognitive capacity (e.g., your ability to “think clearly”) as well as modulate the threshold of stimulation required to feel a higher order emotion. For example, when you are in a state of malaise, the threshold to feel sadness is lower and you will feel sad about things that otherwise wouldn’t bother you.
Overlay states are caused by “system wide” effects on the brain that can be influenced by factors ranging from diet to the time of day, hormones, physical fitness level, and whether you have the flu.
Positive overlay states can be created through simple “life hygiene.” This includes eating healthy food, exercising, meditating, maintaining good sleep hygiene, giving to charity (yes, there is research showing this raises baseline happiness), having meaningful work, maintaining regular social interaction with people you like, having a sense of purpose, knowing what you want from life, etc. If you are attempting to maximize a certain overlay state, the best method is to record daily activities and record your daily overlay state. You can use this information to look for positive trends between the two. One surprising thing that results from overlay state monitoring is the realization that actions which do not feel good in the moment, such as caloric restriction, exercise, charitable giving, hard work, or social interaction, can ultimately have a very positive effect on your overlay state.
As mentioned above, having a sense of purpose will also help to affect your overlay state. The objective function, ideologies, and persona you cultivate as a result of applied pragmatic thought may come in very handy for creating a better overlay state, as studies indicate one of the best ways to maximize your overlay state is to feel there is purpose to your life. (Note: The scientific community does not use the term overlay state.)
Note: A persistent negative overlay state in the face of normal “life hygiene” can be created by certain mental illnesses and will require psychopharmacology and professional behavioral therapy to remedy. Not seeking help when you notice yourself in such a condition is akin to not going to a doctor when you realize you have advanced pneumonia. Sure, you may be able to “tough it out,” but you may also end up dead.
The Effects of Overlay States on Emotions
Overlay states are often talked about in terms of emotions, but while overlay states can affect emotional states, they are not exactly emotional states themselves. A person can have so much of a higher order emotion that that emotion hijacks a lower order emotional pathway (e.g., a person can be so sad they feel physical pain), but a person cannot have so much of an overlay state that they feel an emotion (a person cannot be at such a high level of malaise that they feel sadness).
Instead, overlay states affect the threshold of stimulation required to experience certain emotional states. A person in a strong overlay state will need much less stimulus to feel happy, sad, angry, or any other higher (or lower) order emotion.
In sum, you experience a higher order emotional state through the following pathway:
To experience a higher order emotion:
- You experience something
- You tell yourself a story about what you experienced
- You reference that story against your mental model to determine a level of emotional output
- If that emotional output level is higher than the threshold created by your overlay state, you will experience said emotion
For example:
- You notice you are the only person sitting alone in the movie theater
- You tell yourself a story about how this means you are more alone than most other people
- You see yourself as the type of person who doesn’t want to be alone, so you release a small level of sadness output
- Typically, this level of sadness output would not be experienced as sadness but because your overlay state is “hormonal” due to being pregnant your threshold for experiencing sadness is unusually low and you begin crying
When you regard overlay states as filters changing the threshold needed to experience an emotion, it makes sense people are likely born with quite divergent “default” overlay states. Specifically, some studies have backed the idea of happiness set point theory, which essentially claims people are born with different thresholds of stimulus required to experience happiness. The most famous studies associated with this theory follow people after major life events—such as winning the lottery or marriage—and demonstrate that after a short period of time, people return to the same level of happiness they experienced before the event. In essence, this theory finds people gravitate toward a level of happiness that they developed very early in life, either through genetics, through in utero conditions, or throughout early life experiences.
The only thing that can affect the level of positive emotion you experience in your life as much as your self-image is your “default” overlay state. Fortunately, studies have shown this state can be nudged both up and down in terms of this threshold sensitivity. Events such as the loss of a child/spouse, or continued unemployment, will nudge your threshold for happiness up (making it permanently harder to experience happiness), while actions such as prolonged charitable activities and exercise will nudge your happiness threshold down (making it permanently easier to experience happiness).
Directly Stimulating Positive Emotional States
Let’s explore how we can maximize our positive emotional experiences while keeping this model in mind.
(1) You experience something
(2) You tell yourself a story about what you experienced
(3) You reference that story against your mental model to determine a level of emotional output
(4) If that emotional output level is higher than the threshold created by your overlay state, you will experience said emotion
This section will be divided into two parts: maximizing pursuits that make us feel good—things we do in the physical world—and maximizing experiences that make us feel good—the way we relate to experiences we are not currently living through either as aspects of our memory or imagination.
Maximizing Pursuits that Make You Feel Good
Maximizing stage (1) “you experience something,” seems deceptively simple. Just put yourself in a position to experience things that make you feel positive emotions, right? In practice, maximizing step (1) is more difficult to do than one may think. This difficulty ultimately demonstrates just how much work the “maximizing positive emotional states” objective function really is.
