Feelings have an odd reputation for something that determines how much money you save, how you navigate the relationship with your neighbor, whether you change jobs, and whether you get a cat. They’re treated as squishy personal matters, embarrassing interruptions to rational thought, or mysterious messages from a soul nobody really understands. You’re told to honor them, transcend them, trust them, and control them at the same time. In all that advice, their original, biological function gets little attention. You’re an animal that needs to move through the world, find what sustains it, and respond to what threatens it. Feelings actually organize that entire business. You can think of the processes behind them as biological algorithms: evolved ways of registering what matters and preparing you to respond. Hunger makes food important, fear makes you register possible threats, affection makes you seeking another’s presence. None requires you to understand the biology behind, you just feel something, and you act accordingly.
Feelings include more than emotions
When I talk about feelings, I mean more than anger, sadness, or joy. Hunger and thirst are feelings, too. So are the unpleasantness of pain and the pleasure of a warm shower. In affective science, these experiences are commonly distinguished as homeostatic, sensory, and emotional feelings. Homeostatic feelings concern your body’s internal needs; sensory feelings concern the pleasant or unpleasant qualities of sensations; emotional feelings accompany systems that organize activities such as exploring, defending yourself, mating, and maintaining relationships. These categories overlap in everyday experience. Hunger can make you irritable; a touch can be physically pleasant and emotionally comforting. What they share is that something feels a particular way to you. The feeling is the subjective experience; and it’s basically about what the current circumstances mean for you and what to do about it.
How feelings get you moving
Information alone doesn’t tell an animal what matters. Your surroundings contain countless things you could investigate, eat, avoid, or ignore. Feelings give those possibilities significance and urgency. Thirst makes finding water worth the effort, fear makes one desire distance from danger, and interest makes you keep reading when you could be doing something else. Much of this works through a push–pull relationship between discomfort and pleasure. An unpleasant state pushes you toward something that might bring relief; an appealing possibility draws you toward anticipated enjoyment. Sometimes the activity itself feels good: playing, exploring, or pursuing something can be rewarding before you obtain any result. You don’t have to begin in misery to want something. Nor does the sequence reliably end in satisfaction. You may choose an ineffective response, face competing wants, or obtain relief that lasts approximately two seconds. Checking your messages can briefly ease uncertainty while strengthening the habit of checking them again. Feelings motivate behavior, and the consequences help teach you what to repeat. Unfortunately, what you learn can be useful in the moment and a pain in the ass over time.
What’s happening in the brain?
The foundations of your basic feelings are located in evolutionarily ancient networks deep in the mammalian brain. These networks coordinate feeling, bodily responses, and tendencies to act. Their activity depends on interacting neural circuits and chemical signaling; there is no single “happiness chemical” responsible for making life enjoyable.
Emotional feelings get particular attention because they organize so much of how we pursue what we want, protect ourselves, and relate to other people. In our work together, we examine how these systems have been shaped by both, evolution and your experience, and how they contribute to the difficulties you keep encountering. Seven core emotional systems have been identified so far: SEEKING, PANIC/GRIEF, FEAR, RAGE, PLAY, LUST, and CARE. They support exploration and pursuit, responses to separation, protection from danger, resistance to restraint or frustration, social play, sexual activity, and nurturing. They provide foundations for emotional life rather and make the exhaustive list of everything you can feel possible.
In this account, inherited emotional capacities interact with learning and reflective thought. You arrive equipped to experience fear; experience helps determine what frightens you; thought lets you reconsider whether the danger is real. Influence advances in both directions. Fear can organize your thoughts around threatening possibilities, while imagining a threatening possibility can intensify fear. Feeling does not require a verbal explanation, and knowing why you feel something does not automatically change it.
Evolution’s purposes and yours
Here is the essential distinction: the evolutionary function of feelings differs from their subjective purpose in your life. Natural selection favored capacities that helped your ancestors reproduce, including surviving, sustaining useful social relationships, finding good mates, and caring for offspring. Feelings made the right activities compelling. Pleasure and distress are means through which behavior could contribute to reproductive success. Evolution has no separate commitment to giving anyone a lovely time.
For you, however, how life feels is itself a central concern. You want to enjoy your existence. Whatever else you value, your work, your relationships, your freedom, the experience of living matters. Successfully transmitting your genes would be a fairly inadequate consolation for decades of misery. And you may have absolutely no interest in transmitting them anyway. There is also the ongoing arithmetic of feeling good now versus feeling good later. Eating two Snickers might begin magnificently and end with you reconsidering several decisions. A demanding gym session can involve discomfort you willingly accept for the satisfaction afterward and the benefits of being fitter. Neither immediate pleasure nor immediate discomfort tells you what the whole experience will be worth.
We have evolved capacities for anticipating consequences and delaying gratification, but those capacities do not amount to a system that reliably maximizes lifelong well-being. Your expectations can be wrong. Immediate rewards can be disproportionately persuasive. Learned responses can persist long after the circumstances that made them useful.
Putting the machinery to work for you
Understanding feelings is the first step. You can then examine what activates your responses, and what happens when you follow them. You can experiment with changing circumstances, developing different responses, and engineer new patterns this way. It’s about informed learning, and repeated practice, as well as sustained work on patterns that resist your conscious intentions. In that sense, we’re hijacking nature’s engine for our own purposes. “Reprogramming” it is an imperfect metaphor, we cannot rewrite ourselves at will, but we can influence how these systems operate in our lives. Your purposes might include more pleasure, less suffering, satisfying relationships, or the freedom to pursue something difficult because you consider it worthwhile. How you feel along the way is part of the outcome.
The next posts will examine each of the seven core emotional systems: what it does, how it feels, and how its activity can help or complicate the life you want.
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