When we look around, we find some people on the emotional or sensitive side of the spectrum. These people get affected by sensitive issues more than others. People who are emotional, don’t get emotional for the sake of getting attention; they are emotional because that’s the way they have always been.  Sadly, today not many people want show their emotional side, simply because society considers them as weaklings. Hence people dislike even appearing to be sensitive. Sensitive people frequently live life on the brink of emotional snowballing, which means sometimes their emotions get out of control, and out of proportion in some situations.

A highly emotional personality is also very sensitive and will not need a big stimulus to react. A not so emotional person can also be very sensitive but will not react emotionally at the same stimulus. I think people who are more emotional experience life more than those who aren’t. They are more connected with reality, they feel more deeply than others. Therefore, literally they live more than others. Having feelings makes these people experience the world on different levels with intensity; they see, touch, and feel, hear sounds, smell more vividly. They take in information from the outside world and experience it at personal level in their heart, hence they experience happiness, pain, agony and pleasure, mysteries easily; they are more connected with the surrounding and environment.

A research was carried out by The Carnegie Institute of Technology on EQ that showed that 85% of financial success is due to skills in “connecting with ease with others,” inner personality, ability to communicate, negotiate, and lead. They found that only 15% was due to technical ability. In other words people skills come easily when emotional intelligence is high. And, this is the most crucial skills. Nobel Prize winning Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that people like to do business with a person whom they can trust rather than someone they don’t, even if that that person is offering a better product at a lower price.

Sensitive people are more empathic. Empathy is one of the greatest quality of a person which helps him/her functioning in the world with more understanding because it allows to put oneself in another person’s shoes, and see the world through their eyes, and feel the way they feel. This is incredibly important, as empathizing helps one to understand how other people function, why they do the things that they do, why they behave the way they do, why they talk the way they do. It allows the person to form a very personalized connection with others. Because of vulnerability they become very passionate about causes.  And, nobody can deny the fact that passionate people live a fulfilled life. Unless we connect with the world empathically, we will feel lonely. Even when we are surrounded by people and we don’t feel connected to them, we feel lost in the crowd.  When we experience emotions in response to things that happen outside of ourselves, we are forming a connection to those things and to the world outside our skin.

It’s sad, but people tend to perceive emotional people as weaklings, because emotional people feel things more deeply than others. Sometimes people with high Emotional Quotient make poor decisions, but they learn from those poor decisions, and come out well. Being sensitive is not being weak, in fact it is being human that allows one to be in tune with their souls, and it gives them permission to follow their instinct and have faith in themselves even when they experience odds. Being sensitive helps in looking at flawed people as beautiful people. Sensitive people can handle their egos subtly. They can much easily put their egos aside and bridge gaps with others. Speaking and feeling from a sensitive mind and heart is a strength and not certainly not a weakness.

I think probably when sensitive people show their emotion such as hurt, irritation, frustration or anger, where others see them as wavered. Whereas a more apathetic person, who can put on mask of calmness is able to hide his/her feelings, giving the notion of, “I don’t care”, “I am not bothered.” But then they are the dangerous people who pretend their feelings and emotions.

International search firm Egon Zehnder International analyzed 515 senior executives and discovered that those who were strongest in emotional intelligence were more likely to succeed than those strongest in either IQ or relevant previous experience. Research that has been done on the relationship between emotional intelligence (EQ) and IQ has shown only a weak correlation between the two.

When someone says that “I have invested my emotions in a cause/ a relationship” it means the person has invested his/her energy, conscientiousness, focus, dedication and drive in a relationship or a cause. We don’t deliberate on investing emotions, that’s because we don’t understand the concept. Make your emotions work for you, and you will be unstoppable. The more emotions you experience — the more emotions you can better understand — the more you will learn about yourself and people in general. Weakness is allowing your emotions to take the wheel. Don’t let your emotions govern your life.

When you get affected by situation or condition of other people and try your best to help them in improving or handling difficult situation effectively without making your own condition weak or worse, it is a trait of great human being.

Sigmund Freud the father of psychology said that mind is landscaped. Like a landscape, mind has a structure and each structure has function of its own to play. In Freud’s model of mind the conscious mind (everything that we see and are aware of) is seen as the tip of the iceberg of our unconscious mind. Our unconscious mind is like a storehouse of our primitive wishes, ideas, and impulse which are kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area. According to Freud the structure of the unconscious mind is like a large metal pot ‘cauldron’. So all that we desire but are scared to speak of and some events which have left lasting effect on us of which we are unable to speak because of fright are locked away in the unconscious mind. The ‘locking away’ process happens through suppression/repression. Sigmund Freud emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind; he stated that to a great extent it governs behavior of people. And, the objective of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious (aware).

In 1923, Freud developed a more structural model of the mind comprising of id, ego and superego. These are not physical areas within the brain, but rather hypothetical conceptualizations of important mental functions.

Freud said that the id expresses pleasures which comprises of two kinds of biological instincts or drives which Freud labeled as Eros and Thanatos. Eros helps the individual to survive; it expresses life-sustaining activities such as respiration, eating and sex. The energy created by the life instincts is known as libido. In contrast, Thanatos is viewed as a set of destructive forces present in all human beings such as hostility, aggression and destruction. Freud believed that Eros is stronger than Thanatos, thus enabling people to survive rather than self-destruct.

