How our brain works to decide how to behaves?

1. Our brain:

   1. receives information about the situation we are living at the moment

   2. filters great parts of the information because it would need too much time to considerate every single information we receive from our senses.

   3. then compares these information with our beliefs, the experiences lived in the past and the meaning we have given to those experiences. These composes our mental models.

What are emotions?

Emotions are a way to describe a whole of thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

What are positive and negative emotions?

Positive emotions are emotions associated with happiness and wellbeing.

Negative emotions are emotions associated with suffering.

Why do we experience emotions?

Because is one of the ways our brain works to decide how behaves in our life.

Why can’t we simply ignore emotions?

• Various researches suggest that:
  • simply ignore emotions can have negative effects in the long term from the psychological point of view.
  • allow greater well-being:
    • acknowledge emotions and what they want to tell us
    • evaluating emotions and situations with reasoning
    • let them pass when they are negative

Why can’t we simply follow pleasure and avoid suffering?

Because this will lead to hedonic happiness and not true eudaimonic happiness.

Because our thoughts and in particular the presence of negative thoughts have a huge impact on our happiness, I want to know more about this topic.

What are thoughts? And in particular negative thoughts?

Thoughts are words, images, stories that are created by our minds. They are not necessarily true.

Negative thoughts in particular are thoughts about self, others or the world in general that are associated with negative emotions.

What is well-being?

Well-being is a state that a person reach when one does what is good for oneself.

Why some people behave in a way that bring them to feel pain and negative emotions instead to reach well-being?

Premises

• (A) Some people misinterpret experiences they lived.
• (B) Some people can make a mistake evaluating the possible consequences of their behaviour.
• (C) We evaluate the possible consequences of our behaviour based on the past experiences and the interpretation we gave them. See Brain.
• If (A) and (C), then (B).
• (D) Some people can wrongly think that a behaviour that could bring to reach well-being, bring him to feel pain and negative emotions instead and viceversa.
• If (B), then (D).
• (E) Some people are not able to choose how to react to emotions.
• (F) Some people don’t know the best strategies to reach well-being.
• (G) Some people don’t know how to behave in a way useful to reach well-being.
• If (D) or (E) or (F), then (G).
• (H) Some people behave in a way that bring them to feel pain and negative emotions instead to reach well-being.
• (I) The opposite of reaching well-being is feeling pain and negative emotions.
• If (G) and (I), then (H).

Conclusions

• Therefore, some people behave in a way that bring them to feel pain and negative emotions instead to reach well-being.

What is good for this person means?

Although it is very subjective and some people weigh some criteria over others, it generally means:

Index

• What is happiness
• Why pursuing happiness
• What are the differences between Eudaimonic and Hedonic
• Is better to pursue Eudaimonic or Hedonic happiness
• Can happiness be measured
• What happiness depends on
• What contributes to well-being
• What is the relation between happiness and behaviour
• What are other things that influence behaviours
• Environment (Behaviour context)
• Do we choose our behaviours
• What are the main principles about happiness
• What are the most useful techniques to improve happiness

Related Questions:

Related Topics:

References

I want to introduce a comments system to my digital garden to allow other people to contribute and question the topic I’m learning.

There are various ways to introduce comments in a static website like this one. My requirements for the comments system are:

• no ads
• the privacy of the users must be respected
• it’s free
• should not be required to the users to create 3rd party accounts.

After some research I have chosen to give a try to Staticman.