To understand what feelings are, you need to understand by what criteria they can be assessed. Criteria are another basis for classification.

The criteria serve to ensure that experiences can be measured, characterized and called a word, that is, defined.

There are three criteria for feelings:

1. valence (tone);
2. intensity (strength);
3. sthenism (activity or passivity).

Feelings table 1 allows you to characterize any complex experience:

For example, a person may have a positive, strong sthenic experience. It could be love. If the intensity of the sensations is weak, it's just sympathy.

The table of feelings, characterizing experiences, does not allow them to be called a word. The name can only be guessed at. A person does not always have enough knowledge and experience to determine how to correctly name the emotional excitement experienced. This is not surprising, since there are so many of them. However, some people cannot name even ten senses, and this is how many, on average, a person experiences every day.

The third basis for classifying socially conditioned experiences is based on the underlying emotion.

American psychologist Paul Ekman identified seven basic emotions:

• joy;
• sadness;
• anger;
• fear;
• astonishment;
• disgust;
• contempt.

Feelings table # 2 suggests looking for a name for the emotional experience you are experiencing, starting from the first four basic emotions:

The second table of feelings complements the first. Using both of them, one can understand what kind of power has taken possession of the mind and heart, how to describe and name it. And this is the first right step to awareness.

List of moral, intellectual, aesthetic feelings

To the question: "what are the feelings", each person can give his answer. Someone more often experiences strong and deep feelings, while others have mild and short-lived ones. The ability to feel depends on the temperament, character, principles, priorities and life experience of the individual.

Most often, feelings are classified depending on the sphere in which the object of experience is located:

• Moral

These are sympathy and antipathy, respect and contempt, affection and alienation, love and hate, as well as feelings of gratitude, collectivism, friendship and conscience. They arise in relation to the actions of other people or their own.

They are determined by the moral norms accepted in society and assimilated by the individual in the process of socialization, as well as his views, beliefs, worldview. If others' or their own actions correspond moral standards, satisfaction arises, if not - indignation.

• Intellectual

A person also has such experiences that arise in the process mental activity or in connection with its result: joy, satisfaction from the process and result of work, discovery, invention. It is also inspiration and the bitterness of failure.

• Aesthetic

Mental excitement arises when you perceive or create something beautiful. A person experiences incredible sensations when he sees the beauty of the Earth or the power of natural phenomena.

A person feels a sense of beauty when looking at a small child or an adult harmoniously built person. Beautiful works of art and other creations of human hands can cause delight and elation.

Since this classification does not reveal the entire palette of feelings, it is customary to classify them for several more reasons.

How Feelings Differ from Emotions

All people experience emotional experiences and worries, but not everyone knows how to name and express them in words. But it is precisely the knowledge of what feelings are that helps not only to correctly determine, but also to control, manage them.

Feelings are a complex of experiences associated with people, objects or events. They express a subjective evaluative attitude towards real or abstract objects.

People in everyday life and some psychologists use the words "feelings" and "emotions" as synonymous words. Others say that feelings are a kind of emotion, namely higher emotions. Still others share these concepts: emotions belong to the class of mental states, and feelings to mental properties.

Yes, there is a direct relationship between them, because they are human experiences. Without emotional unrest, the individual would not live, but exist. They fill life with meaning, make it diverse.

But there are still significant differences between feelings and emotions:

• Emotions are innate and instinctive reactions of the body to changes environment, feelings - social, developed in the process of education and training experiences. A person learns to feel, to express emotions, everyone knows how from the moment of birth.
• Emotions are difficult to control by an effort of will, feelings are easier to control, despite their complexity and ambiguity. Most of them arise in a person in consciousness, emotions are often not realized, since they are associated with the need to satisfy an instinctive need.
• Feeling changes, develops and fades away, varies in strength, manifests itself in different ways, can develop into its opposite, emotion is a certain reaction. For example, if a person experiences hatred for another person, it is possible that this experience will develop into love, and the emotion of fear is always fear, regardless of the object (it may be unreasonable). Fear is either there or not.
• Emotions do not have objective correlation, feelings do. They are experienced in relation to something or someone in different ways. For example, loving a child is not the same as loving a spouse. And for example, bewilderment is always expressed in the same way, regardless of what exactly causes it.
• Feelings are a stronger motivator than emotions. They motivate, inspire, push to perform actions in relation to the object to which they are directed. Emotions only give rise to actions in the form of responses.
• Emotions are short and superficial, albeit bright manifestations, and feelings are always complex and strong emotional disturbances.