The ego develops from the id during infancy. The ego’s goal is to satisfy the demands of the id in a safe manner which is socially accepted and does not harm others.  In contrast to the id the ego follows the reality principle as it operates from both the conscious and unconscious mind.

The superego develops during early childhood when the child identifies with the same sex parent and is responsible for setting moral standards to be followed. The superego operates on the ethics and morality principle and motivates us to behave socially in a responsible and acceptable manner. The superego makes us self-governed; we feel ashamed for cheating others or harming others and feel guilty if rules are not followed by us. When there is conflict between the objectives of the id and superego the ego acts as a referee and arbitrates the conflict. The ego can thus organize various defense mechanisms to prevent it from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety.

Freud has explained that our brain guards us from disturbing thoughts and memories by holding back them and he believed that we are almost entirely driven by unconscious sexual desire. So Freud used to say that our dreams are a secret outlet for these repressed desires. Sigmund Freud used dream analysis to interpret the fundamental language of dreams; it is very different from normal conscious thinking. Freud intelligently used id, ego and super-ego to support his research on dreams.

The study of dreaming is called Oneirology; its psychoanalysis runs through neuroscience, psychology, and literature. Do you know, till today the plain fact why we dream is still unexplained. But that hasn’t stopped scientists from coming up with some pretty fascinating premise; each study has come out with variety of reasoning.

Dreaming allows wish fulfillment: After examining and analyzing dreams of hundreds of his patients, Freud came up with a presumption that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Any dream, no matter how terrifying, can be looked at as a way of getting something that you want, either literally or symbolically. If you dream of falling from height, which is the most common dream, the dream suggests that you may have lost control over a particular situation in your life. The situation can possibly be linked to job, work, and school assignment, home or even in your relationship. Falling dreams are usually vivid ones that you can recall them quite easily and are able to remember most of the symbols.

Dreaming is storing an idea in memory: Famous psychiatrist Jie Zhang said that dreams are not just randomly-generated stories caused by neural impulses. Perhaps, there are also more reasons for dreaming them. He said that our brain is always storing memories regardless of whether we are awake or asleep. Dreams are a kind of “temporary storage” area of realization, a spot where we hold memories before we move them from short-term to long-term storage. A dream flashes through our mind before it is filed in our memory.

Dream often cleanses our mind: In our dreams we get rid of undesirable connections and associations that build up in our brains throughout the day. Basically, dreams are garbage collection mechanisms, clearing our minds of useless thoughts and making way for better ones. Essentially, we dream in order to forget the bad actions and deeds. Dreams help us get rid of the information overload of daily life and retain only the most important data. Yes, that’s the truth.

Strengthening what we learn: One theory suggests that we actually dream to remember rather than forget. It’s based on a number of studies that show people remember what they’ve learned better if they dream after learning it.  It supports Jie Zhang’s theory about long-term memory storage; our dreams help us retain what we’ve learned.

Psychiatrists suggest that we should keep people awake and talk to them for hours if they have experienced a trauma. The theory is reinforced by recent studies on trauma, which suggest that when people go to sleep right after a traumatic experience, they are more likely to remember and be haunted by the trauma.

Preparation for threats: Neuroscientist Antti Revonusuo of Finland suggested that dreams play a biological function often to replicate threatening events which prepare us to face it. People who have threatening kinds of dreams are better able to face threats in their waking hours, because they’ve already run through these in their dreams. Harvard medical researcher Deirdre Barrett suggests that dreams are a kind of theatre in which we are able to solve problems more effectively than when we are awake. This happens partly because the dreaming mind makes connections more quickly than the waking mind does. This idea is based in part on experiments she did where people were asked to solve problems while “sleeping on them.” The problem-solving outcomes were better for the candidates who dreamt.

Processing painful emotions with symbolic associations: solving problems in our sleep is itself a kind of Darwinian process. Basically, dreams are natural selection for ideas and this can broaden to the level of emotions, too. One group of researchers suggests that dreams are places where we run through situations and try to select the most useful emotional reactions to them. Psychologist Richart Coutts suggests that this is the best way to react to those situations emotionally. And, we often feel better about painful issues the next morning after a night of dreams. While a Darwinian model of dreaming suggests that we aggressively transform our ideas to weed out problematic and awkward emotions, a new model of dreaming suggests that the process is more like therapy. We don’t aggressively select for the most adaptive idea or emotion, we just run through those ideas and emotions and place them in a broader psychological context. Often, the brain does this by associating an emotion with a symbol.

So friends, dreams play an important role in our emotional, psychological and physical health. We have the romantic, terrifying, emotional, funny, awkward, loving, uniting, separating and weird dreams. What we may not realize is that these dreams are common across cultures and their seemingly wacky content is both important and meaningful. We spend an average of eight hours a night sleeping, which is basically a third of our life. About a quarter of our sleep is spent dreaming, which in an average lifetime represents about six full years of dreaming. Most of the researchers conclude that dreams play a central role in our emotional health, our memory, our learning and to help us to find solutions to our problems.

