Stress and Emotion Management 3 - How Does Emotion Develop?

Everyone has their own consciousness. The function of consciousness is that we can think, judge, and feel every day. Emotions are said to be a relatively strong conscious response. To understand how emotions are developed, we must first understand how consciousness works.

Consciousness controls five entrances and two exits. The five entrances are the eyes to see, the ears to hear, the nose to smell, the tongue to taste, and the body to touch and feel. The two exits are speech and body movements.

All the experiences of consciousness are stored in the subconscious mind and form the standard of conscious judgment and response. The accumulation of similar experiences will form the conscious habit and emotional response. For example, I run into a well-known friend and know who he is immediately without really having to think because there are a lot of experiences about interacting with this friend in my subconscious.  According to these experiences, I might like or dislike him, envy or be jealous of him, want to chat with him or just just say a few words and find an excuse to leave. After a few words, I start to feel uncomfortable, thinking that he used to make me upset, and talking with him just makes me angrier.  Everything happened almost automatically in auto pilot mode, and that is the conscious habit response, or the emotion. Afterwards, I feel that my emotion was out of control. But the same thing will happen again next time, because the habit has formed.  If I don’t change the habit, the emotion will always be out of control.

Emotion is the accumulation of similar experiences to form conscious habits. When there is an external stimulus which triggers the conscious habit, the emotion emerges. (to be continued)