As you work through the difficult emotions in your life, you will feel better about the challenges you face. While facing your negative emotions as they arise will make you feel better, there is a faster way to radically improve your mood. If you examine the background emotions you have all the time, you can make tremendous progress towards feeling better.
The Third Insight to Feeling Better is knowing that at any moment, you are feeling many different emotions. Right when you wake up, you begin to feel a default set of emotions. This default set of emotions is called the Emotional Base State or base state for short.
You may be wondering how you can possibly be feeling many emotions when you feel “normal.” The answer lies in the fact that we get used to persistent stimuli. When you first feel an emotion, you notice it. But, if that emotion stays around for a while, you will pay less and less attention to it. Eventually, you will no longer notice the emotion at all. This doesn’t mean that the emotion isn’t there, it just means that the emotion has become part of your emotional base state.
The emotions in your base state are in a large part responsible for you feeling happy or unhappy. This means that if you can identify and release the negative emotions in your base state, you can become happier all the time. This is how to feel better. Improving your base state will transform your life.
But because your base state feels natural to you, it takes a little extra effort to identify the emotions making it up. That’s what this article is about. I will show you how to reconnect with your base state and identify your default emotions.
Once you identify a base state emotion, you can apply any of the other techniques for releasing emotions to the base emotion. When you let go of that base emotion, you will feel lighter, feel happier, and have more energy. The problems that your negative emotion was causing will begin to resolve.
Now let’s learn how to see the emotions in your base state. When you are able to feel your base state, you will begin to understand yourself more deeply. It’s very powerful to be able to realize what your “normal” state really is and which emotions are normal to you.
To find and connect with your base state:
- Find a time when you feel “normal.” This may be a weekend morning when you have nothing to do. Try to relax into the moment.
- Begin to notice the physical sensation of your body. Then feel for stress or muscle tension. See if any of the sensations are emotional feelings.
- Focus on feeling your whole body now. Concentrate and then amplify your feelings tenfold. Amplify your feelings 100-fold. Allow yourself to experience the feelings you carry with you all the time.
- Continue amplifying your feelings. Wait for a single emotion to jump out at you.
- When an emotion jumps out at you, zoom in on it. Focus on feeling just that emotion.
- Where is the emotion in your body? What color or adjectives describe the emotion? What is the intensity of the emotion on a 1 to 10 scale?
- Can you give the emotion a name?
Congratulations! You have discovered a base state emotion! Repeat the above exercise to find more emotions to work on.
Your background emotions are powerfully shaping your life. Until you notice them, you will not be able to create the life you want. When you release one of these background emotions, you will feel better permanently. This is the real power of emotional understanding. Improving your base state improves every moment of your life.
Check out my post on improving your base state here!
