Vibe
Recently I feel so tuned to my emotions or at least aware of my emotions. There are times when I get the comments like "I like your vibe" or "I enjoy your vibe". I'm also aware that there are times where I have a "Destructive vibe" in which I could say to myself "Ah fuck, today is such a mess, I just want to be alone." Because the truth to the matter is, a bad vibe is actually apparent and could bring others down. The same way that good vibes can bring a perpetual cycle of good vibe with the others. Now it's almost as if energy needs to be spent to alleviate oneself from a bad vibe to a good vibe, a conscious effort or to help oneself bring itself back up.
Vibe appears itself. It shows itself outwardly. From the happy facial expressions that you make that take in forms of smile or laughter, for a lack of better words, joyful, or at least, seemingly joyful. It's like an aura perceived by others, and it is distilled to be either "good vibe" or "bad vibe". We don't need to go to lengths for a rhetorical example to imagine if you just happen to lose your parents from a car accident that you just now got the news of in school and as the news were brought and the realization collapse within yourself, the aura of frustration, anger, and denial will appear outwardly. Of course it will be normal to say "How can I not be sad?" as a reaction to the unfortunate circumstances. The same principle when everything is going great you would say "How can I not be happy?" as your good vibes are vibrating among the presence of your being.
Good vibe is a result of a good mental state. Dissecting vibes based on your experiences that you've had. Can't we dissect between good vibes and bad vibes to be something pleasant or unpleasant, positive or negative--corresponds to the message that "everything seems fine" or "something is wrong". It appears to me it's easier to bring you another rhetorical example that when you're quite under stress or inhibiting a bad vibe, you become irritative, weary, or to some certain extent, hypercritical. A slight sense of a "bad" gesture for example, when your friend taps your shoulder when you least expect it you might appear a facial expression of irritation almost as if reflexively? Or when someone asks for a pencil and you damn know you have five but you choose to shrug it off as a clear "No."? Though, these things happen all the time but it's easily influenced by our "now vibe". In which "vibe" actually has a way longer history with us than we actually know it.
Core Affect
Core affect is a reflection of your physical viability, a kind of thermometer whose reading reflects your general sense of well-being, based on data about your bodily systems, information about external events, and your thoughts about the state of the world. [...] It influences the development of your emotional experience, providing a connection between emotion and body state.
Though principally a reflection of your internal condition, your core affect is also influenced by your physical environment. it responds to art and entertainment, to funny or tragic scenes in a film. And it is affected directly by medicines and chemicals, both uppers and downers and euphoric drugs. In fact, the core-affect-altering-properties of many drugs are precisely the reason that many people take them [...], from alcohol to Ecstacy, to help induce feelings of positivity.
Your core affect is always present, just as your body always has a temperature, but you are only consciously aware of it when you focus on it, such as when someone asks you how you are doing or when you pause to ponder that yourself. Core affect sometimes varies noticeably from moment to moment, but it can also be more or less constant over long periods of time. [...] It is what you experience when you feel cheerful because you're healthy and your day is going well and you've eaten a good meal, or miserable because you have a bad cold and you're hungry.
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If, Saturday morning, after a good breakfast and a pleasant cup of coffee you receive a telemarketer's call, you might react politely. Your comfort level allows you to have a response that comes from sympathy for the plight of a person desperate enough to take such a job. On the other hand, if you wake up with a sore throat and a cough, you might curse the caller and slam the phone down, focused on your feeling of resentment at being interrupted on a weekend morning. Your behavior in both cases is a much reflection of your own psychological state as it is a reaction to the event. In touchy situations in particular, it is good to keep in mind that a person's response to your words or deeds might be influenced as much by that person's current core affect as by anything you have said or done.
The reason why I read such books that I just quoted above, it's from "Emotional" by Leonard Mlodinow, because I feel it's meaningful to me as I believe it's crucial to link between the body (emotions) and mind (awareness/rationality) because understanding how emotions "emerge" and how we can appropriate ourselves with our thoughts and decisions. It's meta-understanding (Meta is a prefix that -- in most information technology usages -- means "an underlying definition or description." Metadata summarizes basic information about data, which can make it easier to find, use and reuse particular instances of data.)
Interplay between Vibe and Meaning
This is where I propose, when one has a good understanding about the meta-information of emotion, in which they are aware of the underlying information or cause of the emotion, one can navigate life better. Because life inherently is just a series of decisions and the emotions that put weight or rather essence or soul to those decisions that we have made and future decisions that we plan to make, our wants and whims. Might as well just understand the "nature" of emotions and how it can be bent to fit our wants through understanding.
