Emotions, Feelings and Moods

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‘If someone says, "Stop being so emotional!" they're telling you to calm down because your feelings are out of control. When you're emotional, you're feeling lots of feelings, or emotions: happy, sad, afraid, lonely, mad. An emotional speech makes you stand up and cheer. An emotional movie tugs on your heartstrings. The opposite of emotional is logical: logical things have more to do with your head, while emotional things are all about your heart.’ (Source)

Teresa decides to break it down further.

Emotions are chemicals released in response to our interpretation of a specific trigger. It takes our brains about 1/4 second to identify the trigger, and about another 1/4 second to produce the chemicals. By the way, emotion chemicals are released throughout our bodies, not just in our brains, and they form a kind of feedback loop between our brains & bodies. They last for about six seconds – hence the name of our organization. 

Feelings happen as we begin to integrate the emotion, to think about it, to “let it soak in.” In English, we use “feel” for both physical and emotional sensation — we can say we physically feel cold, but we can also emotionally feel cold. This is a clue to the meaning of “feeling,” it’s something we sense. Feelings are more “cognitively saturated” as the emotion chemicals are processed in our brains & bodies. Feelings are often fueled by a mix of emotions, and last for longer than emotions. 

Moods are more generalized. They’re not tied to a specific incident, but a collection of inputs. Mood is heavily influenced by several factors: the environment (weather, lighting, people around us), physiology (what we’ve been eating, how we’ve been exercising, how healthy we are), and finally our mental state (where we’re focusing attention and our current emotions). Moods can last minutes, hours, probably even days.’ (Source)

Let’s continue – The Purpose of Our Emotions

Start at the beginning - Tiffi ends up in the town of Wellspring