Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
are the words of a famous Chinese proverb. We begin our Rules of Order—our first step toward getting our lives better organized and more in control—by working to better manage our emotions. We are human because of our capacity to feel and to experience an emotional life. But, right from the beginning, emotions can block the entrance to our path to becoming better organized. Emotion and cognition—feeling and thinking—must be integrated in order for us to function at our best. In this chapter, we discuss the remarkable neuroscience of emotional control and how achieving a balance of feeling and thinking is a fundamental prerequisite for the organized brain. Emotions are as varied as we are: the so-called “primary” emotions—anxiety, sadness and anger—are, like the primary colors, basic and inviolable. But just as on the artist’s palette primary colors can be combined into dazzling new creations, so, too, can our emotions meld together to form every hue imaginable. Because of the great range of feelings, some theorists have organized emotions around two set dimensions, each encompassing a broad range of feelings: valence (pleasant to unpleasant) and arousal (calm to excited).
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