It is well known to physicians that as our body ages and physical stamina decreases,

is there a pararell decrease in the emotional reserve so that quite commonly we all

wind up becoming cantankerous, irritable old men and women, and our children and grandchildren 

may start keeping distance from us.

Typically when adult children bring their elderly parents often on wheelchair or with a walker or cane

and report to their family doctors that their father or mother is becoming so irritable and complaining that

it is hard for them to deal with. Typically the physician would say that likely your father or mother must be

depressed and anxious. The children would quickly agree with the doctor and ask if any antidepressant or

tranquilzer may be indicated. Next thing you know they will convince the patient to try the antidepressant or

tranquilizer or both.

As I am approaching ever closer to the ages of these patients I used to try to help, I have had enough personal

experiences where I could have easily made a good use of those pills although so far I have handled myself

amicably without them.

So in sum, mastering our emotions as our body strength and health decline is certainly an uphill battle;

as a consequence, the sooner we learn more about dealing with it, the better I believe in lessening 

not only the suffering but also the stress on the part of our loved ones.

Emotion

Emotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, prompting automatic reactive behavior that has been adapted through evolution as a survival mechanism to meet a survival need.

Linda Davidoff defines emotion as a feeling that is expressed through physiological functions such as facial expressions, faster heartbeat, and behaviors such as aggression, crying, or covering the face with hands.

Based on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain.

Defined as such, these emotional states are specific manifestations of non-verbally expressed feelings of agreement, amusement, anger, certainty, control, disagreement, disgust, disliking, embarrassment, fear, guilt, happiness, hate, interest, liking, love, sadness, shame, surprise, and uncertainty.

If distinguished from reactive responses of reptiles, emotions would then be mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (e.g., dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures.

In mammals, primates, and human beings, feelings are displayed as emotion cues.

For example, the human emotion of love is proposed to have evolved from paleocircuits of the mammalian brain (specifically, modules of the cingulated gyrus) designed for the care, feeding, and grooming of offspring.

Note:   The above text is excerpted from the Wikipedia article "Emotion", which has been released under the GNU Free Documentation License.

For more information, see the following related content on ScienceDaily:

https://nam02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Ffuture%2Fstory%2F20171012-how-emotions-can-trick-your-mind-and-body&data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca84f4575bb404c4288b908d67fe52ea0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636837019631485328&sdata=8QOo8E3GeMW2xQauh6gxVK%2ByAHNnJuu0M011njjKUkQ%3D&reserved=0
 

The ideas in this story  seem to make some good sense and may well be very useful for us.

kind of agree with Barrett's observations not only from the standpoint of my personal experiences but also

as a treating physician dealing with countless patients over 40 years.

One best example would be diagnosing brain tumor of some sort on a patient admitted to psychiatry ward.

In other words, the causes of emotional upsets are often based upon physical or physiological problems so that

we have to be careful in making standard diagnoses of major or minor depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, etc.

Talking about the exercise being good for stabilizing your emotion, I'd like to quote a study out of Japan

decades ago that concluded that playing golf saved many times more people's emotional problems 

than what all the psychiatrists or doctors in the world are doing in their offices.

I would often mention this study whenever I had a chance to discuss on the subject matter.

Counselling 101: Managing your Body Budget

  By  adminSeptember 7, 2018Anxiety, Thriving, Wellness

Lisa Feldman Barret in her new book How Emotions are Made: the Secret Life of the Brain posits that emotions are not simply reactions to things that happen to us, but emotions are constructed by how we make sense of our sensations, and by how we make predictions based on our past experiences and understandings.  Essentially, we are the architects of our emotions and have the capacity to master our emotions or “construct” our lives differently.

One important feature Barret talks about is “body budget.”  Mastering emotion begins with having a balance “body budget.”  Our body budget is our body/mind/brain capacity to cope.  Building a healthy body budget includes common sense practices such as eating well, maintaining a healthy weight and fitness level and taking time for relaxation.  She suggests helpful activities such as massage, yoga, reading or time spent in nature.  Time spent outside of our ruminations and thoughts helps us maintain a healthy body budget.  Meditation can be very helpful as a chance to experience and observe emotion, accept without judgment, and release.  Reading can be a mental vacation transporting us to other times and places.  A powerful body budget booster is gratitude.  Gratitude is known to increase levels of happiness and well-being.  Additionally, Barret points to positive social interactions and freely giving to others all as body budget enhancers.

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a University Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University,^[1] where she focuses on the study of emotion.^[2] She is a director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory. Along with James Russell, she is the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Emotion Review.^[3]

Contents

EducationEdit

Barrett was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1963. Barrett obtained her Bachelor of Science in Psychology with Honors at the University of Toronto. Barrett completed a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, and a Clinical Internship at the University of Manitoba Medical School.

Professional historyEdit

Study of human emotionsEdit

At the beginning of her career, Dr. Barrett's research focused on the structure of affect, having developed experience-sampling methods^[4]and open-source software to study emotional experience. Dr. Barrett and members at IASL study the nature of emotion broadly from social-psychological, psychophysiological, cognitive science, and neuroscience perspectives, and take inspiration from anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. They also explore the role of emotion in vision and other psychological phenomena.

In 1996 she joined the Psychology Faculty at Boston College. Before that she was an Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University.

Her research has focused on the main issues in the science of emotions such as: 

• What are the basic building blocks of emotional life?
• Why is it that people are able to quickly and effortlessly perceive anger, sadness, fear in themselves and in others, yet scientists have been unable to specify a set of clear criteria for empirically identifying these emotional events?
• What roles do language and conceptual knowledge play in emotion perception?
• Are there really differences between the emotional lives of men and women?

Theory of constructed emotionEdit

During her graduate training, Barrett developed the initial insights for her current theory of constructed emotion.

She highlights differences in emotions between different cultures, and says that emotions "are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and upbringing, which provide that environment."^{[5][6](from Internet)}

Part of my daily enjoyment is learning something outside my box

by exploring a subject that is vital to our daily living challenges 

with the help of google search.

Certainly this subject on our emotional aspect of our life is a good example 

that always arouses a great interest in me desiring to learn more about it.

I felt like I learned something new from this lady(Lisa Feldman Barrett) 

by reviewing her life time study on emotion.

Here's a story from The New York Times that I thought you'd find interesting:

People who have more nuanced views of their emotions — indignation versus general misery, say — are healthier, studies find.

Read More...

Get The New York Times on your mobile device