Tree Rings of Feeling: Understanding the Layers of your Emotions

How often you you wish your emotions would just quiet down and let you breathe? But they can’t. Emotions are like countless tiny thermostats in your inner home, constantly sensing the air, adjusting the temperature, and guiding you toward actions, whether you want them to or not. They manifest as feelings that relentlessly calibrate your responses to the world around you. The sensations you experience arise from intricate neural and hormonal networks working in togetherness behind the scenes. These are two faces of the same coin, inseparable and always in dialogue. Experientially, emotions can feel like a  patchwork quilt of textures and shades. Sometimes, they present themselves as a clearly defined pattern; other times, they appear as a tangled knot of sensations and half-formed thoughts. Your ability to describe what you’re feeling depends heavily on both your own and others’ emotional vocabulary. When you share your feelings with someone, you’re engaging in a kind of delicate translation, hoping that when you say your last date was “interesting,” the listener understands whether that means “full of warm surprises” or “more questions than answers.” You can only explore your own inner landscape. You can’t step into someone else’s mind to compare notes. Like everyone, you live in your own emotional echo chamber, piecing together the words, meanings and feeling as best you can.

Why We Need Emotional Theories (and Why None of Them Feel Quite Right)

Because emotions are private experiences, they’ve puzzled thinkers for centuries. To make sense of them, we’ve cooked up countless theories. But it’s like trying to decode a secret recipe by tasting the final dish. The James-Lange theory claims your body’s reaction comes firs. Your heart races, then the feeling of anxious flutter of having sent the email to fast pops into awareness. The Cannon-Bard theory argues that emotions and body responses happen simultaneously. Imagine pressing "Sent" and feeling your face flush with panic even as the emotional regret bubbles up at the same time. Finally, the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory insists you need both a physiological reaction and a cognitive label to get the full emotional experience. In this case, your heart races as you realize what you’ve done, and you think, "This is bad, and now I feel mortified." Trying to differentiate them can feel like sorting similar herbs by smell alone: James-Lange says body first, then feeling; Cannon-Bard says both happen together; Schachter-Singer says it’s a blend of body and mind. Why does this matter? Because it makes us observe what's happening in our body and mind. In everyday life, it’s the broader patterns that shape how you relate to yourself and others.

What often proves more useful are the ways we group emotions. In 1890, William James proposed four basic emotions: fear, sadness, love, and anger. He saw these as the foundational ingredients that combine into more complex feelings. A century later Paul Ekman expanded this list to six: anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Ekman’s research focuses on facial expressions across cultures. His research focused on facial expressions across cultures, showing that no matter where you go, humans share a universal recognition of these emotions. It shows that the core feelings are part of the blueprint, preloaded into every human. Jaak Panksepp took things further, focusing on brain circuits rather than facial expressions.  He forget the idea of stimulating different parts of rats' brains with electrodes and observing their reactions. Their behavioral responds: laughs, explorations, and sudden freezes offered clues to the actitaved emotional networks in their brains. WIth this methos, Panksepp identified seven core emotional systems, terming them SEEKING, FEAR, SEPARATION DISTRESS, ANGER, CARE, PLAY, and LUST. These systems are present in all mammals and have been running for millions of years.

At its heart, categorizing emotions breaks down your emotional experiences into manageable building blocks, making it easier to understand their functioning principles and how to reshape them. Basic emotions are theoretical concepts that provide a foundation for working on your emotional health. It’s a bit like organizing a chaotic closet; once you group everything into categories, the chaos starts to make sense.

The Three Levels of Emotional Processing: From Instincts to Self-Reflection

With the horizontal basics covered, let’s move to the vertical dimension of your emotional blueprint. In neuroscience, we often imagine the brain as a three-story house:  (1) The foundational layer securing basic life functions; (2) the middle layer upgrading the basic system by your environment; (3) the highest layer refining your beautiful being with reflection, self-awareness and self-direction. Basic emotions are a part of the hardwired foundational layer. In Pankseppian affectology, we label them as core emotions. The middle layer is where your secondary emotional circuitry develops guided by your personal experiences by interacting with your environment. At the third level tertiary emotions annotate your mental and behavior functioning with self-awareness and self-direction. Understanding these three layers (the survival foundation, the learned patterns, and the reflective refinements) offers a framework for exploring how emotions function and how they can be optimized. Each layer builds upon the last, creating a dynamic system that influences every aspect of your life.

• Core Emotional Networks (Red Zone): These are primary emotions, the unchanging basic survival tools of the brain. Core emotions like fear, rage, and joy operate on autopilot, ensuring survival.
• Secondary Emotional Networks (Green Zone): These networks form through early experiences and shape emotional patterns adapted to your relational environment. It’s like learning which keys unlock which doors in the emotional escape room of life.
• Tertiary Emotional Networks (Yellow Zone): The most sophisticated level, where rationality, language, and self-awareness come into play. Here, your primary and secondary systems interface with your sense of self.

