The balance of emotions. Each and every one of us experience many emotions throughout a typical day. Research finds that an average person will feel more than twenty distinct emotion groups during the day.
Each emotion will contribute to your mood. For example, for most people feeling love will contribute to a good mood.
For most people feeling anxiety will contribute to a bad mood.
We associate a good mood as being a contribution to happiness and a bad mood to sadness.
Most people will feel slightly more positive emotions than negative emotions over the day. This will lead to a neutral emotional state or a slightly happy emotional state.
Understanding this balance is important for you to understand your happiness.
Once you have this knowledge, you can start to influence your emotions to so that the outcome is more in the direction of happiness rather than sadness.
I am now going to illustrate this balance by showing a picture. I want you to imagine two buckets. The blue bucket will be used to hold emotions that contribute to you being sad.
Emotions such as anger, disappointment, hate and panic we will place in the blue bucket.
The yellow bucket will be used to hold emotions that contribute to your happiness. These emotions could be peace, creativity, excitement and joy.
On a typical day the two buckets will be of equal weight. Neither bucket is heavier than the other. They are in balance.
When you feel more emotions that contribute to sadness the blue bucket is heavier.
When you feel more emotions that contribute to happiness, the yellow bucket is heavier.
It is this balance of your emotions that determines your happiness. Every day you will experience a different balance. One day you will be in a good mood. On another day, you will be in a bad mood. This is normal. Every person experiences this fluctuation. What is important, is that the average balance favours the side of happiness.
If you measure your balance over a week or month, you would want your balance to be more on the side of happiness.
The next question is: can you change the balance.
The answer is yes. The first step is to understand your emotions. To have knowledge of your emotions and to figure out how your emotions affect your happiness.
The exercises on our program are designed to assist you in understanding your emotions.
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