Core Emotion: SEEKING

If you’ve spent time with any of my writings, whether a blog post, an Instagram story, or a quietly reflective essay, you already know this: emotions are not just decorative flourishes. They are the soil from which your entire life grows. And if this is your first visit, welcome. You’re about to discover that your emotions have been shaping your days like an old-fashined gardener tending a vast and intricate landscape. Just like a garden doesn’t cultivate itself but follows patterns laid down by the seasons and soil, you are guided by an evolutionary script that was written long before there were offices, grocery stores, or self-improvement workshops. This ancient code lives deep within the root systems of your mind, in the most timeworn layers of your neural landscape.

There, nestled like the roots of a tree, lies the brainstem, one of the oldest parts of your neural architecture. It doesn’t busy itself with lofty reflections or future plans; its mission is to keep you alive. Here, among other guards of your living being, like the breathing and eating governor, you’ll find your core emotional networks. Seven of them, to our current knowledge, were laid into your cradle, an inheritance you were born with. These are the seedlings from which your emotional life sprung. As you grew, early experiences begun to shape your fields of feelings, cultivating mid-level emotional networks that branch and intertwine. By adulthood, the core and mid-level systems work alongside the higher, more elaborate structures of the mind, reason and discipline for example. But they are all root in your emotional core.

Among other core emotions, one stands particulary apart: the SEEKING system. The SEEKING emotion acts like the vital water channels, ensuring your entire being to thrive. Let's take a closer look at it.

The SEEKING Network: Your Inner Compass for Growth

The SEEKING system is your internal cheerleader, your instigator for discovering new opportunities, rewards, and experiences. Whether it’s brainstorming about a new project, looking for a new course, or searching for that final piece of dark chocolate in the fridge, it sparks excitement and gets you our of the bed in the morning. It spans from the ancient root structures of your mind to the highest branches of your thought. It drives every pursuit, and supplies other emotions with initiatives, ideas, and energy. It's the universal emotion of moving, and it doens't even care so much if it's forward or backward. 

When active, it inspires engagement, curiosity, and a readiness to embrace life: taking on new challenges, exploring ideas, and investing in projects that stretch your potential. When overgrown, it can become restless, scattering your energy across countless pursuits, leaving you overcommitted and exhausted. At its most unruly, it fuels manic striving, chasing ambitions without pause for rest. When undernourished, it can leave you listless, like a parched patch waiting for rain: unmotivated, drained, and unable to find the spark to move ahead. In this state, life feels flat and colorless, like a neglected flowerbed.

Your Daily SEEKING Rituals: The Rhythm of Renewal

The buzzing of the SEEKING web is expressed with searching, wanting, desiring, being interested, longing, motivation, enthusiasm, anticipation, and excitement. On a behavioral level, it manifests as seeking, exploring, and trying things out.  SEEKING emotions maintain your curiosity and interest on all levels, from everyday grocery shopping and browsing TV channels or the internet to the most complex intellectual endeavors and problem-solving.  Every time you search, explore, or investigate something, your SEEKING web fires up and gives you a dopamine treat. It’s the reason you:

• Check your phone as soon as you wake up, hoping for news that might change the shape of your day.
• Wander the kitchen, opening the fridge again and again as though a different outcome might await you.
• Scroll social media in search of that one post that promises a sudden sense of connection or insight.
• Watch documentaries on topics that, only yesterday, you didn’t know you cared about.

The SEEKING web doesn’t draw its energy from having something but from the process of longing, discovering, and pursuing. This is why it’s not the victory that keeps you invested but the possibility of what lies ahead. The neurotransmitter dopamine feeds this system, releasing its motivating energy each time you step into the unknown—whether exploring a new career path or reimagining the direction of your life.

SEEKING vs. Depression: When the Piano Falls Silent

A shutdown of the SEEKING web is one of the two core mechanisms of depression. When the SEEKING energy fades, life loses its spark, its tempo, and its momentum. Your mind feels like a forgotten piano in a dimly lit room, keys untouched, strings quiet, the air heavy with stillness. Instead of looking for opportunities, solutions, or new experiences, your mind withdraws, letting the notes fall silent. You feel tired, discouraged, demoralized, apathetic, and unmotivated. The sensation is deeply uncomfortable, but it’s a biological safeguard. When dopamine levels deplete from sustained activation, the mind naturally steps back to prevent exhaustion and preserve energy. The SEEKING shutdown helps you conserve strength and avoid the dangers of burnout, giving your system time to restore balance before resuming the melody of life.

