Susan Britton MCC explains how three brain chemicals—dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine—create the emotions you feel. She covers secondary modulators like cortisol and oxytocin, then shares practical ways to shift your emotional state through breathing, movement, and sleep.
Susan Britton with the Academies, and we're talking about emotions today, the biology of emotions, and specifically the neurobiology of emotions. For a number of years, neuroscientists have proposed that there's a locus or a location within the brain where certain emotions reside, and they've looked at this through fMRI scanners where they'd hook people up and the people would experience some sort of fright or gratitude or anxiousness, and they'd look at what part part of the brain was lit up. Well, what they started to discover is that different parts of the brain would light up, so there probably wasn't a specific one location where that emotion started from or resides. And now what they're looking at is this concept of a three primary emotion hypothesis. So similarly to three primary colors that our eyes can see— red and green and blue— that allows us to see a big spectrum and range of colors, There also is a thought that there are 3 primary emotions that have the beginnings of different pathways so that we can experience a lot of different emotions. But in, in essence, the 3 primary emotions that neuroscientists are hypothesizing now that can lead to all of these other emotions are dopamine. So that's the, the neuromodulator that drives us towards getting things and getting rewarded, whether it's food or a promotion. There's also 5-HT. 5-HT is hydroxytryptamine, I think. Yeah, easier to remember as serotonin. So there's a relation between those two, and they're discovering that there are emotions related to, let's say, disgust or punishment related to that. Then the third one is norepinephrine, and so that's going to be your typical sort of fight-flight type of emotion where we would experience fear or anxiety. Certainly there are other emotions— excuse me, other neuromodulators like cortisol and oxytocin that are what they call secondary pathways. The relevance of all of that is that if you are experiencing any number of emotions, whether it is frustration, or it's worry, anxiety, anger, something like that that might be throwing you off a bit. Maybe you've got some uncertainty in your world, and that would be certainly a trigger for having some of those different emotions. If you think about what is the biology going on within me, and if you can discover that perhaps it's just a norepinephrine sort of overload that's responsible for that fight-flight, and think about how do I formulaically change that within my body. So that's going to be whether it's breathing or movement or sleep or something that's going to help kind of change that chemical makeup so that you can sort of dial up the formula that you want, that you need to be able to get into a state where you have the emotions that are going to work best for you. Enjoy experimenting with that.
Susan’s ICF Educator Award | The Heart Behind the Impact Katy Montgomery, PCC
