We all need basic skills for our mature adult living. We need the ability to solve problems, make good decisions, communicate better and settle arguments peacefully. We are all emotional beings, more emotional than we seem to realize. Every day we live our lives with feelings and emotion. There are sorrows, excitement, joys and disappointment, also love and fear, dismay and hope. We could feel all of these emotions within any given day. Our lives would be dull without the ability to show our emotions. However, our emotions can cause us trouble when we are too intense. These feelings can cause us to lose close friends, warp our judgment and just make us miserable and sometimes the other people around us. Emotions are the greatest driving force in our lives.

Emotion and feelings can refer to any mood and attitude because of reactions from the past or the present. Emotions are not always on purpose. Our reactions are different according to various situations. It is possible to experience several different emotions at one time. You can have mixed feelings of both love and hate that can develop when someone you like or respect mistreats you. We are not always able to fully or readily control our emotions and we do not always think in an objective frame of mind. Sometimes as children we learn to hide our emotions so others do not really know what we are feeling. Emotion is a departure from the normal calm state of an organism. This departure includes strong feelings, an impulse toward open action, and certain internal physical reactions; any one of the states designated as fear, anger, grief, joy, surprise, yearning, etc.

We develop emotional habits and motives and these learned emotional habits can be reactions to other people or to anything physical around us. Sometimes we express our emotions as we have goals we wish to obtain. A correlation exists between the emotional habits we acquire and the role of the habits in our motivations. As a person grows into an adult he matures and learns to think and to react emotionally and to modify his behavior. There is evidence that emotions have a hereditary basis. If you study an animal in the wild, you can try to tame him, but only to a certain extent as he has learned not to trust just to survive.

Fear is an emotion that is specific, moreover, it is a normal reaction to an obvious threat. People can acquire many sorts of fears. People have varied experiences that will make them be fearful later after the first fearful experience. Fear can help to avoid or survive risky situations by warning you either to flee or to protect yourself. It will signal your nervous system to remain on red alert until the danger passes. Sometimes it makes sense to act on your normal fear by seeking safety, but other times it can hold back emotional growth and keep you from enjoying your life.

At times fear can become a super fear, called phobia. This type of fear can cause people to be afraid to fly in an airplane, be afraid of crowds and just make an ordinary situation seem much worse than it is. There are sometimes reactions to dangers that do not even exist. The definition of a phobia is an intense, irrational fear, usually acquired through conditioning to an unpleasant object or situation.

Pleasure is a satisfying emotion. It is sometimes relief from tension or from relief from fear or anger. We just like to have pleasure as this is a good emotion and feels good.

Anger is an emotion that underlies aggressive behavior. It is the most difficult of all emotions for adult. We get angry at whatever keeps us from achieving our ends, and if we stay frustrated then we can acquire a conditioned hostility toward the obstacle and things similar to it. This conditioned hostility is most common in older children and in adults.

Depression is another emotion that can make us feel very low and can be in a range from just a short time to months of despair. Some people who suffer from depression can lose interest in living and surely they will miss out on the fun in life. There can be intense surges of love or hate, fits of jealousy, or periods of elation and depression during the adolescent years. There are emotions that are very close to depression such as feeling hurt or neglected or even jealous.

Frustration is the key to understanding anger and hostility. Environmental frustration is when environmental obstacles frustrate the satisfaction or motives by making it difficult or impossible for a person to attain his goal. This feeling is largely from unachieved goals because they are out of reach of the person and his abilities. The problem is that one may learn goals, have levels of aspiration but these levels are too high for his level of performance. The last category of frustration is conflict of motives.

An attitude is a tendency to respond positive (favorably) or negatively (unfavorable) to certain persons, objects, or situations. It is a tendency to react emotionally in one direction or another. An attitude can be pleasant, hostile, or fearful. A prejudice is an unfavorable attitude toward some person, living thing, or inanimate object. Prejudices are attitudes.

When our emotions change we have bodily changes such as being terrified, violently angry or excited. In most cases we are not even aware of these changes. A wide variety of bodily changes occur in the following symptoms: dryness of the mouth, need to urinate, and sickness in the stomach, pounding of the heart or the muscles becoming tense. We have changes in our emotions. Changes occur and initiate by a part of the nervous system called the autonomic system. This system consists of many nerves leading from the brain and spinal column out to the various organs of the body, including particularly the blood vessels serving both the interior and exterior muscles. The autonomic system has two parts, which usually work in opposition to each other. One part, the sympathetic system, increases the heart rate and blood pressure and distributes blood to the exterior muscles. The other part of the system is the parasympathetic system. It tends to be active when we are calm and relaxed.

We need to develop skills to maintain our emotion under pressure. There are two basic ways to live. You can approach problems head-on as you prepare to deal with them and you can avoid problems either by running from them or by acting as if they do not exist. How you learn to cope with the unexpected in daily life will decide the quality of your life in the years ahead. Methods that reduce anxiety may be necessary to improve that part of your personality.