When it comes to emotions online, people often talk about emotional management. I'm not in a hurry to talk about management. I haven't even figured out what emotions are, so what is there to manage?
When I draw, I definitely have emotions and feelings. Every stroke carries emotions and feelings until the painting is finished. If you look at my paintings, you might guess that the person who painted them probably had a bad mood, at least not a good one. Why would you make such a judgment? Because the painting gives you a bad feeling, and then you make a judgment that the author's mood is also bad. But even if the author's mood is bad, you won't see any bad emotions in his paintings unless he makes you look ugly.
I have been drawing for a long time and have experienced many things before realizing that emotions and feelings are different and should not be confused.
Feelings can be physical or psychological. People often describe good emotions with "good feelings," such as happiness, joy, excitement, and contentment... in short, no more than two kinds, physical comfort and psychological comfort.
If we don't use these good feelings to describe emotions, how do we define "good emotions"?
Many people may not understand how feelings and emotions can be separated. This is because if the two are mixed together, people will first assume that feelings are the driving force behind actions, and emotions are just a side effect. For example, if someone insults me, I will hit him back. He insulted me and made me feel bad, and this bad feeling is the driving force behind my retaliation. The implication is that I didn't hit him on my own initiative, he made me feel bad, I am passive, I have no choice but to fight back.
But in reality, there are too many counterexamples, too many people who won't fight back when insulted, who won't insult back but just laugh it off. Can they not have feelings? This means that feelings are not the driving force behind actions. Feelings are just a state of being affected by others' behavior, putting me in a bad state, and then I become angry. It is the anger that drives me to hit back.
If feelings and emotions are mixed together, it is impossible to judge what happened between experiencing feelings and taking action. This will cause people to focus only on changing their feelings and not being able to control their behavior. In fact, besides behavior, the factors that affect feelings include the environment, the objects of sensory contact, and the physiological state at that time. Focusing only on feelings and ignoring emotions and behavior is like trying to stop boiling water with a ladle.
Therefore, we need to eliminate feelings to understand what emotions are.
Bad emotions are easier to understand, and the most common one is anger. Anger often makes people unaware of what they have done, but even so, if you measure their blood pressure at that time, it will definitely be higher than usual. The increase in blood pressure means that there has been a change compared to when they are not angry. Therefore, bad emotions are a force that drives changes and behaviors.
The question is, if we set aside feelings, what is good emotion? Without feelings, bad emotions can make blood pressure rise, cause illness, or even death, but good emotions will only keep blood pressure normal and not "more normal." A happy person can become even happier, but they will never become "more normal."
This is a very difficult point to understand: good emotions are not the driving force behind changes. Good emotions are a capacity to bear, representing how much bad emotions a person can bear. For example, if a rope breaks when hanging 100 kilograms, but an iron chain can hold 100 kilograms without any problem, we would say that the iron chain is better than the rope.
Two employees are called into the office by their boss and scolded. They are scolded by the same person with the same words. One will fight back, and the other will remain silent. In the same situation with the same feelings, different people will have different emotions. This is a fact that needs no further explanation. It is mentioned here to better define what good emotions are.
So, let's continue the analysis with some basic math knowledge.
If we set the range from -9 to -1 to represent the level of bad emotions, -9 is the worst emotion, and 0 represents calmness. -1 to 0 is a relatively weak form of bad emotion, let's call it negative emotion for now.
You will find that some people's level of bad emotions never reaches -9, at most it can only reach -5. So we can say that -5 is the limit of their capacity to bear bad emotions, and the distance from -5 to -9 is their level of good emotions, which is 4.
In other words, a person with a level 4 of good emotions, even if the end of the world comes, their emotions will never be worse than -5.
Two points need to be noted here. First, the person's level of bad emotions may change with their feelings, but the level of good emotions remains 4. This is like lung capacity, which is 5000 milliliters, but you can't always breathe in 5000 milliliters. Therefore, good emotions are actually a capacity to bear, the ability to bear bad emotions.
Second, this capacity to bear bad emotions can also change. It is like lung capacity, which can be trained and improved.