Your unconscious emotional rules

The Hidden Code of Your Emotions

All of us, without exception, operate under a complex and often invisible set of emotional rules.

These rules are the internal conditions, the specific criteria we've learned throughout our lives that dictate when we "allow" ourselves to feel a certain emotion.

They're like the programming code that runs in the background of our minds, determining our emotional responses automatically.

The problem is that, because they're mostly unconscious, we've rarely examined them or deliberately chosen them.

How Emotional Rules Work

An emotional rule typically has a structure of something like, "If [condition X] happens, then I will feel [emotion Y]." For example:

• Rule for happiness: "To feel happy, I need all my projects to go perfectly and all the important people in my life to be happy with me."
• Rule for love: "To feel loved, my partner must know exactly what I need at all times, without me having to tell them."
• Rule for anger: "I feel anger whenever someone doesn't meet my expectations or disagrees with my opinion."
• Rule for success: "I will only feel successful when I have achieved a high-level position and earn a large amount of money."

The Rule Imbalance

The main problem with our unconscious rules is that they are often unbalanced.

We tend to set incredibly difficult, demanding, and often unattainable conditions for experiencing positive emotions.

We make happiness, love, or success distant and elusive goals.

On the contrary, we tend to have very lax, simple, and easy-to-activate rules for negative emotions.

We allow ourselves to feel frustrated, angry, or disappointed at the slightest provocation.

This imbalance in our internal "rulebook" is one of the main causes of chronic dissatisfaction and suffering.

The First Step. Bringing the Rules to Light

Emotional self-management begins with the act of making these hidden rules conscious.

It is a work of introspection that we can begin with a simple but powerful question: "What has to happen for me to feel [name of the emotion]?".

By asking ourselves this question for different key emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, success, love, etc.) and writing down the answers,We begin to unravel the code that has been governing our emotional life.

Once the rules are visible, we can begin to question whether they are logical, useful, and whether we really want to continue living by them.

It is the first step in rewriting our own emotional instruction manual.