Emotional Dissection

Let’s say you’ve been hunched over a keyboard all day and start to feel restless. You sit up, crack your back, and stretch your arms far above your head. Felt good, right? Why do you think that is? If you thought that the muscles just hadn’t been worked for a while and needed some exercise, you’re partly correct. Consider this: if someone pokes your arm with a needle, it hurts. The arm doesn’t say, "Something just hit me. It hurt." Instead, the nerves of that muscle of the arm send a message to the brain saying, "Something just hit me." The brain then sends a message back to the arm to make it hurt – the brain is in control. So when you stretch your arms back over your head, the muscles do get the little exercise they need, but the brain makes it feel satisfying.
Technically, the act of stretching is done for only one reason: to make the body more physically prepared for whatever may come its way. With the muscles relaxed and pliable, the animal of the human being may fight or take flight stronger or quicker. Seeing as the brain wants its body to survive, it rewards stretching with a little flush of pleasure that bubbles in the fingertips and shoots down throughout the body – it felt good, so we will do it again. Likewise, if something hurts, we slowly learn to shy away from it, just as a dog may learn to avoid sticking his nose into a hot oven with its door open. This then is two different entities of the brain working together: the survivalist core training the animal.
The reason for pain and pleasure is extraordinarily necessary. In the case of the needle and the arm, the survivalist warns the animal of a threat. The harder the needle is stabbed into the skin, the more pain is released. This makes sense because the harder the needle is pushed, the more danger the body is in. If pain was not issued or the body did not react to it like it instinctively does, the needle could stab the arm two hundred times before the animal noticed or chose to stop this from happening; one would never know that letting the needle stab you is a bad thing until you’ve bled to death right there on the spot. It is possible, and very likely, that not all of humankind’s ancestors had the ability (and it is an ability) to feel pain, or at least it may not been as well defined as it is today. The ones that did, survived long enough to reproduce and pass on the "pain gene".
All animals have a consciousness – they are aware of things around them. But humans are the only living things on Earth that can be aware of its own consciousness – I can say to myself, "I realize that I am aware of things around me." Then it can be taken a step further by acknowledging that one is aware of the fact that he or she is being conscious of their consciousness. This grants humans the unique skill of what I call Emotion Dissection. Whenever something upsets me, I simply break down what I am feeling and trace it back to the two main goals of every animal – reproduction and survival.
On the Fourth of July, for example, you may find yourself looking up at the red and blue fireworks in the night sky and suddenly feel a wave of patriotism rush through you as goosebumps cover your arms. At this moment, you legitimately feel patriotic and loyal. Stop and ask yourself why. Humans, being animals conscious of their lives and of their eventual death, which will come sooner or later, have an involuntary drive to put value in things other than themselves. It is as if we put stock into things – whether it is a country, a religion, or even another person. This way (so thinks our animalistic brain) we live forever, because when we die the "companies" we had put stock in will live on. Whether a person actually thinks this before he or she dies or not, the primordial core of our brain is tricked into being satisfied. This is how the mind solves the problem of death and achieves the goal of survival - existence forever and ever.
In another situation, you might be creeping through the dark woods alone with a flashlight. Your heart beats faster. You begin to sweat. You hear things all around you that make you jump with fear. Stop and think about why. Fear is the simplest and most necessary emotion besides physical pain. All the side effects of fear are actually good things. They prepare your body for the fight of flight response. If you were not afraid while walking through a dangerous wood, you would be at a severe disadvantage if you needed to fend off a wild animal or a masked serial killer.
On another hand, you might be thinking about something you said or did when you feel a twinge of regret. Like pain, remorse is used to train the active/conscious mind. Nobody wants to feel regret. The only way people know this is because they have experienced it before. Regret is issued to and from the brain after the conscious part realizes it has made some kind of mistake. Just like pain, the animal inside us learns from this "bad feeling" and does whatever it can to keep it from happening again, thus creating a smarter, more cautious individual who will not make a similar mistake. The survivalist doesn’t want the brain to make mistakes because that could impair that person’s relationships – leading to impeded chances of "falling in love" which directly prevents one from having children; the person’s career – which affects a person’s income which leads to the purchase of food and shelter; or his or her health – all things that affect the Big Two: reproduction and survival.
Although some of these may seem like a stretch, to the brain it is pure logic at its most sensible form. Thousands of years ago, a man had to kill for his food. Today he needs money. Survival = food & shelter = money = job. Anything that impedes any part of the chain threatens survival. Once you have dissected the negative emotion down to this bare sequence, you can "get over it" almost immediately. The reasonable part of the mind knows that that one little hiccup in this or similar chains will not lead to death. One can therefore deduce that the emotion is irrelevant and should be dismissed. It is not a perfect system; but this imperfection is what makes us human. So whenever you or anyone you know does or feels something, trace it back to this once-useful but now obsolete motivation and get over it.