Emotions- everyone has them, yet no one understands them. Appreciate the content as always, this type of work isn't lauded enough. Just to let you guys know, there's a bad audio cut around 1:56-1:57 where one of the words gets cut off.
Thinking about the reframing of emotions, I once was at a recital, waiting my turn to perform. I felt a bit nervous and I watched all the kids playing before me, knowing that I would be judged much less kindly than all the little kids if I messed up. But I made a conscious choice to believe the pounding heart was excitement, not nervousness, and I sat there focusing on how excited I was to get so sing this song I loved so much. I get up there and started singing, and I didn’t feel nervous at all. And suddenly the music stopped. The WiFi had failed and interrupted the streaming video. I stopped, and they told me they couldn’t fix it, so I just shrugged and resumed where I’d left off, a cappella. And I still wasn’t nervous. I can’t explain it. But maybe, just maybe, the conscious choice to reframe my physiological symptoms as excitement helped calm me and allowed me to not just not get nervous when the music stopped, but to stay on tune without the music to keep me there! (Because if I’d gone flat, my teacher and all the other musicians there would have known!)
“How do you feel about it?” I see what you did there! I am a bit biased toward the theory of Candice Pert in Molecules of Emotion. Emotions happen regardless of cognition, although cognition can influence emotions once it develops, and can help to change them. But emotions are very much a physiological phenomenon and are often completely outside of our control. For instance, I have been nervous singing up front of people and not nervous at all, and I cannot identify what makes the difference, except exposure, just singing more. For a while, there was a definite correlation between how much I had practiced and how nervous I was (a positive correlation, not a negative one). It was super frustrating. But it only lasted a few months, thankfully!
