[Re-post] What you knew about emotions is wrong

and why self esteeem might not be so good for you

Hello again, fellow readers and curious inquirers. Hope you had a fruitful couple of weeks. With winter (finally) taking its place, perhaps you have more time to spend with your friends, family, and colleagues.

I. About spending time with people

The first topic today is this amazing talk about how your mind creates your reality and how emotions are made. Some highlights worth mentioning:

1. Emotions don’t just happen to you. Because there are no emotion circuits in the brain. Yes, you heard that right: there is no evidence linking certain parts of the brain to certain emotions. Remember the “fear circuit”? Apparently, it was a highly simplistic and erronated way to think about fear.

   

2. We cannot detect emotion in others. Because they are not universally expressed. What we do instead is “guess” what that person is feeling based on our experiences with that kind of situation.

   

3. Your brain does not react to the world. Instead, it predicts & creates the experiences that we feel in the moment.

   

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II. About confidence

You probably think that the more confidence you have in yourself the better. That is the popular belief and it sticks with people. Because it makes sense.

But the research does not support it. Here is a very interesting read about developing a new kind of skill called confident humility. Instead of trusting your knowledge, it means trusting your ability to solve problems, even though you may not have the right solutions.

So if you ever think “fake it till you make it” - well, it might not be such a great idea after all. Self-confidence actually has nothing to do with job performance or school results.

Instead, the effect that researchers found was minimal at best. However, this research shows that sometimes it is more beneficial to know when to quit, instead of persisting endlessly on a dead task.

II. About you

Take it easy this season.

Source.

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