Emotions are Evolutions Executioners…and So Much More

Photo by Domingo

So, how are you feeling? This has to be one of the most important questions you could ask yourself because, as you can FEEL—our emotions significantly impact our lives.

Emotions can create some significant problems in our lives, specifically within our relationships, but paradoxically, they can also help us solve them by understanding their origins.

There are still ongoing debates about free will vs. determinism and whether we really have a choice, but we can all agree on two things. First, we do have some agency over the way we behave, and second, if we are not behaving in a way that allows us to improve our relationships, we have the ability to change through not-so-pleasant self-investigation and a life of self-awareness.

Moreover, we can have the power to create the life we want—a life with balance, control over our choices, and a good relationship with ourselves and others.

But let's be clear—emotions can sometimes sideline all of our best intentions.

Emotions and their chemical messengers are powerful beyond what most realize. How powerful? Well, they can be the catalyst to call us to action when decisiveness is required, and they can also have us compel us to act in shameful ways that we can regret for a lifetime.

Robert Wright, an evolutionary biologist, wrote in his book The Moral Animal a simple explanation of our emotions, stating, “Emotions are just evolution’s executioners,” but this doesn’t make them any less impactful on our day-to-day life and how it feels to be you.

For those of you who possess higher levels of consciousness, spiritual teacher and author Eckhart Tolle describes emotions in the following way:

“The deeper emotions are not really emotions at all, but states of Being. Emotions exist within the realm of opposites, while states of Being may be obscured but have no opposite. They emanate from within you as the love, joy, and peace that are aspects of your true nature.”

Again, this doesn’t make emotions any easier to understand and manage.

So the next question: how in touch with how you feel? Brené Brown shares valuable insights in her video, “The Power of Vulnerability,” on YouTube. She points out that in North America, we often numb our emotions. We distract ourselves with food, binge-watching TV, and using drugs and alcohol, suggesting that we are avoiding our feelings instead of dealing with them.

This emotional shutdown is concerning because expressing our feelings is key to being human. We are meant to feel, share, and connect, not repress, hide, and avoid. Repressing, hiding, and avoiding is the definition of an unnecessary life of needless suffering that will end with many regrets.

When we hide our emotions, we may try to regain agency by under or over-responding or we may attempt to soothe ourselves from triggering emotional energy in unhealthy ways, like turning to food or mind-altering substances for comfort.

At the same time, food can give us energy, which our physiology demands after taking the urgent message from our psychology; as we all know, overeating, for most of us, will create its own problems. Excess energy doesn’t help us; it builds up in our bodies and literally and metaphorically weighs us down.

For some of us, this may manifest in behaviours like heading to the fridge to overeat and numb our feelings. In my case, at the most challenging part of my life, I turned to drugs and alcohol to numb my emotional pain, much of which was subconscious and not in my awareness, hence the importance of self-awareness. While these substances can be very effective at dulling feelings, as you can imagine, they bring along a host of other problems.

Let’s explore where emotions originate; putting aside the biology and genetics components, we will start with our values and beliefs, which are at the core.

This is closely tied to our attitudes and actions. They are all intertwined. Whatever we’re thinking tends to be accompanied by an emotion. For example, if we’re thinking about how someone has more than we do and we desire what they have, it can evoke feelings of envy.

Lacking something — that intense craving or desire — generates the corresponding emotions tied to those thoughts.

You can see how these concepts are interrelated, and it all goes back to the core of it. Everything starts with values and beliefs — the foundation for how we act and behave.

Understanding that your behaviour is closely linked to your beliefs is essential. Therefore, it’s important to identify which beliefs serve you and which don’t, which requires a thorough self-investigation, guided or unguided, but necessary nevertheless.

Think back throughout your life: have you ever changed your beliefs? Perhaps your parents instilled certain beliefs in you, and over time, those beliefs have evolved — maybe even to the opposite of what you were taught as a child. Now, as a parent, you may be instilling different values in your children. It is indeed possible to make these changes.

Before my divorce, I couldn’t believe I would ever be a divorcee and have my family separated. I fought against this idea tooth and nail until I realized that I needed to surrender to reality. My resistance only enriched the lawyers and made me miserable. I was plagued by chronic and unmanageable feelings of anger and resentment, which held me captive and caused me to act irrationally and unproductively. I had to adopt a new belief that would allow me to move forward into a new family dynamic, which, interestingly enough, I believe turned out to be beneficial for everyone, including our children.

Values play a significant role in shaping the type and intensity of our emotions. For instance, when we prioritize one behaviour over another, this influences our actions, even in triggering situations.

For instance, I value presenting myself to my children as someone who is strong and in control of his emotions, even though I have lost my composure on many occasions when they weren’t around. Because I prioritize maintaining my composure in front of my children, I can better regulate my emotions, even in stressful situations. My daughter has said to me several times, “I’ve never seen you mad,” which I then gently look at her and smile—no comment.

Ultimately, our emotions are interconnected and, to a certain extent, directed. They start with our values and beliefs, which shape our thoughts and corresponding feelings. These, in turn, influence our behaviours and how we interact with the world. These interactions affect how others perceive us and our overall success in life—which can be gauged by our connections to other human beings. It all amounts to how we show up in the world and how it feels to be us.

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All INCLUSIVE DIET—Finding Balance

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