Despite what we tell ourselves about wanting to be happy, we are horrendous at actively pursuing experiences that make us genuinely happy. This is due both to the fact that we often just refuse to take the initiative to seek happy experiences and because humans are not good at identifying what kinds of activities will make them happy.
Take stock of the things you have done this week to make yourself happy. Now reflect on how much happiness you felt during each of those experiences. How much were you smiling uncontrollably? How much were you laughing? How much love did you feel? Now take stock of the last thing you spent over $5,000 on to make yourself happy (a trip for example) and ask yourself the same questions. How much were you smiling uncontrollably? How much were you laughing? How much love did you feel? If you are like most people, if you are like us, your answer will be: “very little.”
Why do we spend money and time doing things we tell ourselves we are doing to make ourselves happy but don’t actually bring us much happiness? Because we spend very little time consciously observing how happy specific types of experiences make us on average. Instead, we make five common mistakes when categorizing activities and expenditures that bring us happiness.
Mistake 1:
Instead of focusing on how happy an activity makes us on average, we focus more on specific memories in which we had a uniquely high level of positive emotion. We then categorize whatever activity we were undertaking when we reached that uniquely high state of positive emotion as an activity that is likely to on average give us a high positive emotional state. For example, we may categorize going out to a nightclub as a happiness-generating experience because we have a couple very positive memories associated with nightclubs—even if most of the time when we go to nightclubs, we do very little other than go through the motions of what we feel like we are supposed to do in that environment.
Mistake 2:
We also have a problem with lying to ourselves about how happy certain things and activities make us. If we spend a lot of money or effort on an experience, we are unlikely to admit to ourselves that the experience was mostly unpleasant. We will find it very hard to acknowledge that we could have experienced more positive moments doing something that costs less time and money. For example, if we spend a significant amount of money on an expensive trip, we are unlikely to admit to ourselves that we would have been happier staying home and binge reading good books (or doing something else familiar and comforting). As a result, we often end up chasing experiences that are expensive or inconvenient simply because they are expensive and inconvenient.
Mistake 3:
Sometimes people will tell themselves they enjoy an experience because that experience is tied to something they are addicted to and their subconscious is looking for an excuse to indulge in the addiction. For example, someone addicted to gambling may categorize sitting in front of a slot machine and pulling a lever as a positive emotional experience even when in reality they get almost no positive emotional stimulation from the experience, while someone addicted to alcohol may categorize events that allow them to become intoxicated in a socially acceptable setting as enjoyable, even if they would gain more enjoyment by staying home and getting drunk while reading a good book.
When looking for experiences we have convinced ourselves we enjoy because they are associated with something addictive, remember that most human addictions are not substance-based but a result of intermittent reward pathways.
The classic study demonstrating how powerfully addictive intermediate reward pathways are was conducted by B. F. Skinner and showed that if you give a rat a lever that releases a food pellet (reward) whenever it is pressed, the rat will press it when it wants food. If, however, the lever releases food only sometimes, the rat will get a large dopamine rush in addition to (occasional) food and will become addicted to pushing the lever, sometimes doing nothing but pushing the lever all day long. The dopamine rush caused by intermittent rewards is like any other drug, forming dependency in the user and eventually no longer yielding the positive emotion which led to the addiction in the first place. In their most raw form in humans, interment reward pathways are what cause gambling addictions and make it difficult for people to leave abusive relationships in which the partner is sometimes nice.
However, there are many less obviously destructive activities we become addicted to through intermittent reward pathways—things we tell ourselves we do for fun when the activity actually brings us very little happiness. A classic example is a simple mobile phone or social media game (Farmville being the archetype here). However, intermittent reward pathways are also core to many activities that give us other types of enjoyment, such as golf, posting to social media, playing video games, watching sports, etc. Note that these activities don’t have features to recommend them on their own; an intermittent reward addiction accounts for at least part of their enjoyment and popularity.
Mistake 4:
When you are on autopilot, you will naturally gravitate towards activities that reinforce your self-image. While sometimes fun, these activities are rarely the most enjoyable options available. For example, a person who sees themselves as an intellectual bohemian may go to a museum not because they enjoy the content of the museum, but because they enjoy doing an activity that reinforces the way they see themselves. Whenever we do an activity that reinforces our self-images, we experience a moderate amount of activation in the reward pathways of our brains and feel good. This is a normal part of processing higher order emotions.
