Using Emotional Power to Envision the Impossible

Emotions are powerful. They can radically change the ways that we think, feel, and act in just fractions of a second.

The world can often feel chaotic and out of control. In our daily lives, we can become stuck in cycles of anger and grief. Our circumstances, whatever they are, can feel completely entrenched, as if there is no way out and no hope. Often in these times, we feel alone, as if no one understands or, even worse, that other people are helping to create the terrible situation.

These feelings might or might not have a basis in reality, but we experience these situations as very real and they feel terrible.

What we often don’t appreciate is that this feeling is the known consequence of many negative emotions, particularly sadness and anxiety. After a loss, sadness helps us withdraw and reconsider our options and actions. When we’re under threat of loss, anxiety makes us look for dangers and think carefully about our next moves. Both emotions focus our attention on the negative parts of our lives and our experiences. This is functional in that it helps us to reduce the likelihood that we will fail in the future by encouraging us to slow down and think carefully about our actions. But it can also become a cycle that is hard to break out of.

My colleague Linda Levine described negative emotions like a narrow highlighter over the text of our lives – they draw attention and focus to very specific types of information. When we’re sad, we will spend time thinking about the loss that made us sad, remembering all of the past times that we failed, and the future will seem bleak as we consider all the ways we might fail moving forward. Once you start highlighting your narrative, it can be hard to see the other stories that are not highlighted.

It’s critical not to stay stuck in this state of feeling hopeless, helpless, and disconnected. If we do, we could lose opportunities to change the situation and contribute to the world. If we have unexpectedly lost a job, it is normal to feel grief and like a failure. But if we don’t move on, we won’t find new, meaningful work where we can be successful and make valuable contributions. How do we get out of these funks?

Multiple intriguing studies in psychology have shown that positive emotions can “undo” the effects of negative emotions. Whereas negative emotions act like narrow highlighters on very specific types of information, many positive emotions broaden attention and focus, expanding our view of the world around us and what we are capable of accomplishing. Emotions like joy and amusement can have these effects. They represent a broader highlighter, capturing more of your narrative and seeing the strengths of your past and the hope for your future.

man feeling awe

Source: Bricolage/Shutterstock

But one emotion – awe – can be so powerful that it can help you envision radically different perspectives.

Awe is an emotional state that involves the perception of information that does not fit in one’s current worldview. It is lauded by great poets, explorers, and scientists as the key ingredient of life that drives innovation and discovery. It is marked by a sense of vastness and the need to accommodate information that was previously unknown. It is often experienced as overwhelming and with slowed time, causing people to stand rapt, observing and trying to understand. Awe is reported in a variety of situations that push the boundaries of our understanding – viewing the earth from the distance of space, staring into the face of a newborn child, witnessing passage into death, encountering a magnificent landscape, observing people stand for a noble cause.

Awe has been shown to have a number of effects. It is associated with feelings of smallness or as if the “self” is reduced, connection with something larger than the self, and often with feelings of connection with others. It is often experienced as indescribable and not easily captured in words. It can promote creativity, presumably because it helps us set aside our assumptions. Awe is often associated with a feeling of peace and reduced focus on our own worries.

This is the opposite of what happens when we feel stuck in negative emotion and helpless in the situation. Suddenly, there are possibilities and ways of seeing things that we never considered before. During awe, anything and everything seems possible and the future feels limitless. Awe could be a perfect cure for breaking out of the funk that negative emotions can create.

If negative emotions act as highlighters of very specific information, keeping us focused on failure and threat, awe erases the highlighter of negative emotion and throws away the page that was highlighted. It might even help us to take a step back and realize that we are in an entire library of possibilities. Awe can be a tool to help us move beyond what is known and envision the new, the different, the impossible.