Module 3: Emotions

“We don’t take action to get results. We take action because of how we think we will feel when we have the result.”

How To Feel Emotions
Emotions are felt in the body.
We call them good or bad, positive or negative, comfortable or uncomfortable.
Human beings act in response to how they feel.
Sometimes they act because they feel a comfortable emotion or want to feel a comfortable emotion.
Other time they can because they want to stop feeling an uncomfortable emotion or to avoid feeling an uncomfortable emotion.

There are four ways people handle emotions; they resist, avoid, react, or process emotions.

Resisting emotions leads to stress, anxiety, or desensitization.
Many men have been taught as children to resist their emotions and as adults have a difficult time ‘feeling’ their emotions.
In addition to stress and anxiety, resisting emotions can lead to physical health problems.
Since ‘stress’ is the correlate to several health issues, you can see that the cause is resisting feeling emotions.

Avoiding emotions leads to buffering.
Buffering can lead to addiction.
Buffering is any activity that aims to replace an uncomfortable emotion with a comfortable emotion and creates a ‘net negative’.
Buffering is so common, I have devoted an entire day of teaching to it in Module 4: Health.

Reacting to emotions is ‘to become’ the emotion.
This used to be taught as a useful way to processing emotion.
In truth, it is simply putting an emotion on display and does little to drive intentional action or desired results.
Reacting to emotion looks like yelling and punching in ‘anger’, crying and hiding in ‘sadness’, or flustering and retreating in ‘frustration’.

The only useful way to handle an emotion is to process it through the body.
Remember, an emotion is a chemical and when it is released, it undergoes a chemical reaction.
The physiological change that occurs in the body at a cellular level must run from beginning to end for the emotion to be ‘processed’ by the body.
Resisting, avoiding, and reacting to emotions does not allow the chemical process to run in its entirety.
Processing emotions allows this to happen so that the body can return to homeostasis.
It is the only way to take emotional responsibility.
Emotional responsibility, along with cognitive mastery, is the skill-set and definition of an Alpha Male.

Watch the video below for a further explanation of how emotions are handled by human beings, why these are the four ways we handle our emotional lives, and how to learn to process your emotions to their complete chemical reaction.

https://vimeo.com/331562242/9c28fb71ff

Self-Study Assignment for Module 3, Day 3

In your notebook, do a thought download every day this week. For this week, start with a specific circumstance to do your thought download on. It can be anything that is a circumstance – it must be neutral and objective. It can be what someone said or did, something that happened in the past, or something that is happening now (it’s raining outside or your current body weight). Do a model for two of the thoughts in your download.

In your notebook, every day for the rest of the week do an emotion identification. 

What are you feeling RIGHT NOW?
Where is this feeling in your body?
What is the color of this feeling?
Is this feeling hard or soft?
Is this feeling fast or slow?
How does this feeling make you want to act?
Why are you feeling this?
Name this feeling with an emotion.

In your notebook, answer the questions:

What is the worst feeling you can imagine ever having to feel?
What would that feel like in your body.
Describe the location in your body and exactly how it would show up.
Only include the details about the sensations in your body and nothing about the thoughts that would be going through your head.
Just notice how this feeling would feel in each part of your body.
Name this emotion.

When you think about this feeling and the great lengths you have gone to avoid feeling this way, can you explain why that might be?
A simple vibration is harmless in our body, so why do you do so many things to avoid it that might be harmful to yourself or others?
If you were willing to feel this emotion without fear (resistance, avoidance, or reaction), how might you act differently in your life?
What might you do differently, and why?
What would be your intended results from these new actions?