It can be difficult to determine when a combination of emotions will give rise to a feeling, and what higher experience is expressed in one or another series of emotional manifestations. These are close, concomitant phenomena, but still they need to be distinguished. The individual is responsible for his higher emotions and for the actions that they entail.

How to manage your feelings

When strong feelings and excitements take possession of a person, even if they are positive, the psychological balance is disturbed.

For psychological health and well-being, you need to be able to moderately enjoy both positive feelings and upset from negative ones.

To cope with excessive sentiments that prevent you from responding adequately and acting wisely, you need to:

1. Describe the emotional sensations: determine the valence, intensity, stenicity (Table of feelings No. 1).
2. Determine the underlying emotion. Choose what the experience is more like: fear, sadness, anger or joy (Table of feelings number 2).
3. Decide on a name and try to figure out the experiences on your own.

Sometimes emotional impulses take over a person so much that he literally cannot sleep or eat. Long-term strong experiences are stressful for the body. It is not for nothing that nature conceived that even a bright period of falling in love, when the blood is oversaturated with adrenaline, oxytocin and dopamine, does not last long, developing into a calm and solid love.

Each person must have their own table of feelings if they want to be a conscious person.

The eternal dispute between mind and heart is the question of the ability to regulate emotional, sensory impulses through the mind.

Experiencing deep and powerful experiences, a person lives life to the fullest. It is unreasonable to limit your sensitivity, and sometimes it is simply impossible. It's all about what experiences a person chooses: positive or negative, deep or superficial, real or fake.

It is difficult for me to understand my feelings - a phrase that each of us has encountered: in books, in movies, in life (someone's or my own). But it is very important to be able to understand your feelings.

The Wheel of Emotions by Robert Plutchik

Some believe - and perhaps they are right - that the meaning of life is in feelings. Indeed, at the end of life, only our feelings, real or in memories, remain with us. Yes, and the measure of what is happening can also be our experiences: the richer, more diverse, brighter they are, the more fully we feel life.

What are feelings? The simplest definition: feelings are what we feel. This is our attitude to certain things (objects). There is also a more scientific definition: feelings (higher emotions) are special mental states, manifested by socially conditioned experiences, which express a long-term and stable emotional relationship of a person to things.

How Feelings Are Different from Emotions

Sensations are our experiences that we experience through the senses, and we have five of them. Sensations are visual, auditory, tactile, taste and smell (our sense of smell). Everything is simple with sensations: stimulus - receptor - sensation.

Our consciousness interferes with emotions and feelings - our thoughts, attitudes, our thinking. Emotions are influenced by our thoughts. Conversely, emotions affect our thoughts. We will definitely talk about these relationships in more detail a little later. But now let's recall once again one of the criteria of psychological health, namely point 10: we are responsible for our feelings, it depends on us what they will be. It is important.

Fundamental emotions

All human emotions can be distinguished by the quality of the experience. This aspect of a person's emotional life is most clearly presented in the theory of differential emotions American psychologist K. Izard. He identified ten qualitatively different "fundamental" emotions: interest-excitement, joy, surprise, sorrow-suffering, anger-rage, disgust-disgust, contempt-neglect, fear-horror, shame-shyness, guilt-remorse. K. Izard refers the first three emotions to positive, the remaining seven - to negative. Each of the fundamental emotions underlies a whole spectrum of states, differing in their severity. For example, within the framework of such a single-modal emotion as joy, one can distinguish joy-satisfaction, joy-delight, joy-glee, joy-ecstasy, and others. All other, more complex, complex emotional states arise from the combination of fundamental emotions. For example, anxiety can combine fear, anger, guilt, and interest.

1. Interest is a positive emotional state that promotes the development of skills and abilities, the acquisition of knowledge. Interest-excitement is a feeling of being captured, curious.

2. Joy is a positive emotion associated with the ability to fully satisfy an urgent need, the likelihood of which was previously low or uncertain. Joy is accompanied by self-satisfaction and satisfaction with the surrounding world. The obstacles to self-realization are also obstacles to the emergence of joy.

3. Surprise - not having a clearly expressed positive or negative sign emotional reaction on suddenly arisen circumstances. Surprise inhibits all previous emotions, directing attention to a new object and can turn into interest.

4. Suffering (grief) is the most common negative emotional state associated with obtaining reliable (or seemingly such) information about the impossibility of satisfying the most important needs, the achievement of which seemed more or less likely before. Suffering has the character of asthenic emotion and often takes the form of emotional stress. The most severe form of suffering is grief associated with irreparable loss.