Your Ground Floor: The Core Emotions

The primary level of emotional processing happens in your brainstem; the oldest part of your nervous system. When you are born, this part of your brain is fully functional and ensures your basic survival, regulating your heartbeat, hunger, and responses to immediate threats. Primary emotions are a fundamental part of this esssential tasks. Just as hunger signals you to eat or pain prompts you to seek relief, core emotions nudge you toward survival behaviors without conscious thought. You don’t need a masterclass to know when and how to feel anger or joy, you know that by nature. Neuroscience has identified distinct neural networks associated with these primal emotions, and they are strikingly universal across individuals and cultures. However, in adult humans, core emotions can’t operate in isolation. They’re deeply intertwined with secondary and tertiary emotional processes, making every emotional experience a mix of these layers. That said, the primary level is theoretically and empirically the most manageable. Its neural activations are relatively well-defined, and specific networks correlate with characteristic behaviors. Let’s meet the cast:

• SEEKING drives you to explore, search, and pursue goals; from finding food in the Savannah to staying up late researching your next vacation, reaching for a new dress in the store, or lingering in a conversation that sparks your curiosity.
• RAGE propels you to defend your boundaries, take action, or claim what’s yours; sometimes by arguing, like finally speaking up when someone cuts in line, standing your ground when a friend oversteps, and sometimes just deciding not to answer that text that feels too demanding.
• FEAR activates avoidance and self-protection; leading you to take cautious steps when danger looms, like sensing tension in a heated meeting, or feeling your chest tighten when walking down the road at night.
• PANIC/GRIEF prompts you to maintain connection and resist loss. It prompts you to text a friend when you feel alone or reach for your partner’s hand after an argument by creating the ache of someone’s absence. If the attempts to reunite fail, it leads to withdrawal as a way to rethink and recover.
• PLAY encourages experimentation and light-hearted interaction; testing your strength, skills, and limits in safe, non-serious contexts, like humor, games, sports, and the arts.
• CARE fosters nurturing and caregiving behaviors; whether you’re soothing a crying child or sending your friend a comforting note.
• LUST fuels sexual interest and desire; the ancient impulse to ensure the species survives, but also the motivation to make yourself desirable, whether by climbing the social ladder or wearing your favorite dress that makes you feel confident and alive.

These core emotions form the foundation of your emotional life, but as a human being, your experience doesn’t stop there. Beyond these universal roots lies a vast and sophisticated emotional landscape, shaped by your unique history, relationships, and reflections: a place where your emotional world becomes distinctly yours. Let's go ahead and explore it.

Secondary and Tertiary Emotional Networks: Why Your Emotional Experience is Uniquely Yours

Secondary emotional networks are the personalized pathways that grow from your core emotions. Unlike the universal, hardwired nature of core emotions, secondary emotions are shaped by your early experiences, which build emotional patterns shaped by your social and relational environment. During childhood, you begin internalizing social and relational dynamics and a mental map of safe and unsafe objects (meaning, people) and patterns of behavior. Through associations with pleasant emotions, you learn what is encouraged and what should be avoided by association with unpleasant emotions. These learned models form the emotional manual for navigating your living landscape and getting you where you want to get. While the core emotion of fear might prevent you getting eaten, the secondary emotion of fear might remind you not to upset someone whose anger once frightened you. Your secondary patterns are the heirlooms of your childhood environment, for better or worse. When that environment was nurturing, these patterns often serve you well. But in more challenging homes, they may need tending and reshaping. Recognizing and reshaping these learned emotional patterns is the first stop on your emotional growth journey.

As your brain matures and gains rational abilities, primary and secondary systems interface with awareness and self-regulation, forming a tertiary layer. The tertiary layer allows for mindfulness, reflection, and deliberate decision-making. It’s the part of your brain that lets you step back from a heated argument and think, “Is this worth it?” or to feel sadness but resist spiraling into despair by reframing your perspective. While primary and secondary emotions are automatic, tertiary emotions involve a interplay between reason and emotion. This allows you to reinterpret experiences, consider consequences, and rewrite your emotional scripts. You may feel anger bubbling up during a disagreement but, through self-awareness, recognize it as stemming from an old fear of being dismissed, choosing instead to assert yourself calmly. The tertiary layer is where you shape your identity. Are you the kind of person who reacts impulsively, or do you pride yourself on staying composed under pressure? Do you view sadness as weakness or as a sign of depth and connection? These are decisions, influenced by your values and beliefs. The tertiary layer allows for the greatest emotional freedom.

Every emotional experience you have pulls from all three layers. Because of this complexity, emotions at the secondary and tertiary levels defy simple categorization. Your emotional architecture is as unique as your fingerprint; formed by your personal history, shaped by relationships, and molded by lessons about safety, danger, desires, and taboos. No one else feels anger, sadness, or joy quite the way you do because no one else has lived your life. Your emotional fingerprint is shaped by countless factors: the lullabies you heard as a baby, the heartbreaks you endured as a teenager, the lessons you’ve learned from successes and failures. It’s a constantly evolving mosaic, pieced together from the fragments of your history, relationships, and aspirations. Grasping your emotions at the tertiary level therefore is like herding cats. Each one jumping in a different direction, often at the most inconvenient moment. Working directly on these higher-level emotions is incredibly challenging because of their sheer complexity and individuality. That’s where primary emotion models come in. By categorizing and understanding emotions at their core level, those universal building blocks, we created frameworks that simplify this chaos. These models act like a net, helping you gather and manage bunches of cats at once, making the pandemonium of real-life emotions more approachable and workable.

Closing Thought: Knowing Your Emotional Blueprint

Just like math starts with understanding numbers and reading begins with letters, mastering your emotions requires learning their foundational components. Without a grasp of the basics, you actually have no idea what you are doing. Attempts to manage your emotional patterns can feel frustrating and be aimless. It’s not your fault you’ve struggled. From the most popular approaches to optimizing or managing motional challenges it is obvious that affectology is a young science in its infancy. Most popular approaches to managing emotional challenges reflect how young the contemporary science of emotion still is. General advice is everywhere, but it often lacks a solid foundation or clear context for when and how to apply it. Emotional optimization is highly contextual and the same approach has opposite effects in different circumstances, with different individuals and for different emotions. Approaching it from the tertiary layer, where you encounter a chaos of everything, is an overwhelming task. It’s like trying to learn math by starting with calculus or playing your first tennis match against Federer. By understanding the basics, you know what you are working with instead of relying on random trial and error. Working with a clear framework is a much more reliable approach to build emotional fitness.