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Comment by iovrthoughtthis | Hacker News Reader

it’s not so clear cut, instead it’s very interlinked.

what you think effects your body, what you do effects your mind.

e.g. worrying will cause your heart rate to increase ad your breathing to quicken, breathing slowly will reduce your heart rate, a lower heart rate will reduce your sense of anxiety.

your body is a sensor, your mind is the computer. emotions are like the ships diagnostic warnings from star trek.

edit:

id add that this is why “mastering your emotions” using the control sense of mastering, doesn’t make sense.

you don’t want to control your diagnostics, you want to be great at reading them and making decisions from them, aligning with them if you will.

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I agree that it's all very interlinked, but that doesn't mean there's no distinction. Changing your way of thinking is purely psychological, whereas changing what you eat is both.

> id add that this is why “mastering your emotions” using the control sense of mastering, doesn’t make sense.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, it seems to contradict what you said in the earlier sentence? For example, if you have migraines due to stress, and you learn to control your emotions, you could reduce migraines. Breathing slowly is one way to do so, but there's also a lot of more or less purely psychological ways of doing it (e.g. CBT).

i didn’t want to imply there was no difference between the body and emotions. just that they are a integral parts of the same system.

> I’m not sure I understand you, it seems to contradict what you said earlier.

i did contradict myself because both are true at the same time. my example was one of malfunction, an over reactive warning systems. your example is one of, i assume, coping with unchangeable external stressors.

fyi, the later is a good example of how disconnected we can become. a migraine caused by stress (like any other painful symptom) is pretty late into the warning system that our emotions behave as. while breathing to reduce pain is a good coping tactic, as a long term strategy it isn’t removing the stressors and so only relieves that particular symptom. in that situation i would hope to align myself with my warning system and attempt to change my environment such that the stressor is removed.

if you’re in a situation where the you feel stressor cannot be removed, that is a different discussion.

in the situation where the stressor isn’t apparent then i would seek a therapist as perhaps there are past traumas that have been experienced which exacerbate your emotional response to some stimulus.

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