Introducing the Emotion Safari

This week we’ll dive into a very interesting technique I like to call the “emotion safari”. It’s designed to increase mindfulness of the Big Five primitive emotions we covered last week. 

But first, let’s take a quick 1-2-3 recap of the Big Five primitive emotions:

  1. We all struggle to consistently do the things we know are good for us and avoid doing the things we know are bad for us. 
  2. The reason for this irrational behavior is that our world has changed completely over the last 0.1% of human history (more details), leaving many of our instincts and emotions badly outdated. 
  3. The five most important primitive emotions are: craving, ego, sloth, frustration and worry. They all worked worked fine over the first 99.9% of human history, but are causing big problems in today’s world. 

The first post last week also introduced the idea of the caveman with an evolved consciousness. It states that each of us consists of two entities:

  • A body and mind that evolved over the first 99.9% of human history (the caveman). 
  • An evolved consciousness capable of reasoning beyond these primitive caveman instincts. 

To make this more concrete, I encouraged you to give your caveman a name 🙂 This is a fun experiment that allows you to directly communicate with your outdated emotions. 

Getting a high level of control over your body and mind with these techniques requires a thorough understanding. Hence, we get to this week’s…

Monday 5-minute action Get to know the Big Five primitive emotions by heart

 

I strongly encourage you to reread last weeks post. It’s crucial that you know the Big Five well enough to instantly recognize them if they pop up in you head. 

These primitive emotions do most of their damage when they can remain abstract and fuzzy. But the moment we shine a light on them, they lose a lot of their power. 

And this is the aim of the emotion safari: training the mind to shine a light on these dark creatures whenever they close in. 

Tomorrow, we’ll cover the technique in detail. See you then!