0.8 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts  (Page 32/89)

Humans have many different emotional states, or you could call them moods, ways of behaving, ways of thinking, ways of feeling, etc. All the different ways that people can feel and think are obviously going to be connected to one another. A simple way to think about it would just be to say that if you are stressed then you might want to relax later on, however that is missing the complicated emotional subtlety involved. There are emotional states, ways and levels of feeling, ways and levels of thinking, and these different things are going to play a role when you are relaxing or whatever it is you are doing. Your feelings, behavior and thoughts are going to be under the influence of more subtle tones of feeling and thought that are related to the previous things you have done and your other emotional states when you are doing other things.

I am just using the different things people do so I can describe what a different emotional state is like. Different emotional states are obvious if you consider the two most extreme examples - a high stress state and a relaxed state. However there must be many many more ways of feeling that people can experience. For instance people probably experience many feelings, sets of feelings, modes, moods, etc during an activity. I am suggesting that people have different ways of 'being' whereby their feelings and thoughts are influenced by their mood, their emotional state, whatever you want to call it.

My theory is that for a certain period of time people are influenced by certain ways of being. So say someone is doing any activity - during this activity they might change modes and for a few seconds or a few minutes feel more like the activity is like another activity that they have done. Or maybe they just adopt a different way of feeling for that activity that they are doing (feel differently about it in some way).

So there are many different layers of feeling, ways of feeling, modes people can go into where they feel differently for a certain period of time, or ways in which their thinking and feeling interact to help them have a unique experience that is dynamic, shifting, deep and complex.

Emotion is influenced by thoughts, moods, experience, previous activities, your environment, your physical condition - and there a levels of emotion and thought that make this experience much more complex. When one can adopt a set of feelings for one activity for a few seconds or minutes during a not related activity, it makes you wonder just how complex emotional and intellectual experience is.

Life occurs in sharp spikes

Life occurs during the brief periods of time when people are actually paying attention, in spikes.

People need to pay attention to things in order to keep their minds alive and active. They need to pay attention to little things all the time. That is why spikes occur, when people refocus their attention on little things over and over it occurs as a spike, because the new object needs to be processed as a whole and this processing takes energy in the form of a “spike”.