There are countless different theories on emotions and how many baseline emotions humans have. One of the most prominent is Robert Plutchik's wheel of emotions that identifies eight basic emotions; joy, sadness, trust, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation. More recent studies from Glasgow have narrowed this down further to only four irreducible emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear.
Where wired to look out for trouble. That's how we've survived this far. Out of the four irreducible emotions three would be classified as "negative"; sadness, anger and fear. Whereas happiness is the light energy one. Sadness, anger and fear will all visit us from time to time during the course of our lifetime, we don't need to feed them. We need to feed happiness though, some say we even have to work for it.
It's not a race or a competition, still, we need to make conscious choices of where we want to wander when we're at baseline in our lives, when things just move along. How do you feed your happiness? Do you know what actions, people and circumstances help you get there more often? We don't need to run from the uncomfortable emotions, but we certainly don't need to chase them either, they always find us.
I realize more and more that what I actually work with is mental training. In myself and in my clients. We program the brain to track and look for happiness, in the small things in life. Maybe I can help you too?
With all my love,
Helena
