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Understanding primary emotions are a key and important part of maintaining our emotional and mental health. Whether it’s dealing with daily life difficulties or working out depression or anxiety, primary emotions are a great way to help cope with daily life.

Often times people find themselves in situations where they are feeling out of control or lack the motivation to do anything. Although these situations may be observable moments in dealing with anxiety and depression, understanding and taking charge of our primary emotions is a fantastic way to support our life challenges.

Now in the world of primary emotions, no one expert in the field of emotions completely agree on the word choices given in the area of primary emotions. I’m actually okay with this because sometimes it’s nice to have a few extra words kicking around our emotional root issues to figure out what I’m feeling. In other words, I, along with others who work with primary emotions find that if we can figure out the roots of what is emotionally bothering us, then this will help support with what is known as “emotional regulation”.  

Emotional regulation is simply being able to control our emotions, rather than being out of control of our emotions. And the more in control of my primary emotions the more opportunity there is to walk out life in a calm, caring, wise way. This is much better than freaking out uncontrollably (unofficial NLC clinical phrase) and projecting my negative emotions onto family, friends and co-workers.

This is one of the reasons I find even venting to a close friend a good thing to do…as long as primary emotions are intentionally being captured in the conversation.

Notice I’m not talking about what are called secondary emotions. The main reason is I find secondary emotions tend to be fleeting and don’t get to the source of the issue.

One example how secondary emotions are fleeting is the secondary emotion called happiness. Happiness is awesome when it’s around, however, next time your jamming to your tunes driving Deer Foot in Calgary Alberta and you get cut off by a vehicle; watch how quickly your happiness disappears and then your unhealthy feelings of anxiety, depression and a slight wish for vengeance kicks in, just wishing a police officer had just seen that horrible and dangerous driving maneuver that almost caused an accident.   

Again, I love primary emotions because they help support us in getting to the root/core issue of what we are often times feeling and if I can change negative core feelings to positive core feelings, I can then support my emotional and mental health more effectively and deal with challenging life events more effectively.

Here is a combined list of what is commonly referred to as primary emotions.  

Hurts (and Anguish), Fear(s), Anger, Shame (and Disgust), Loss (and Rejection), Sadness (and Despair), Joy, Surprise.

So next time you’re bothered by something or a life situation and you just can’t quite put your finger on it; go back to this list and figure out what primary emotion(s) you’re dealing with in order to support your personal self-regulation so you can figure out what’s really going on deep inside of yourself.

Now, if you’re finding the situation(s) you’re dealing with at your core primary emotions are 3 or more, or even all of them, and you’re still having a difficult time self-regulating yourself, it might be time to consider going to see a professional counselling therapist or psychotherapist that can support you in dealing with the difficult clusters of primary emotions that are all intertwined and making it difficult to navigate through and preventing you from walking in New Life.