If I were to bend it upside down and ask you what even are the significance of your decisions without your emotions? Why make any decisions at all if all decisions are indifferent to you? What is emotions but the essence of the decisions that we've made and what we plan to make, doesn't it just tell you how significant is the ability to have feelings and emotions and how much you want your voices and feelings to be heard and understood by other people?
Our decisions are influenced by our emotions and our future decisions are influenced by our perceived emotions towards those decisions. The day you feel no emotions is the day you will justify suicide. The indifferent that shows itself that all future decisions unequivocally bear the same weight, equally meaningless. Though, there are still labour or physically demanding acts of living.
As I'm writing this, It's almost as if I found myself an important piece of the puzzle of depression induced suicide. I would like to grab you by the hand and to travel a little to the meaning of "depression" as we learn from its symptoms. To have more credibility of the meaning of it, I would like to quote an article from PsychCentral, I Feel Nothing: How to Cope with Emotional Numbness as it explains what happens in the brain of a depressed brain:
Why do I feel nothing?
There’s no one answer to this question, but experts have a pretty good theory. Emotional numbness can occur when the limbic system is flooded with stress hormones. This is the area of the brain that deals with emotional regulation and memory.
There’s an emotional component as well. High-stress situations can tax our emotions and exhaust the physical body. The combination of the two can lead to a feeling of being drained and, consequently, numb. Numbness may also be a coping mechanism to prevent more pain from entering the psyche. This is especially true for those in high-stress environments.
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In some cases, antidepressants may be the cause of emotional numbness. A 2017 study, Emotional blunting with antidepressant treatments: A survey among depressed patients showed that 46% of research participants experienced emotional numbness as a side effect of medication, most commonly with a classification of antidepressants called selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (SNRIs).
I agree to what it have to say based on my personal experience with my own depression. Loneliness also plays a crucial factor to this "event" as not many people do feel the "numbness of emotions". But, everyone has stress hormones from time to time, it just maybe has not tipped enough to feel the "numbness of emotions" when the stress hormones "flooded" the brain. So it may relate to other people that does not understand the nature of the situation very clearly. To some degree, everyone experiences some stress at their time of their life, the degree or rather intensity may be just different from person to person in which some person has different "tolerance levels" in which the brain comes to be flooded with depression. The height of it, the heat of the moment, the significance of the consequences implied when the bad things happened, the amount of stress hormones released and the neurotransmitter receptors responsible to bind the stress hormones, all of these are really case by case. So it's not nice to shrug it off and say to people with depression "Just get a grip." Instead, one can listen and analyze where the "stress" is coming from, before the "numbness of emotions" takes over and one finds that there's no more reason to make any more decision as it renders unequivocally meaningless, including talking.
Depression to the tipping point of "numbing of emotions" is really scary and it's real. People who died because of this are not just mere numbers. To say that they are suffering is an understatement in my opinion, because suffering is still under the term of negative emotions. Severe depression is the state that ends all state. Between good vibes and bad vibes, pleasant or unpleasant, positive or negative, there is a "middle ground" in which is experienced by the self, the middle flat state in which one is indifferent to its emotions. As it's brain is quite literally unable to comprehend any emotions, there are simply no weight to one's decision and the making of future decisions. It's over.
If there's anything that I can learn from my depression is that I'm extremely grateful for my ability to feel my feelings, my real human feelings. I come to put together these thoughts as it helps me understand better about myself. I feel that it's right, I do the things I do simply because I like it. Even if there are things that I "must" do despite that I don't like it like doing the chores for example, we all know we do chores because if we don't do it, we are just going to pass the burden to the next person in the house and that's not nice. There's a rational thinking that goes to play that "subsidizes" what our emotions desire. Though, without emotions our rational thinking is absolutely meaningless. As I would like to quote Leonard Mlodinow:
Matters of the heart are the most important matters, and the most difficult to decipher. The new science of emotion has expanded our self-knowledge. We know that emotion is profoundly integrated into the neural circuits of our brains, inseparable from our circuits for "rational" thought. We could live without the ability to reason, but we would be completely dysfunctional if we couldn't feel. Emotion is a part of the mental machinery we share with all higher animals, but even more than rationality its role in our behaviour is what sets us apart from them.
I guess, to tally up this article is that, through good vibes and bad vibes, good days and bad days, pleasant moments and unpleasant moments, positive experiences and bad experiences, be grateful that you are able to feel and recognize those bad emotions are still in coherent levels to the point its registrable by the brain. We now know damn well that it could be unregistrable as bad emotions and that's when it gets really challenging to overcome. Until then, be grateful for the ability to feel, as it is what makes our decisions and ultimately, life, lively and meaningful for us.