One of the things that we talk about at Good Therapy SF as well with our clients are the five primary emotions.
To list them, the five primary emotions are Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust.
And why is it good to know what these five primary emotions are? The more we know about our emotions, the more we can regulate them and have more control over how these emotions affect us as opposed to letting the emotions control us instead. So we always want to be in the driver’s seat.
Starting with the first emotion, Joy, it’s obviously an emotion we all enjoy experiencing. I think the feature that I tell my clients most about joy is to make sure that they’re not expecting to feel joy all the time. I try to tell people that joy is more fortunate output that comes from having more helpful or useful habits or thoughts throughout the day and then we get to experience joy as a result of that. But try not to think or hope that joy will be the baseline emotion we experience throughout the day. That’s actually ironically going to take away from your joy.
The second emotion is Sadness. So a way to think about sadness really is that sadness ultimately is about the loss of something.
So sometimes that loss of something is something specific or concrete. You move, or unfortunately someone in your life passes away. But more often than not, sadness really is about this ideal of something that we have in our mind that doesn’t happen, and we have to let go of the ideal that we have in our mind, and when that happens, we end up being sad as a result.
And again, the more you know about this emotion, the more control you ultimately feel around it.
The third emotion is Fear. So obviously fear is important because it keeps us safe and it has a very strong evolutionary benefit to it. However, often the fear feeling will pop up in unhelpful ways.
So one way to gain control of fear is to recognize that often it occurs because we are afraid that something bad is going to happen right now or in the future. And not only something bad going to happen, but we actually won’t be able to cope or handle the situation. As a result, we develop this fear or anxious response.
The fourth emotion. Anger, right? So why do we feel angry? It obviously has a strong evolutionary benefit to it. But when it comes to anger, again, there are ways in which it’s useful and ways in which it’s not useful. So a useful way to work with anger is to recognize that often it occurs because we have a type of expectation in the moment that we feel this other person intentionally violated.
And this kind of happens unconsciously, but we get anger because we have an expectation in the moment that we think this other person intentionally violated. And then that brings up the feeling of anger. And it’s important to note too, in some studies that the feeling of anger is actually tied into our dopamine reward system.
So it feels good to stay angry. And that’s often why we can ruminate in our minds about how this person wronged us in some way. We feel very justified or entitled to our perspective because it’s likely tying into that dopamine reward system. So knowing this part about anger can help you be more mindful and observe that process.
So that again, you can be in control of the emotion as opposed to the anger emotion being in control of you.
And then the last emotion in the five emotions that we’re born with is Disgust. And the feeling of disgust really has a strong evolutionary benefit. If you think back to when we were more in a tribal society or even earlier before that, it’s important for infants to know when food is going to be rotten or spoiled or essentially unhealthy for us to ingest.
So that’s really what we think the origin of disgust comes from. But all for all, those are the five primary emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger, and Disgust and why they’re useful for us.
And if you’re interested in more information like this, please reach out to us at GoodTherapySF.com
Take care.
