Brains are story-making machines. The foundation of your emotions is how your brain constructs stories. Brains love predictability, so we form stories about everything, including peoples intentions. We use our past combined with culture to do this. Also, each emotion concept is attached to a story. What stories is your brain constructing.

Our lives are funneled down to this one directive: to achieve an internal balance. Balance of blood pressure, glucose, PH, electrolytes, and body temperature. When experiencing an emotion, it is a temporary pressure on our systems. Our bodies adjust to being "offended" as the adrenal glands release cortisol, speeding up our heart. This is helping you prepare for confrontation of the stimuli that was offensive. Emotional responses activate physiological changes that are subsequently modulated through homeostatic mechanisms to restore the body to a baseline state. Your brain's main objective is to maintain stability. Is it easier to maintain stability if you are very "emotional"?

It's a simple question, isn't it. But, can you confidently answer it? I was shocked when I first was posed this question because I was unable to answer it. "But I feel sadness, I must know what it is?" I told myself. Humans have very little training in our emotions. But this topic isn't one that needs to be drawn out over weeks and years. This process starts with knowing a few definitions. Once this is established, you will learn a lot about yourself. This is a slow discovery that your interpretation of a situation is "constructing" an emotion that is either useful or not useful. Have you ever labeled the situation incorrectly? Did you construct anger? What happens if you interpreted the situation the way the other person intended, would you have constructed a different emotion? Let's talk about definitions of emotions, and then we move to our motivations, our expectations, our personality traits and our past stories that contribute to the construction of emotions. So.....before looking it up, what is sadness? What is your sadness responding to?