The Ruck March report The Model Series

• The Model
• Circumstance
• Thought
• Feeling - This episode
• Action
• Results

What are emotions?

VIbrations Emotions are vibrations that start in your mind and are felt throughout your body

Emotions are also associated with different neurotransmitters and hormones your body produces

• dopamine - pleasure, happy
• gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), - Calming
• serotonin - Joy and contentment
• Oxytocin - love
• Endorphins - relaxed

Hormones we avoid

• norepinephrine - FIght or flight
• cortisol - Stress
• Adrenaline - stress

We often avoid these hormones because they don't feel good in general. Yet many people will seek them out like adrenaline because it also helps produce Endorphins

There are also other parts of the brain that are into the process of emotions. Your brain's primary objective is to keep you alive.

• The prefrontal cortex - THinking part of the brain
• The amygdala - The Primative part
• The hippocampus - The habit center

It is emotions that keep us playing small. They are sought out because we want to feel safe and The primitive part of our brain is the part that we don't want to have control. This is the warning system that we are venturing into unknown territory.

Our brain also likes to not waste energy so as soon as a brain can offload a set of movements and thinking processes to the hippocampus it does.

So with all this, it may look like you have a lot to overcome but your thinking part of your brain is the main control center of it all that is the prefrontal cortex. So how do you control your emotions?

Emotions are not positive nor negative

The 50/50- Principle

Our life is 50% pain and 50% pleasure. You can spend your life fighting the perceived negative emotions and we do this by buffering or avoiding or indulging

Buffering is using something to get the dopamine and serotonin hits we desire. We buffer to avoid pain but at the cost of suffering.

Things we buffer on

• Porn
• video games
• social media
• food
• alcohol
• drugs

Emotions don't last. The reason they keep coming up is because of our thoughts. We keep having the thoughts of something bad and we experience the emotions associated with that thought. Yet if you can do the thought work of changing how you see a circumstance you can change your emotion.

Often we resist the so-called negative emotion and this act of dining the 50/50 principle causes us more pain and suffering. We avoid doing the hard things in life because we don't want to feel bad. We don't want to face the thoughts and beliefs we have formed. So we stay comfortable. We keep playing small.

What if you were to allow the emotion to be. Allow yourself to feel that emotion. What would happen to you?

What if we didn't run from that emotion just accepted that the emotion is there let it run its life and then carry on? What would you be able to do?

You can choose to let emotion have power over you or you can choose to take the power you have back and live your life.