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Comment by adrianmonk | Hacker News Reader

I agree emotions are important. Given how all of our brains work, it's not realistic to take them out of the equation.

But it is important to maintain some moderation and rein them in. Emotions are powerful, and if you don't learn to exercise some degree of control them, then they will control you.

I think it helps to understand that emotions have a purpose. For example, fear helps you avoid threats, and anger pushes you toward taking action that is needed to change a situation. If they're serving their purpose constructively, that's good.

But if they're not, they need to be controlled. For example, when fear makes you avoid something which is actually safe, or when anger makes you act in a rash manner or suffer mentally over things you cannot change.

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I totally agree with what you've written, with perhaps one small clarification/caveat/nuance. A mistake I've made in the past was to think about "controlling" emotions, as if emotions and logic were mutually exclusive, opposing forces. For example, take your excellent example about how a maladjusted fear response can make you afraid of things that aren't actually dangerous. The solution to this problem is not to try to "control" the fear, e.g. by telling yourself "there is nothing logically to be afraid of". The solution is actually to experience more of that fear - in a controlled, gradual and safe manner, which is what exposure therapy is all about.

Again, I'm not saying that this is what you meant by "controlling" or "moderating" emotions, but just want to clarify that learning how to express emotions in a constructive way usually makes an argument that much more forceful that trying to "rein in" your emotions and make them subservient to logic.

I agree with the you in the general sense here, and want to point out that, in my opinion / experience, this:

> The solution is actually to experience more of that fear - in a controlled, gradual and safe manner, which is what exposure therapy is all about.

is true for some of the people some of the time. There is a wide range of approaches that will work for some and not for others, in various circumstances.

I’ve started to think of it more of attuning to my emotions rather than controlling them.

Yeah, that's a valuable point. I described it as controlling, which may sound like suppression, but I probably should have said something else like managing.

Even if you call it managing, it's too easy to see emotions as something with a volume knob you can just turn down whenever you like. But it's more complicated than that. They're basically hardwired into our brains. Some people's brains are wired differently, but even in a completely normal brain (if such a thing exists), there are systems that kick in and do stuff whether you want them to or not. As in parts of the brain that activate and shift gears for other parts of the brain.

So there are some things you can control but also some things you cannot control. Which means to manage them, sometimes you need to understand how the system works and the kinds of changes you can make. It's a bit like fixing a complicated bug: you can't just comment out the code that is doing whatever you don't like. You need to understand the whole system so you can make the right change in the right place.

I think your fear example is a good illustration of this. Experts have figured out how the system works, and they know where a change can be made, and that's exposure.

The problem for discussion is when people are dishonest about their emotional motivations. So, someone who feels bad about this or that will really go out of way to absurd arguments to make it sound like he is rational. Conversely, it makes you mis-interpret people. People can be dismissive because they think something with idea is wrong, or because they are tired and cranky.

Emotions are not just big things. It may be that weird feeling about someone you cant explain. And that weird feeling may be either unfair bias or you actually noticing a problem with that person.

The emotion-logic dichotomy where mention of emotions makes you sound irrational motivates people to hide those. And it creates discussions that happen in sort of alternative reality and emotional conflicts that mask as professional disagreements.

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