#43: Emotions Are Pre-suaded
What was I primed to feel?
My environment pre-suades me towards certain emotions, thus setting the agenda for what I feel. I am conscious of the effects of pre-suasion when I am actively employing it: I go to the library to be pre-suaded to focus. Yet, I need to become aware of the effects of external pre-suasion that is being enacted upon me without my awareness.
When I feel a certain emotion, before jumping to conclusions, I can first ask myself: “What am I being primed for through the things I’ve been exposed to?” I’m exposed to them, not by some master curator, but rather by randomness, chance, and my environment. Factors worth considering are the time of the day, the emotional charge of places/people, unconscious associations, suppressed feelings, etc.
Oftentimes, I would realize that I didn’t feel X out of nowhere and “just because”: there was a stimulus or a sequence of them that enabled me to feel X. The mere awareness of this process becomes the path towards either resolving a negative emotion or learning to enact a positive one intentionally.
*Apologies for the break. I’m striving for and learning to be consistent.