1) Recent research has found that emotions can be unconsciously evoked without awareness of the triggering event. Studies showed that people's emotions and words were affected by brief exposures to disturbing images, even though they were unaware of the cause. 2) Many decisions are influenced by emotional responses, even if we aren't consciously aware of them. Emotions evolved to quickly signal threats and prompt action. 3) While emotions can provide useful cues, they are an ancient system prone to "false alarms" in modern contexts. Noticing and interpreting emotions allows us to make conscious decisions rather than automatic reactions. This can help break unhelpful habits like binge eating that developed from emotional responses.

1. How Do Emotions
Influence Our
Behaviors?
www.bingeeatingbreakthrough.com

2. Science Daily reports that most people agree that
emotions can be caused by a specific event and
that the person experiencing it is aware of the
cause, such as a child’s excitement at the sight of
Santa Claus.
But recent research suggests emotions also can be
unconsciously evoked and manipulated.

3. Psychologists Kirsten Ruys and Diedrick Stapel of
the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Economics
Research at Tillburg University in The Netherlands
have uncovered the first empirical evidence to
suggest we do not need to be aware of the event
that caused their mood or feelings in order to be
affected by it.
(You can see the full article here:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/0
80428155208.htm

4. They hypothesized that, since humans have
evolved to respond quickly and unconsciously to
threats, they should be able to react to an
emotional event without full awareness.
Why? Because, as the psychologists explained,
you’re likely to live longer if you immediately stop
moving at the sight of a growling grizzly bear and
do not need full awareness for such a response to
be instigated.

5. They studied 3 groups and proved that after brief,
quick exposures to disgusting or scary images,
people’s words and emotions were affected. So
there was no real threat, just an image. But the
brief sight of the image caused an emotional shift
in the participants.
These findings are the first to demonstrate that
specific emotions can be evoked without
awareness of the cause and a person’s overall
mood can develop into a specific emotion.
-

6. Your Emotions Drive
Many Of Your Decisions
(Whether You Realize It Or Not)

7. Your emotions will drive the decisions you make
today, and your success may depend upon your
ability to understand and interpret them.
When an emotion is triggered in your brain, your
nervous systems responds by creating feelings in
your body (also commonly called a “gut feeling”)
and certain thoughts in your mind.

8. Many or most of your decisions are informed by
your emotional responses. That’s what emotions
are designed to do: to appraise and summarize an
experience and inform your actions.
But if an emotion is triggered, just how much
should you pay attention to your visceral response
and the thoughts it creates?

9. For instance, if you have a fight with your partner,
perhaps you feel lonely or sad afterward. And let’s
say that, over time, you’ve turned to other things
to be able to find comfort or emotional relief
when you feel this way…like food (or alcohol, or
sex, or shopping or gossiping or celebrity news or
whatever).

10. Because you’ve turned to the outside
thing to relief the feeling, when you
do that multiple times, you begin to
build a habit in your brain. Your
neurons literally start wiring together
to establish this habitual response to
the emotion.

11. Emotions Are Clumsy

12. Emotions are not particularly sophisticated
or precise, but their speed and utility make
up for what they lack in sophistication and
precision. Emotions, when they are not
disordered, provide information about your
circumstances in a simple, quick way that
does not require a lot of thinking or
awareness.
Your emotions serve as a cueing system–an
attention directing system associated with
physiological changes that can prepare you
to take action.

13. For example, imagine that you are
negotiating a contract and begin to get
anxious.
If something doesn’t feel right, what’s
happening is that your emotional system
that is informing you to further evaluate the
situation.

14. Perhaps the other person reminds your emotional
brain of someone in the past who took advantage
of you. Is this person doing the same thing or is it
just a particular mannerism he has that triggered
your anxious response? Is your anxious response a
reaction to the other person or to yourself?
Maybe it’s your own fear of success or failure.
Many people think of their emotions as
something they have to manage or control rather
than something upon which they could capitalize
on.

15. While emotions are created to direct our attention
to physiological changes to prepare us to take
action, this system is clumsy. There are many false
alarms.
Why? Perhaps because you’re dealing with an
ancient system that evolved to keep us safe from
lions or death 10,000 years ago…but the cues in
modern society are quite different.
Wired to be stimulated to keep us safe, our
emotional brains get triggered and prepare us to
react in ways that may be a misfire.

16. Utilizing Your Emotions
As a Valuable Tool

17. However, this fascinating system can be utilized as
a tool…your emotions can be an invaluable
resource to capitalize on rather than ignoring,
managing, controlling or reacting without
consideration.
Emotions can tell you something about the world
that you may not have accurately perceived in
another way. They are something to interpret and
use rather than an annoyance that you should
ignore or control.

18. Emotions are like an indicator that you have with
you all the time.
If you have a sense or “feeling” about something,
the more you practice checking in to notice your
feeling, the more you develop awareness. The
more awareness you have, the more you can
make decisions consciously.

19. As you make conscious decisions, you create
the outcomes you intended.
And when you create the outcomes you
intended…your self-esteem naturally rises.
When you feel like you are able to generate
the outcomes or results you want in your
life, you feel in control and empowered.

20. So next time you start to repeat a behavior
that’s become a habit, like overeating or
binge eating, notice the emotions you’re
having.
When you pause to notice your emotions,
you can then begin to understand them and
see the emotions as an indicator. You can
decide consciously whether you want to
respond or not, rather than reacting and
repeating the same habit.

21. Relating This To Binge
Eating…

22. If part of you feels the urge to binge and part of
you doesn’t want to binge, pausing to notice the
conflict and letting the emotions run their course
will give you freedom in your behavior.

23. Rather than reacting to the urge, you can notice
your emotions, appreciate that they are triggered
by something, and choose to let them come and
go.
By doing this, you’ll begin to break your old habit
of binge eating to establish new habits to deal
with the emotions.
It may be hard to distinguish what emotion you’re
feeling that’s driving your behavior.

24. If you have a long-established habit, you’re
dealing with a habit instead of an emotional
reaction.
However, the habit started with an emotion at
one point. It can be broken and a new one can be
created with conscious awareness.

25. For more about our brains, emotions and binge
eating as well as a free video course, visit
http://www.bingeeatingbreakthrough.com.