Author: Allen Cheng

Do you feel anxious all the time? Do you have anxiety issues and have trouble coping? Do you want to stop worrying and being anxious?

Here’s a complete guide on understanding your anxiety, what it is, how NOT to manage your anxiety, and what to do.

Do you feel angry all the time? Do you have anger issues and have angry outbursts? Do you want to stop being angry?

Here’s a complete guide on understanding your anger, what it is, how NOT to control your anger, and what to do.

There are a lot of emotions you can feel, and it can be unclear what you’re feeling. Learn what emotion you’re feeling now, with our list of options.

How do emotions change your body and physiology? Your heart rate, your breathing, your eyes, your fists? Learn the physiology of emotions, with plenty of examples.

Are you emotionally self-aware? Do you know what emotions you feel, and why? Learn more about emotional self-awareness from this discussion of emotional intelligence from Daniel Goleman.

Traumatic experiences are hard. Trauma and PTSD can seem insurmountable when you don’t understand your emotional reactions and can’t control them.

Once we’ve learned an emotional response to something, the emotion hardly ever changes or goes away–but we can learn to control that emotion and how we let it affect our actions.

How does trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder change the brain? How does it affect the amygdala and the opioid system?

Emotions are strong impulses that urge us to take immediate action. The root of the word emotion is motere, the Latin verb meaning “to move.” Watch children or animals: they act almost immediately upon getting a feeling, before they know what they’re doing.

What are temperaments? Why does your emotional temperament matter?

Before undersatnding the four temperaments, let’s take a step back and define emotional responses in general. Emotional reactions can feel very different to us, based on how long they last, how intense they are, and how they affect our bodies. 

Have you ever looked back on an emotional response you had and thought, “I don’t know what came over me!” This is what Goleman would refer to as a limbic or emotional hijacking, where the emotional center of your brain takes over without notice. We usually associate it with negative emotions, but it can be positive, too–if you’ve ever laughed uncontrollably and felt like you couldn’t stop, that’s a hijacking.