Sometimes, when I do public speaking engagements, I ask the audience to define an emotion. We feel emotions every single day, but when asked to explain what an emotion is, most people blanch.
“A thing you feel?” someone will ask, tenuously.
“You know, like… sadness or whatever,” someone will venture.
It’s hard… I don’t even have a great definition for an emotion, except to describe how it’s different from a thought. We conflate thoughts and emotions all the time, and this even sneaks into our lexicon when we say things like, “I feel like pizza is the best food” or “I feel like you’re judging me right now.”
But those are both thoughts. A thought is anything you can put between a set of quotation marks – or if you’re a more visual person, anything you’d put into a comic book character’s thought bubble:
But you can’t put an emotion into a thought bubble. An emotion is a single word used to describe how you feel. No one walks around thinking, “anger!” Instead, they might think, “I feel angry,” which is a thought about a feeling. Make sense?
The other thing about an emotion is that it’s a variation on one of these words:
(The movie Inside Out personified five of these emotions and did a great job of describing the function and purpose of each.)
Because our language is so precise and colorful, we have thousands of words to describe emotions… but most of them boil down to the above list. You might say you’re feeling content or ecstatic. They both boil down to happy, even though they mean very different things. To oversimplify, you might say this is a function of intensity. Your “happy” might fall anywhere on this line:
Inevitably, when I present this list of six emotions, people will try to come up with emotion words that they can’t fit into any of those categories.
“What about anxious?”
“Fear.”
“Surprise?”
“Happiness with fear.”
“Boredom or apathy?”
“Those are words people use to describe a lack of emotion, or very low levels of emotion.”
“Frustration?”
Ah, frustration.
I used to say it was a variation on anger… but I was wrong.
Okay already, so what’s frustration?
Frustration, in a nutshell, is the feeling of holding back a feeling.
Often, that feeling is anger. Expressing untethered anger, in its most raw and unprocessed form, can be damaging to other people. And a lot of people associate anger with frustration because anger is a secondary emotion, which means it’s playing a protective role for something more vulnerable like sadness, fear, or shame.
So it’s a bit of a downward arrow:
Sometimes people believe that the softer emotions are weakness, so they bar themselves from feeling anything other than anger and happiness. Then people learn that those emotions aren’t okay – anger will get them in trouble, and untempered happiness is “dorky” – and what results is a feeling of frustration.
Sometimes the word people use isn’t frustration – it’s impatience or restlessness or dissatisfaction. But these words all boil down to the same thing: Your emotional expression needs aren’t being met.
So what can you do about this?
The quickest way to alleviate frustration is to identify the underlying emotion and put how you’re feeling into words. If the emotion is anger, ask yourself what’s underneath the anger. So it might look like this:
The best thing to do is to say these things aloud to another person. Sharing the experience with someone who’s empathic can build connection, and connection a strong antidote to negative feelings. But even if you can’t voice these things to another person, identifying the underlying feelings for yourself will help you to process them.
Then you can analyze which pieces of your situation you can control and which pieces you can’t. In the moment, you can call ahead to apologize and let the person know you’re running late. In the future, you can set an alarm for when you need to be out the door in three minutes.