How Your Senses Can Affect Your Emotions

Did you know that your senses can influence your emotions and mood? Smells, sounds, colors, and even daylight have a direct impact on your behavior.

The alarm sounds. You try to open your eyes, but you don’t know why it’s so difficult. You can’t form a single thought or idea. Finally, you get up, open the window, and look outside. The sky is gray. How do you feel?

The alarm sounds. You open your eyes eagerly. Today will be a good day, you can feel it. You have so many plans. You jump up, open the window, and look outside. The sun is radiant. The light is spectacular. How do you feel?

Weather. Light. Smells. Sounds. All of this can influence your mood and emotions. Think about how you dress when you feel sad. It’s common to wear dark colors like gray, brown, and black. Now think about happy moments. Everything is colorful. Orange, yellow, green, blue.

Smells and sounds can elicit emotions

A smell can transport you to a moment from your childhood, to the cake that your mom made you for your birthday. A song can remind you of a special person, the first dance, the first kiss. One song might evoke happy memories, and others not so much.

Your mood in the morning, the colors you wear, the memories you have, the way you behave…everything is related to the emotions that you feel.

Contrary to how it might seem, all of these emotions are good. But you might give them a positive or negative spin, depending on how you feel.

It’s natural that sometimes, you don’t want the people around you to know how you really feel, and you mask your emotions so that you don’t appear vulnerable or sad. And other times, you unconsciously deceive yourself about your true feelings. In any case, you wear a suit of armor to protect yourself from getting hurt.

But you know what? If the people who love you don’t know how you feel, they won’t be able to help you. And if you don’t ask for help, they won’t be able to help you either.

Maybe you were taught not to ask for anything, to be self-sufficient, so when you find yourself in a situation that you don’t know how to fix, you don’t know how to ask for help, or don’t dare to. But asking isn’t bad. On the contrary, it brings you closer to the people you love. In doing so, you’re telling them that you trust in them. And the people who love you have emotions, too.

Imagine what it would be like to feel good every day

Emotional management is learned. For example, if you feel sad, you can change your mood by wearing happy colors. If you feel depressed, listen to an upbeat song that will make you dance. Break down your walls and change your attitude, and the circumstances you live in will be in your own hands. You have the power to decide how you want your day to go.

In a story by Jorge Bucay, sadness and fury are both bathing in a magical pond. Fury, who is always in a hurry, bathes quickly and leaves the pond. It puts on its clothes, but because it can’t see reality very clearly, it doesn’t realize that they were actually sadness’s clothes.

So when sadness gets out of the water, slowly and unaware of how much time has passed, it realizes that its clothes aren’t there, so there’s nothing to do but put on fury’s clothes instead.

So remember that in the same way that you sometimes want to hide your emotions behind a mask, other people are doing the same thing.

Knowing how to manage your emotions isn’t always easy

When you get angry in an argument with your partner or a friend, remember that they might be hiding their true feelings behind their words. Their shouts might simply be a way to indicate how bad they feel without expressing it out loud.

Learning to understand others is a sign of wisdom. And you can do it if you stop to think about what certain emotions mean to you and how they affect you when you think of a certain memory or listen to a certain song.

It’s up to you to decide how you want your day to go. And remember that happiness is also learned.