“Life is a train of moods like a string of beads and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue…. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, philosopher and writer, in 1844, which may have made him the first person to propose that emotionality is hard wired.
I remember when my first son was born–and trust me, what did I know–the nurse had a twinkle in her eyes every time she brought him to me. He was already charming people with his active, engaging and responsive emotionality.
Some babies are placid, others cannot be comforted. Some reach for the new toy, others shrink back. Some scream at the top of their lungs; some barely whimper.
Scientifically, it’s believed that emotional control centers in the reptilian brain determine innate temperaments.
For optimal functioning as a human being, and for feeling good, it’s best to have the worry-rheostat set about in the middle. Evolutionarily, our ancestors who didn’t know when to be afraid, and therefore what to avoid, fell from trees, walked off cliffs, or died prematurely in the jaws of a beast, so the gene pool shifted toward more caution.
“But as the DNA shuffles and recombines,” say Lewis, Amini and Lannon in their book, A General Theory of Love, “it’s the unlucky who suffer the extremes of temperament.”
If you worry too much, you can’t function and miss a lot of life, being afraid of too much, too often.
If you don’t know what to be afraid of, you can get yourself killed or end up in prison.
“When anxiety becomes problematic, most people try vainly to think their way out of trouble,” say Lewis et al. “But worry has its roots in the reptilian brain, minimally responsive to will.
The autonomic nervous system, which carries the outgoing fear messages from the reptilian brain, are not closely connected to our thinking brains!
What to do? Learn more about your emotions, learn ways to manage them, and use them. Increase your emotional intelligence.
Increasing your understanding of anything, and getting to know it better, reduces fear. You can eliminate one compounding factor – i.e., fearing the fear itself.
Susan Dunn, MA, Marketing Coach,
http://www.webstrategies.cc. Marketing consultation,
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writing and submission, help with ebooks and other
strategies. Susan is the author or How to Write an eBook
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