Why you would die without feelings

By: Aaron Mitchum

Feelings help us survive. Without them we would die. This is because feelings tell us what a moment means to us and what we need to do to adapt to that for the sake of survival. They alert us to how things are going in terms of biological needs. Let’s take an every day example: all of a sudden you notice the stairs you’re going down because they are kind of tricky and the normal way you learned to go down stairs, that’s become so automatic you don’t even think about it anymore, won’t work in this situation. Feelings of being off balance alerted fear which alerted you to the fact that you need to pay attention (i.e. think about) how you are stepping in order to not fall. Without our basic emotions we wouldn't know when we were in danger, or in love, or how to care for our children. But of course our complex lives don’t only make us feel one thing at a time usually. We feel a bunch of things at once which can leave us feeling conflicted. A classic example that Mark Solms uses in his book, The Hidden Spring, is: when someone enrages us but we fear social backlash and guilt if we were to act on our instinct to attack them. This is where thinking comes in. We use thinking to slow down our emotional instincts and instead imagine what the future would feel like if we acted on our impulses. We run virtual trial and error scenarios. Doing this helps us navigate what will work for meeting our competing needs and what won’t. In the case of rage it might require us to choose to channel it into less primal routes like: speaking up for ourself, turning it into art or music or letting it fuel us to make a needed change, etc. If we didn’t feel we wouldn’t know how to adapt to new contexts to get what we need to survive and surely we would die quickly. That said, we can’t live in our societies and with the ideals, values and morals we hold without adding thinking to our feelings as well.