Psychologists say if a person laughs too much, even at stupid things, he is lonely deep inside. Loneliness is a composite and usually unpleasant emotional response of many people. While, some people like to be alone; they enjoy isolation. I think, even when you are surrounded by many people, you can be lonely. Loneliness comes because of lack of connectedness,company, when you feel you don’t belong to the crowd. Don’t we all feel this sometime? I have seen people sitting quietly in corner in marriages, parties, get-to-gathers or a concert etc. I think when you really don’t feel like mingling with others, you are feeling lonely. One can feel lonely even marriage, relationship, career, friendship – a vacuum is felt. The causes of loneliness are varied which include social, intellectual or emotional factors. It’s better to come out of the loneliness phase as early as possible. It’s better to realize that loneliness is a feeling and not a fact.

Psychologists say if a person sleeps a lot, he is sad. Not necessarily. Some people when they are sad sleep a lot, while others struggle to sleep. But, why depressed people lie in bed most of the time? It’s not because they want to snuggle under the blankets, but it’s because depressed people can’t bring themselves out of the bed. For them almost any action, bustle or task becomes a painful ordeal. Even a simple task such as taking a shower, brushing teeth, or even getting up to go to washroom or getting dressed becomes difficult for depressed people. Lack of motivation, lack of any direction and lack of enthusiasm keeps them in bed.

Psychologists say if a person speaks less but speaks fast, he keeps secrets and lies. Lying is a pervasive trend which we all do to some degree. Sometimes we see that someone associated with us is a blatant liar. Many times we can spot the fibs but we decide to keep mum over them. Liars are quite often worried about being caught – therefore they speak up fast. They speak fast because they don’t want to give the correct information. They quickly jump to answers, give irrelevant details which are inconsistent. A research has proved that people lie because they want to conceal truth. When people intentionally want to hide something, they speak less and if they speak, they speak very fast. And another A research at Harvard proves that powerful people are superior liars.  If someone is constantly in powerful position, his/her lying improves. When people are given power, they are in more comfortable position while lying. And it becomes hard to detect their lies because of their positions.

Psychologists say if someone can’t cry, he is weak. More women are voicing their belief that men and boys should be encouraged to express sensitive emotions. When a man sheds tears, it means that he lives by a code of values and cares enough to show emotion when things went wrong. Medieval warriors and Japanese samurai cried during times of epic tragedy. In Western culture, a man’s capacity to cry indicates his honesty and integrity. Abraham Lincoln used strategic tears during his speeches, and modern presidents have followed the suit. Healthier men and women do not resist crying; people cry out their suppressed emotions, as crying allows them to vent out. It is very true that weaker people don’t cry.  Strong emotions cause our brains to release chemicals that indirectly lead to teary eyes. A flow of tears not only shoots up the level of endorphins – natural chemicals within the body, but it proves a sense of well-being and relieving stress. A flow of tears also release toxins from our body making us healthier. So, dear friends, crying is a healthier sign.

Psychologists say that if someone eats in an abnormal manner, he is tense. Nervous or tense people eat even when they are not hungry; they use food as a way to deal with feelings instead to satisfy hunger. It happens to all of us sometime or the other. Sometimes we finish the entire packet of chips, or occasionally we eat 4 bananas out of anxiety or boredom. I have seen children eating a lot prior to their exams. But when we eat a lot, especially without realizing it, eating can affect or weight, health, and overall well-being. It’s better to make the connection between eating and our feelings. It’s better to understand what drives us to eat so much. Emotional eating is prompted by negative feelings. Yes, people often turn to food when they’re stressed out, lonely, sad, anxious, or bored.

Psychologists say that if someone cries on little things, he is innocent & soft-hearted. Biologically, there may be a reason why women cry more than men: Testosterone may inhibit crying, while the hormone Prolactin which is seen in higher levels in women may promote it.  You will watch some people crying in theater while watching some emotional scenes or television serials. Innocent people believe Innocence implies lesser experience, lesser exposure in either a relative view to social peers, or by an absolute comparison to a more common normative scale. In comes out of ignorance, lack of knowledge, lack of experience and lack of wrongdoing, whereas greater knowledge comes from doing wrong.

Psychologists say that if someone becomes angry over silly or petty (small) things, it means he needs love. Anger can occur when people don’t feel well, feel rejected, feel threatened, or experience some loss. The type of pain does not matter; the important thing is that the pain experienced is unpleasant. Because anger never occurs in isolation but rather is necessarily preceded by pain feelings, it is often characterized as a ‘secondhand’ emotion. Remember, when a person gets angry over small things it is a sign that he/she needs lots of love. A person craves for attention/love – and when he does not get it he loses his temper over small things. Real love makes us feel vulnerable.

I love this beautiful quote by Anonymous: I am strong because I am weak. I am beautiful because I know my flaws. I am a lover because I am a fighter. I am fearless because I have been afraid. I am wise because I have been foolish. & I can laugh because I’ve known sadness.

Life is nothing but a paradox.