However, social media has caused a disruption in this behavior pattern and can lead us to expend inordinately large amounts of time, effort, and resources on activities that don’t lead to sustainable positive emotional states. While reinforcing your own self-image provides you with a moderate activation of your brain’s reward pathways, having someone else validate your self-image provides you with a much larger hit to those reward pathways. Thus, while going to a museum may activate a bit of a self-identified intellectual’s reward pathway, posting a picture at a museum and having someone else comment how intellectual that person is provides them with a much greater reward. The problem created by this social media validation is compounded when you consider that it is an intermediate reward (we don’t always get rewarding feedback when we post something online) that fits all the criteria for a highly addictive reward pathway. Essentially, people become addicted to having others validate their self-images through social media without recognizing it as an addiction.
Outside of the imminent danger of becoming addicted to others’ validation of your self-image on social media, there is a less insidious risk that the type of content you post to social media will alter your memory of an event and cause you to believe you were happy doing something that actually was not much fun at all.
Just yesterday, we walked by a large, expensive-looking party and noticed that not a single guest was smiling except when taking selfies. Today, when they post those selfies online and tell all their friends how much fun they had at this expensive party, they will begin to build a false memory of their experience at the event. This false memory will be reinforced every time they go through their old photos and see images of themselves smiling alongside comments and tags indicating how much fun they were having.
Essentially, when a person posts to social media about an event (whether it be a trip, a nightclub, or a fancy party) they almost never comment on how mediocre the experience is. Instead, people mostly post and share photos in which they are smiling and having a great time; after all, everyone needs to know how great their lives are! This would not be a significant problem if this behavior pattern were applied equally to all the things we did to make ourselves happy, but it is rare for us to post things which make us happy that won’t also make others jealous or think our lives are great.
It is rare for someone to post a picture of themselves content at home alone with a beer curled up on the sofa with their cat while watching cartoons. The reality is that most people would be much happier doing something at home alone than hobnobbing at a fancy party, however due to the role social media plays in their lives, they are more likely to remember the fancy party as a happy moment.
Mistake 5:
Finally, it is very common for us to categorize an experience as something that makes us happy because it made us happy in the past—even if we are no longer capable of deriving happiness from the experience. As we age, the things that make us happy change. The most significant example of this phenomenon is the decline in “play behavior” many mammals (including humans) experience over time.
All young mammals exhibit something called play behavior. If you have ever owned a puppy, you will immediately recognize this behavior and will also be aware that, as the dog aged, its proclivity towards play behavior declined. The repertoire of activities that made the dog happy changed as it aged and the instinctual drive towards play behavior declined. Humans also experience a decline in a drive towards play behavior with age.
Our gradually disappearing play behavior manifests itself as a shift in our default overlay state that, as we age, raises the threshold of happiness associated with frenetic physical activity, curiosity, and imagination, and lowers the threshold of happiness that comes from serenity, relaxation, and nurturing others. Despite this shift that makes physical/curious/imaginary play less enjoyable over time, some people still gravitate toward youth-optimized forms of play out of habit.
All five of these potential pitfalls can be easily avoided by regularly trying new activities and critically thinking about how happy an activity makes you feel in the moment. Be open to the fact that what brings you a positive emotional experience today may be something that you detested in the past. Just because you remember having a great experience doing something in the past doesn’t mean you will genuinely enjoy that same experience today. Even if something seems like the type of thing you would like, it is still worth paying attention to whether or not you actually enjoy it.
Maximizing Experiences that Make you Feel Good
Maximizing experiences that make you feel good does not just involve careful selection of those experiences most likely to make you feel good. It is important to remember that step (1) on the pathway that leads to an emotional output is not: “you participate in an activity,” but rather “you experience something.” This experience does not have to be something you are actually doing in the moment but can be completely in your imagination.
Even though imagined scenarios are completely within our control, they ultimately—almost comically—generate more negative emotions in the average person than positive emotions. This not only comes through ruminating on how a potential action could end up embarrassing you, how a past action lost you an opportunity, or how terrible a potential future could be but also comes from remembering positive experiences.
Often when people attempt to ruminate on the happy moments of their lives, they nail step (1), the experience, successfully remembering a happy moment from the past, but then at step (2), the interpretation of that experience, they tell themselves a story about how sad it is they aren’t experiencing those happy things right now, which evokes a negative emotion.
This is ironic, as most people don’t ruminate on sad events in their past and tell themselves stories about how happy they are they are not experiencing them in the present. Both steps (1), what you are remembering, and step (2), the story you tell yourself about that memory, are entirely within your control. At any point, you can choose to remember the happiest moments of your life and be happy you had those experiences—or remember the worst moments of your life and choose to feel relieved you aren’t experiencing them right now.
But our experiences are not limited to things we experienced in the past, things we might experience, and things we are experiencing right now. We are also capable of experiencing things that are 100% imaginary. This is instinctively obvious to us as children. Children can easily reason that it would be more fun to experience themselves fighting off the alien scourge overwhelming the citadel alongside a crack troop of space marines than to experience the mundane act of playing on a boring playground with their friends.
