Let’s take a little side trip and spend a few moments to better understand how emotions work.

Experts on emotions tell us that the soul responds to stimuli by both what we think and what we feel. While our thoughts and feelings are different parts of our soul, it is hard to separate them from each other. We know from research that we have distinct emotions like happiness, excitement, sadness, and anger. Or we can just describe our emotions by whether they are positive or negative and by their intensity, such as strong or weak. Emotions occur when we experience something different than what we expect or want. We get upset when we fail to meet our goal. We get excited when we win, and even more excited if we did not expect to win. If we receive more of something good or less of something bad, then we have positive emotion. If we receive less of something good or more of something bad, then we have negative emotion.