• Question: Can we fully control our emotions? for example could we make our selves happy or sad whenever we want?

    Asked by anon-181153 on 8 Jun 2018.
    • Photo: Alex Haragan

      Alex Haragan answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      There are many attempts to address this – everything from drugs to self-help books.
      The short answer is: No.
      The longer is: no, because being happy and sad is a normal part of life.
      Maybe the question really ought to be – should we even try?
      You know there are going to be ups and downs – thats life and you can’t change that. But you can try and make your background a good place by having good friends, working on things you enjoy and doing things you like.
      Sometimes people have issues with extreme emotions – anger management is a well known example. And here people can learn to become less angry about things – but you can’t force yourself to feel in a different way – only to learn to cope with the sad things, and make the most of the happy things.
      If the day ever comes we can fully control emotions with the flip of a switch _ I don’t think we’d really be human at that point!

    • Photo: Lauren Burns

      Lauren Burns answered on 8 Jun 2018:

      Fully control? Probably not. However, there are ways to trick your body into feeling happy or feeling sad momentarily but even these tricks don’t work for all people (e.g. forcing a smile, or putting a pencil horizontally between your teeth supposedly makes you feel happier; or thinking of sad things to make you feel sad). But these are temporary, and unless you understand why you are feeling sad (or happy) and find ways to cope (or continue) this, the cause of the emotion won’t just go away.

      I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the TV series ‘Vampire Diaries’, but according to this series, vampires ‘switch off’ their emotions, and basically become different people afterwards. I do believe our emotions define us, and completely agree that if we could alter these emotions easily then we wouldn’t be human!

    • Photo: Ashley Akbari

      Ashley Akbari answered on 9 Jun 2018:

      I think there ways people can train themselves to control their emotions or reactions in certain circumstances like unpredictable situations to have certain sets of actions or reactions such as in combat as a soldier for example. But i do not think we could ever fully control our emotions at all times in all situations.

    • Photo: Hannah Farley

      Hannah Farley answered on 10 Jun 2018:

      I don’t think we can fully control our emotions. I think we could all do better with recognising and dealing with emotions. We have medicines that we can use to help balance out emotions, such as anti-depressants. There are so many factors that contribute to your long-term emotional state that we don’t understand that I think we’re a long way off ever really controlling emotions, if we ever could.

    • Photo: Laura Hemming

      Laura Hemming answered on 10 Jun 2018:

      Unfortunately, like others have said, I don’t think it’s possible to fully control our emotions. What we can do though, is learn to RESPOND to our emotions in the most adaptive way possible. For instance, people who struggle with this, may feel angry and immediately act on this by punching a wall. Although it is probably not possible to make this person never feel angry, it absolutely IS possible to stop the cycle of this anger leading to punching a wall. It is this response to emotions that my research attempts to get at – to stop people using suicide or aggression as a response to their emotions.

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