One of the greatest things about being human is you can mentally experience almost anything you want at any time. Right now, you could close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting on a beach, listening to the waves, feeling the wind in your hair, and sipping on a frozen margarita. You probably just don’t have a habit of imagining things anymore.
With age, many people stop expending the mental effort required to create their own imaginary experiences. Older people instead rely on the crutch of books and television to escape reality. Part of this is due to the subconscious realization that sometimes people who professionally imagine things are just better at it, and that we gain more value from indulging in someone else’s imagined world if we can share that world with others in our social circle. Still, we encourage you to remember that you have the power experience any world you choose to live in, at least for a while.
Recontextualizing Your Experiences to Maximize Positive Emotions
Just as what you are experiencing—step (1)—is often within your conscious control, how you contextualize those experiences, step (2) is always within your conscious control. The story we tell ourselves about what we are experiencing is what our internal model references when determining how we should feel. If we go back to the woman in sitting alone in the movie theater, we can see that there are many stories she could tell herself about that experience other than: “Everyone else here has friends; I am so alone,” such as, “I am so glad I don’t have to share my popcorn!” or “Thank goodness I won’t have someone whispering commentary to me through the movie!”
The ever-popular cinematic family, the Addams Family, present a great demonstration of how powerful recontextualization can be and how jarringly rare it is. The strangest thing about the Addams Family is not the occasionally supernatural events that happen in their lives, but the fact they choose to contextualize things differently than most people and they have different mental models against which they test that contextualization. For example, if Morticia sees a wilted flower, she decides to contextualize that experience as a positive one. Subconsciously, we all realize that choice is not a supernatural one, but a choice any of us could make at any time.
It is almost comically easy to experience happiness whenever you want, even though only one third of Americans describe themselves as happy. You could choose to be experiencing literally the happiest place and thing you can imagine right now, but instead you have chosen not to. Realizing this shakes many people from an objective function based around maximizing positive emotions because what they really meant when asserting that positive emotions have inherent value was, “I want to choose whatever objective function means I don’t have to change anything about how I live my life.”
Realizing that positive emotional states are always within their grasp assuming they are willing to put in a large amount of effort (and don’t have a systematic brain abnormality) makes people rethink the judgment call that they have an imperative to maximize positive emotional states in themselves. This brings us back to the core point of this chapter: even though it is possible to maintain a near constant happy state through sustained mental effort, it is always going to be easier to create a sustained happy state by simply altering the self-image against which an experience and interpretation is tested. For this reason, most of your time when reading this section should be focused on deciding what self-image you want and how you will create that self-image.
The following section portion is skippable, as it isn’t actually useful in choosing who you want to be or controlling your emotional state and is entirely conjecture based on one of the author’s experiences building neural networks. However, if you do like this section, you are likely to really like The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality, where we have many similar discussions.
The glaring question raised by the above four-step system for emotional reactions is: Why, when we remember happy memories, does our brain default to creating negative stories about how sad it is we aren’t experiencing those things right now? In other words, what creates the default pathways our brain takes when we are not actively attempting to influence how we think about something?
Looking at this from the perspective of a neural network, we can begin to get an idea of what may be happening. Neural networks attempt to recreate brain pathways in computers to understand why they behave as they do. Simple neural networks are often based around an input, an output, and a system in between the two that learns how to maximize a certain output based on various inputs. This system is neither conscious, nor designed to prioritize one flavor of output over another (e.g., happy vs. sad) it is only supposed to maximize a given output (e.g., emotion).
If we define the various states this closed system can take as autopilot choices for how we are contextualizing an experience and ask ourselves: “What output is this closed emotion generation system optimizing for?” the answer becomes clear. When it is not being disrupted by the conscious parts of your mind, this system is optimized to enter whatever state will lead to the maximum possible emotional output. For example, if you think of a happy memory, the emotional signal created by deciding to be sad about that experience being over is stronger than the emotional signal created by a decision to be happy that the experience happened at all. The system, which has no reason to favor “happy” over “sad,” will merely enter whatever state causes the strongest signal.
However, a practicing neuroscientist editor argued for a different explanation centered around negativity bias: “That negative emotions are overall generally perceived as stronger than positive emotions. Your most negative emotion possible is really much more salient than your most positive emotion possible. So, when presented with a memory that brings happiness about having experienced it and sadness that it isn’t being experienced in the moment at about equal levels, the negative emotion will be perceived as stronger.” Obviously, we disagree, finding the concept of “positive” and “negative” emotions to be somewhat arbitrary and subject to change, but it is worth at least providing readers with a couple of possible explanations for this curious tendency in humans.