Everyone feels emotions unless a personality disorder is in play. The emotions that we feel tend to be positive, negative, neutral, or a mixture of the prior. Emotions may emanate through our actions, word choices, tones of voice, facial expressions, and body language, controlling our day-to-day interactions with people and being a potential hindrance or promoter of the relationships that we form. Many times our emotions get the best of us and our logical thinking goes out the window. Although this does happen, there are ways that we can actively try to control ourselves and gear our emotions to better our emotional and non-emotional lives.
To start off, "emotion is characterized by physiological arousal and changes in facial expressions, gestures, posture, and subjective feelings." Our emotions determine what certain behaviors we will perform, for example, attacking, fleeing, reproducing, and choking up. Physiological changes come along with emotion as well. These changes inside your body can include, but aren't limited to increased or decreased heart rate, blood pressure, and perspiration. Another part of emotions are the outward expressions we perform when feeling certain emotions. For example, if I was walking home alone at night and saw someone starting to follow me I might display signs such as a tense and defensive posture, trembling extremities, a contorted face, and even a change in my voice. These emotional expressions can help determine what emotions I am feeling.
As I said before, emotions can get in the way of logical thinking sometimes. Why is it that a girlfriend may get angry at her boyfriend for doing something that was fine when her friend did it yesterday? Yes, this can be due to the fact that women are generally more emotional then men, but it also has to do with their emotional bond. Relationships bring strong feelings of connection to the other person. So, when one person in the relationship does something wrong it may cause a larger uprising than it would if a friend did it, in the other person in the relationship.
As a sometimes "crazy" girlfriend, I understand how someone can let their emotions get carried away and how it is extremely important to try to be smart about your emotions and to not let them get in front of your logical thinking. Having the following skills can help you become emotionally mature where you are accepting that emotions are a part of life, and are also able to manage them. People who can quickly recognize what emotions they or others are feeling, those that use past emotional experiences as a way to determine how to currently feel, people who understand what evokes their certain emotions, and those that know how to manage their emotions all fall into this category.
Knowing what irks you is important, but knowing how to calm yourself down once you are upset is even more important. Decisions made based on emotions alone don't always turn out the way we want them to so it is important to use critical thinking skills applied to our emotions so we can all be emotionally smart.