The disengagement of the SEEKING web is asociated with the empty kind of depression as oposed to the pain kind of depression. They often go hand in hand, but if you look closer, pain depression is the kind when you lose someone or something essential, like a relationship, a role, or a dream. It too, is a biological safeguard. Your mind perceives loss as a threat to survival. In earlier times, losing a key source or connection might have meant losing protection, resources, or a safe place. Today you are always surrounded by people and conveniences, but your mind’s ancient script still responds. It pulls back, conserving energy, and waits for the right conditions to play again. Before that, your brain might have fought to restore something that's gone missing. The pain kind of depression is asociated with the PANIC/GRIEF network. It's a two-pased emotional response.

In the initial phase, the SEEKING and PANIC/GRIEF networks might work together in a desperate duet: searching for solutions, trying to get what or who you lost back, replaying every possible scenario where things could have gone differently. But when the loss is irreversible, the SEEKING web shuts down. It’s safer to stop searching and conserve energy. This is where the GRIEF system takes over, like hitting a psychological safe mode. In evolutionary terms, curling up in a ball and doing nothing for a while makes sense. If you were lost, isolated, or separated in the wilderness, staying put increased the chance that help might find you. In your own life, this retreat is your mind’s way of saying: hold steady, conserve your energy. The world is unpredictable. Listen and wait.

So, when grief silences your SEEKING emotions and leaves you empty, that stillness is part of your nature’s composition. It’s a protective pause, a time to gather strength until the music of life feels safe to play again.

Healing SEEKING: Can We Tune the System?

Science is getting creative with depression treatments, and one of the most promising approaches is deep brain stimulation (DBS), essentially a way to retune your SEEKING web. Electrodes are placed in specific areas of the brain to restore motivation and energy, like a piano tuner adjusting the strings to bring the music back to life. But DBS isn’t just a brute-force fix anymore. Recent developments have taken it to a more refined level:

• Personalized DBS: Scientists are now mapping individual brain activity to tailor the stimulation to each person, like a pianist adjusting touch and tempo to match the piece being played.
• Biomarkers for Recovery: Researchers are identifying subtle signals that mark the brain’s readiness to resume its song, allowing stimulation to be fine-tuned in real time—no more playing blindly.
• Smarter Stimulation Devices: The newest DBS devices act like skilled musicians, adapting dynamically to the mind’s rhythms, ensuring the SEEKING system stays balanced—neither too subdued nor too intense.

And there’s more: non-invasive brain stimulation techniques are also showing promise. Imagine a device that lets you bring your SEEKING system back to life without surgical intervention, a gentle metronome, helping your mind find its tempo again. While these tools are currently reserved for the most challenging cases of depression, they hint at a future where restoring your mind’s music might become part of your personal care routine.

Of course, while the promise of brain stimulation is compelling, it’s not the only way to nurture your SEEKING system. Many well-established approaches—psychotherapy, journaling, mindfulness practices, movement, time in nature, social connection, and creative exploration, can gradually restore motivation and engagement. These tools work like slow, patient practice sessions, helping you retrain the mind’s rhythms one note at a time. Yet for them to flourish, they need to be implemented deliberately, with steady commitment, and they require time. There are no shortcuts to building the enduring strength that helps your inner music play.

In Short

Your SEEKING web is the living thread that sustains your motivation, curiosity, and drive. It keeps you engaged in learning, growth, and new possibilities. When it’s alive, you feel inspired, ready to reach for new goals, and open to life’s experiences. Depression is what happens when this inner music quiets and the garden lies still, when the melodies that once stirred your spirit fade and the vibrant blooms retreat beneath the soil. But it’s not a personal failing, it’s a biological safeguard, a pause to help you conserve energy and recover. Whether through deep brain stimulation or the steady tending of your mind’s garden, through therapy, journaling, mindfulness, movement, and connection, healing the SEEKING web requires patience and deliberate care. With time, the music returns, and your life blooms again, one note and one blossom at a time.

References

    Davis, K. L., Montag, C. (2019). Selected principles of Pankseppian affective neuroscience. Frontiers in neuroscience, 12(1), 1025.
    Badt, K. (2017). A Conversation with Neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp. Retrieved from HuffPost.