Mastery of Emotion
Emotion has a powerful purpose. Emotion colours the tapestry of your days. Emotion gives nuance and beauty to your most fond memories. Powerful heroic journeys, heart warming films, mood changing music, and other forms of expression “speak” to you non-verbally through emotion. Colours that remind you of some of your happiest memories are charged uniquely with the emotion. You connect colours to events that you felt, before you could form the words for the events in your mind.
Emotion also charges the events that cause you fear and anger. Emotion reminds you to avoid the things that might make these events occur again. In this way, emotional experiences colour your perceptions in a vivid and rapid way that acts faster than the speed of language.
Sometimes emotion can sweep through you and “un-man” you from the “horses” of your rational mind. Emotional can also subtly influence what you consider to be rational. Strong emotion can stop rational thinking and even interrupt memory processes.
To master emotional balance, you need to learn how to navigate the emotional processes of the mind. The Limbic System is your emotional mind, and a key part of this system is the Amygdala. To achieve emotional mastery, understanding the Amygdala can be useful.
The Amygdala (image © DML)
The Amygdala
The Amygdala is a structure in the brain. You have two, one on the left and one on the right. In Latin, “amygdala” means almond. These structures are named after the almond due to a shape similar to an almond shape. Two Amygdala are called Amygdalae.
As a part of the Limbic System, the Amygdala is involved in memory, decision-making, and emotional responses. In men, the Amygdala is four to five times the size of women’s. The Amygdala thus fires more strongly and the effect of the emotion lasts for longer, in men than in women. Even though men have a lower range of facial expression when they are emotional, the emotions are felt more strongly and deeply than those felt by women according to research in different cultures across the world.
More recent research indicates that the right-sided Amygdala is more involved in aggression and fear, whereas the left-sided amygdala is connected more frequently to happiness and reward. Furthermore, the amygdala are connected to the recording of memories charged by emotion, either strong positive emotion or strong negative emotion.
The Amygdala and Anxiety
In anxiety states, the Amygdala fires more frequently. With increased anxiety over time, the Amygdalae can grow in size. This can make it easier for the Amygdala to fire. People with overactive Amygdalae become more irritable at smaller events than they would before they had anxiety, or increased stress. Studies on burnout show that people in a state of burnout have Amygdalae that fire more easier, with less provocation.
Mindfulness, Meditation and the Amygdala
Evolving studies are showing that consistent meditation practice or mindfulness practice can reduce the frequency with which the Amygdala fires. So the firing happens less frequently. This leads to less expressed high emotion. Less irritability. Less urgency. Less annoyance. Better treatment of each other and more tolerance for difficult situations.
In addition, meditation or mindfulness can shrink the size of the Amygdala. For those with larger Amygdala due to repeated traumatic events or childhood trauma, this can substantially reduce suffering.
Developing more tolerance for challenging situations can allow you to make decisions that are coloured less by negative emotion. Eventually, you can learn how to master negative emotion, and choose to act from a place of strong personal values.
By creating more space for positive emotion, you can ignite feelings like hope, joy, happiness, pleasure, and inner peace. In many places around the world, for over 4000 years, people have been practicing positive emotion. This practice reduces violence, aggression, and suffering and brings more peacefulness and harmony to the social fabric of these places. Making time to intentionally practice positive emotion can help to re-wire your brain to habitually enter positive emotional states.
Meditation or mindfulness can be used to cultivate and practice of positive emotion. By choosing a noble value like peace, kindness, or strength, and focusing on this with great detail, you start to teach your brain new habits of processing.
Key to mastery is developing the state of neutrality. When the positive and negative emotions flow through you like so many natural weather patterns, you can learn the habit of finding a calm within that becomes more and more unshakeable. From this state of calm and relaxation, your well being starts to emerge with more and more resilience.
Learn to Master your Emotion
Our programs are launching soon. Whether you are dealing with burnout or struggling with stress that is beginning to impact your sleep, join us for a virtual small groups in person, or stay tuned for the launch of our online programs. Based in the intelligence of neuroscience, the practicality of applied knowledge, and the power of deeply recharging your motivation and recalling your internal sense of calm and other positive states, the upcoming wellness programs are designed to empower you to shift your experience of your day to day life. The virtual groups are designed to help working or retired professionals understand how to apply cutting edge research in neuroscience to achieve mastery of attention and more agile adaptation to ongoing changes and challenges.
To the virtual groups, I bring my eight years and more of experience working with clients on achieving clarity by using advanced understanding of emerging brain science. My longer term clients often speak to the collection of skills that they have mastered over the series of sessions, and how these skills provide them with new ease in facing challenges that once caused poor sleep and increased stress. As greater understanding of your conscious and subconscious processes develops, the sessions bring you closer to achieving mastery so that you may be better navigate ongoing challenges. You become the hero in your own journey, you learn ways to recover your happiness, joy, and energy, and you practice tools that increase your ability to adapt to change.
To register for the wellness-oriented virtual small groups, inquire at Boreal Wellness.
Wishing you the best, always,
Dr. Maia