5. Anger is a strong negative emotional state, which occurs more often in the form of affect; arises in response to an obstacle in the achievement of passionately desired goals. Anger has the character of sthenic emotion.

6. Disgust - a negative emotional state caused by objects (objects, people, circumstances), contact with which (physical or communicative) comes into sharp conflict with the aesthetic, moral or ideological principles and attitudes of the subject. Disgust, when combined with anger, can motivate aggressive behavior in interpersonal relationships. Disgust, like anger, can be self-directed, reducing self-esteem and causing self-condemnation.

7. Contempt is a negative emotional state that occurs in interpersonal relationships and is generated by mismatch life positions, views and behavior of the subject with those of the object of feeling. The latter appear to the subject as vile, not corresponding to the accepted moral norms and ethical criteria. A person is hostile to someone he despises.

8. Fear is a negative emotional state that appears when the subject receives information about possible damage to his life well-being, about real or imagined danger. Unlike suffering caused by direct blocking of essential needs, a person experiencing the emotion of fear has only a probabilistic forecast of possible trouble and acts on the basis of this forecast (often insufficiently reliable or exaggerated). The emotion of fear can be both sthenic and asthenic in nature and flow either in the form stressful conditions, either in the form of a stable mood of depression and anxiety, or in the form of affect (horror).

9. Shame is a negative emotional state, expressed in the awareness of the discrepancy between one's own thoughts, actions and appearance, not only to the expectations of others, but also to one's own ideas about appropriate behavior and appearance.

10. Guilt - a negative emotional state, expressed in the awareness of the improperness of one's own deed, thoughts or feelings and expressed in regret and repentance.

Table of feelings and emotions of a person

And I also want to show you a collection of feelings, emotions, states that a person experiences during his life - a generalized table that does not pretend to be scientific, but will help you better understand yourself. The table is taken from the site "Community of Dependents and Codependents", author - Mikhail.

All feelings and emotions of a person can be divided into four types. These are fear, anger, sadness and joy. You can find out what type this or that feeling belongs to from the table.

And for those who have read the article to the end. The purpose of this article is to help you understand your feelings, in what they are. Our feelings depend a lot on our thoughts. Irrational thinking is often at the root of negative emotions. By correcting these mistakes (by working on thinking), we can be happier and achieve more in life. There is an interesting, but persistent and painstaking work on oneself. You are ready?

It will be interesting for you:

P.S. And remember, just by changing our consumption - together we are changing the world! © econet

We have all heard the thesis that thought is material. And even generally agree with this idea. But in practice, it has not worked in my life for a long time. I tried to be responsible and conscious and to change my way of thinking, but somehow I found myself in the same circumstances over and over again. Until one day 10 years ago I got acquainted with the idea that feeling is primary in our life. It is the feeling that attracts certain circumstances. Not a thought in itself.

This can be illustrated by the following example: You can endlessly play the thought “I am rich, I am rich” in your head, but if you don’t live with a feeling that corresponds to the situation of wealth, then it’s just a waste of time. Moreover, if by repeating this thought you experience hopelessness and despair, then you continue to attract circumstances that correspond to that feeling - those in which you will experience hopelessness and despair.

From the moment I met this idea for the first time, everything begins to fall into place. I understood why my affirmations and visualizations didn’t work and why I find myself in some situations over and over again, although apparently I’m trying completely different approaches. The approaches are different, but the feeling remains the same. Including the feeling that I will never be able to change this or that state of affairs in my life.

And from that very moment I began to study intently and from all sides the topic of feelings and states. How they are formed, how our thinking and our body participate in this process, I was looking for answers to the questions why some states are especially difficult for us to change. I was looking for the most effective tools for working with feelings and states.

1. Conclusion number one. Whatever happens in my life is not the way I want, it is necessary to look for the feeling that attracted this situation.
   • If everyone annoys me, then I am accumulating and holding anger in me.
   • If they make me guilty all the time or I am afraid to be guilty, then I am accumulating and retaining the feeling of guilt.
   • If my needs, interests, feelings are neglected, then I myself do not take them seriously. As if it really matters.

   There are many different interesting states, holding which a person can put much more effort than necessary to achieve goals.

