Addicted to Emotion

I want you to close your eyes and picture. You’re sitting behind the wheel of your car. Carefully driving along the highway. You’re doing about 120.

Its fast but you’re comfortable. The radio is softly playing a tune you like. The car is smoothly responsive. Everything is absolutely fine.
Suddenly out of nowhere this inconsiderate jerk flies up your tail and sits behind you flashing his lights. He’s so close you can see the veins standing out on his neck as you lip read the curses he is hurling at you. You know if you just had to touch the breaks you would both be dead. Why is he being so inconsiderate? So impatient. Such an...

Who got angry there? I got a bit angry. In fact my anger was tinged with uncertainty having to try and provoke you like that. So who did get angry? Good. My opening achieved its goals. The goal was to get you to feel that anger. I wanted you to be aware of the emotion that you just felt. Now I want you to think. What did you just feel? Yes sure we call it anger. We label it with a word but what intrinsically was happening inside of you that caused you to have a feeling that we associate with the word anger?

What was happening inside of you was that your brain interpreted an outside stimulus, it made a value judgment of that stimulus according to past preconceptions and then it reacted to that judgment. The precepts that you hold are those that you label “What best serves me.” In receiving any information you immediately judge if it serves you or not. According to the answers given in that evaluation your brain reacts by inducing an emotion in you.

This emotion aids you in deciding how to physically react to the external stimulus. What I was doing in my opening was making sounds. Sounds which we have accepted as associations with concepts. We all agree that the sound “agree” means to agree. Do you agree?
So in no way could my opening be seen as placing you in any physical danger. Why then did you brain react with the survival instinct of the production of anger? The production of a chemical that floods the entire system and prepares one to react to the physical effect that is causing the emotion.
What I want to look at is the actual chemical process that has caused you to feel what you felt.

Your brain made an evaluation which set off the production of the relevant chemical compound to induce the necessary emotion. This then is flooded through your entire system via your nerves and synovial fluid. It reaches every cell in your body and docks on a receptor site of that cell. The cell absorbs the chemical and reacts to it.
In the example of anger. The anger chemical is released throughout the entire body. This then triggers the adrenal glands to produce excessive amounts of adrenaline which causes the muscles to tighten in anticipation of the fight or flight response and all non essential functions like digestion to stop in order to direct all energy to the muscle system.

What does this mean to us? When a cell divides, in the production of new cells, if the parent cell was constantly exposed to a specific type of chemical it will produce more receptor sites for that chemical when it divides. Hence the new daughter cell would have more receptor sites for anger, in our example, than the previous generation of parent cells. Unfortunately there is limited space on the outside wall of a cell and so producing more “anger” receptor sites means the loss of other receptors for other chemicals, nutrients and waste disposal. Elastin, which keeps the skin supple, is a protein. When you cannot absorb as much elastin as before, because of reducti

on in receptor sites for elastin, your skin ages.

This leads us to an interesting outcome. Any organic system that is put under repeated effects adapts to compensate for those effects. Thus even a cell can build up a tolerance toward a specific chemical, which means that to get the same effect as before the cell will need more of the chemical. As in our example, if you are angry often your cells develop a tolerance for the anger chemical and so more of it has to be produced to get the same result. This leads to more receptor sites which raises the tolerance levels, which leads to more receptor sites. And the circle is vicious and complete.

Any addiction to a chemical leads to dependency on that chemical to experience the similar state. This dependency changes and impinges on the body on a cellular level. So what do we do? Do we live our lives as emotionless automatons? Not likely. One way to avoid over dependence on a chemical rush is to learn to become detached from results. This does not mean lack of preference for a specific outcome it simply means calm and rational acceptance of whatever circumstance has resulted.

So politely change lanes. Allow that driver to disappear into the distance. Roll down the window. Feel the wind in your hair. Turn the radio slightly up. And breathe.