How Emotions Are Made

An emotion is your brain’s creation of what your bodily sensations mean, in relation to what is going on around you in the world.

we are taught to reframe sensation as emotion. While the two are obviously related—nerves often do result in a fluttery feeling in the stomach—the message we’re getting is that when we feel sensation, the next step is interpretation. The sensation itself is not really worth discussing. Instead, when we feel something in the body, we either ignore i

The outside universe we perceive doesn’t exist as such. Through a series of electrical and chemical reactions, we generate a reality internally.

Human beings are not at the mercy of mythical emotion circuits buried deep within animalistic parts of our highly evolved brain: we are architects of our own experience.

In short, we find that your emotions are not built-in but made from more basic parts. They are not universal but vary from culture to culture. They are not triggered; you create them. They emerge as a combination of the physical properties of your body, a flexible brain that wires itself to whatever environment it develops in, and your culture and