   • For example, the feeling of a struggle. A person living with this condition all the time finds himself in a situation where it is necessary to fight with someone or something. No result is given to him without a struggle.
   • The state of overcoming, overcoming works in the same way. If I live with this feeling, then I will always be in situations where something needs to be overcome and overcome.
   • Likewise, a feeling of heaviness will certainly attract circumstances in which everything will really be difficult.
   • And so on and so forth. Behind any undesirable situation is the feeling that attracted her. And our task is to learn to look into the essence of what is happening, namely, to see and change the feeling that caused the situation
2. Conclusion number two. The feelings that I live with may not only be mine. I can take other people's feelings and then consider them mine. Therefore, one of the tasks is to learn not to take those feelings that I do not need. Such situations are especially common in relationships between adult children and their parents. This is a topic for a separate conversation, and I will talk about this in more detail in the webinar “You have the feelings - you have the life” (http://alenakovalchuk.ru/webinarvladeesh/index.html), but even one understanding that the feelings with which I live , may actually not be mine, can already greatly advance a person in life.
3. Conclusion number three. In order to let go of unwanted states, I need to know what I want. I need to understand what states I WANT to live in. Or what states correspond to my dream life or a resolved issue. You cannot drive out the darkness, but you can turn on the light. Darkness is states and feelings that we want to get rid of. Light is feelings and states in which we want to live. Not knowing what I want, I cannot turn on the light and struggle with the darkness all the time. At the same time, where my attention is directed, my energy flows there, and that increases in my life. And without a clear picture of where I WANT to go, my thoughts naturally drift towards what I want to run away from. Therefore, we need a tool that helps to see all the time in which direction I WANT to move. And you can also learn more about the tools in the webinar (http://alenakovalchuk.ru/webinarvladeesh/index.html).
4. Conclusion number four. Feelings and states have vibrations and our task is to move all the time to states of higher vibrations. The higher the vibrations of the states in which we live, the easier and easier any plans are realized. Moving to states of higher vibrations is more difficult than sliding down to states of lower vibrations. Therefore, many prefer suffering and remain in the role of victim. But if we want to fly, and not crawl through life, then there is simply no other way out than to move on to lighter and more highly vibrational states. Therefore, taking responsibility for your feelings is a spiritual path and a very courageous decision. But if you accept it, at some point you actually start flying. And that's cool.
5. Conclusion number five. The fastest way to resolve any issue is to find a guide who has this issue resolved. Since it is primarily a matter of states and vibrations, simply being next to a person who has resolved the issue you need, you are already tuning in to his wave. And if he can still tell how he came there and convey the necessary knowledge and experience that will shorten your path, then hold on to such a person - the time, energy and amount of happiness that he will save for you are priceless.

Now, a little specifics and the very tools that can help you put the idea of ​​states into practice:

1. The first place where it can help is in solving practical issues. Look at those situations that have not yet been resolved in your life. And think, what state attracted them? Then imagine the future where the issue is resolved. It doesn't matter how, just imagine that somehow he made up his mind. What state or feeling corresponds to this future? It is this state that needs to be started to develop right now. Step by step, the state will attract the necessary circumstances and the issue will be resolved.
2. The second place where it can be useful is in global planning. When we make long-term plans, we usually start from what our mind offers us. We set goals for ourselves, enthusiastically move towards them, often sacrificing something important, and having achieved the goal, we understand that this gave only a short-term effect and the feeling of satisfaction is replaced by new goals. Try to approach global goals differently. Think about what feeling you would like to live with and then think about what gives you these states? What activities, dreams, goals make you feel this way? And try to make these activities and goals the main reference point.
3. The third practical application of this idea is to increase happiness in the current life. What I mean? We often do things automatically, believing that our main task is to complete the task itself. In reality, it is much more important WITH WHAT FEELING we do our daily activities. Because it is these feelings that attract further development events. Based on this, it is important for us to look for a way to do any business with the feeling that we would like to experience again. Think - how can I make it easier, more pleasant, more fun, more interesting. How can I do this to get more enjoyment from it? These small changes in approach can produce the most startling and far-reaching results. I have seen this in my life and many, many times in the lives of other people.

Of course, as with any question, there are many nuances here. Our states are highly dependent on our beliefs. And moving towards the desired states, we will inevitably run into some kind of restrictions and stoppers, which are invariably associated with beliefs. And these beliefs need to be able to correctly identify and change.

Therefore, I say that our mind and our senses are closely related and we need to work with both at the same time. But nevertheless, feeling is primary in the formation of the circumstances of our life. And our way of thinking interests us precisely in the context of the states in which it immerses us.

If you are interested in learning more about how our feelings shape the circumstances of our life, why it is sometimes so difficult to change them, and what approaches and tools exist to do this, then register for the webinar (http://alenakovalchuk.ru/webinarvladeesh /index.html)

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