Amazement
Have you ever stared off the top of a mountain feeling awestruck and humbled?
Amazement is a rare and powerful emotion that combines two emotional extremes: happiness and fear. Imagine standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. What range of emotions do you feel?
Staring down that sheer cliffside dwarfed by the size of this natural wonder, you may feel happiness, enjoying the rare chance to see this extraordinary sight.
You may feel small, comparing your tiny body to miles and miles of rocky canyon. You may feel scared, wondering what would happen if you tumbled all the way down to the bottom. And finally, you may feel surprised because there's nothing like seeing a natural wonder with your own two eyes.
All these contradicting emotions combine to create amazement or reverence. This single emotion stirs your hearts. It creates powerful memories in your brain and leaves you awestricken for hours.
It's common for amazing experiences to change something inside you, to shift your priorities or alter your perspective. Now, while amazement is commonly associated with nature, other experiences create the same electrifying effect.
You feel it standing beside a skyscraper or walking for the first time into a bustling city. You may only experience amazement a few times in your life, but that handful of memories may be the ones that you treasure the most.
Courage
What is courage? Courage drives you to face your fears. It compels you to stand up for others, to right wrongs, and resist temptation.
But why is courage such a difficult emotion to experience? Well, because it contradicts everything our evolution tells us. You see, humans experience fear for a reason. Fear keeps you safe. It protects you from unnecessary danger. Fear is how you preserve your own life and lineage.
But what happens when you listen to your fears? Sometimes, it saves you from getting hurt, but other times, it opens the door for cruelty, sadness, and pain. If everyone in the world listened to their fears, this pain would go unchecked.
And that's why people throughout history have discovered the courage to face their fears. That courage not only empowered them as individuals, it also helped others to find courage in themselves.
Courage, on the surface, is reckless and dangerous. Acts of courage put you in harm's way. You're intentionally ignoring your brain's better judgment. But sometimes, your own safety isn't your highest priority. Sometimes, an unnecessary risk can change your life for the better.
Just imagine someone who's scared of heights planting their flag on the peak of Mount Everest. Imagine a parent diving recklessly into traffic to save their child. Imagine a revolutionary risking their life to change their community.
Courage is rare. Not everyone experiences courage. But if you face your fears, if you challenge your preconceptions, if you take risks to better yourself, well then, your courage will come.
Empathy
Many people think that empathy makes us human, that empathy defines us as uniquely emotional beings.
From an evolutionary perspective, empathy is a challenging emotion to understand. It's your ability to experience another person's emotions from their perspective. In other words, you can walk a mile in another person's shoes.
It gives you the tools to understand experiences that you may have never experienced yourself. Without empathy, human relationships, families, and communities would fall apart. They wouldn't exist like they do today.
But this raises an important question. If empathy is so important to our species and our society, well then, why is it so difficult to experience?
Empathy is often mistaken for another feeling: sympathy. Many people use these emotions interchangeably, but they're very different in very important ways. Sympathy is more common and much less complex.
In fact, sympathy is something you feel relatively often. Just think about watching the news or seeing someone trip and hurt themselves. Each time, you're experiencing sympathy because you feel sorry for the misfortunes of another person. That's what sympathy is: a feeling of pity when something goes wrong for someone else.
For example, let's say your neighbor's house catches on fire. You may feel sympathy for them. You may think it's sad that their house burned down, but does that mean you're feeling empathy?
Empathy requires a more challenging emotional leap. Sympathy is watching someone in crisis from a safe distance, wishing them the best, but empathy is standing right there beside them, trying to experience that hardship for yourself.
As you can imagine, that's a difficult thing to do. Many people strive toward genuine empathy, but few ever get there. But here's the upside of empathy: like courage, empathy is more about the journey than the destination.
You'll never truly understand what it means to walk a mile in someone else's shoes, but you can try. And trying, making an earnest effort to be empathetic, is one of the most powerful emotions you can have.
Inspiration
Most emotions happen naturally. A compliment brings a smile to your face, an accident leaves you embarrassed or angry. But inspiration is unpredictable.
It comes and goes when you least expect it, and that makes inspiration one of the hardest emotions to feel. So, what is inspiration?
Inspiration, like dozens of complex emotions, can be found on something called the wheel of emotions. The wheel of emotions was designed by psychologist and professor Robert Plutchik.
Plutchik discovered that simple emotions divide and evolve into complex emotions. He started with eight primary feelings, including joy, sadness, and anger. From each of those primary emotions comes a more complicated feeling like trust, loneliness, or disappointment.
Over time, psychologists have redesigned Plutchik's wheel of emotions to include a variety of uncommon feelings like amazement, courage, and of course, inspiration.
So, where does inspiration come from? This complex emotion begins with happiness. To feel inspired, you have to feel some kind of joy, but there's more to it than that.
Happiness branches off into optimism, and optimism branches into both hopefulness and inspiration. In other words, inspiration is a blend of optimistic thinking and raw happiness.
But that's not the only kind of inspiration there is. Sadness can be inspiring, pain can be inspiring, all kinds of emotions can trigger this elusive feeling, which pours out through creativity, innovation, and achievement.
If inspiration and the wheel of emotions tell us anything, it's that our feelings are much more complex than we think.
Nostalgia
There's nothing quite like the warm, playful feeling of nostalgia. When you find a childhood toy, you may reflect on happy years spent with your family.
When you revisit your old school, you may walk through the halls, recalling friends, teachers, and teenage memories. Nostalgia has the power to bring a smile to your face and tears to your eyes.
Like amazement, nostalgia combines two contradicting emotions: happiness and sadness. You're happy to revisit those old memories, but at the same time, you're sad those happy days have passed you by.
Nearly everyone in the world has experienced this feeling of yearning. We've all wished deep down that we could relive our happiest moments, and that wish motivates the wonderful sadness we call nostalgia.
But if everyone experiences nostalgia, why is it on this list? Why is nostalgia one of the hardest emotions to feel? Nostalgia is one of the only emotions dependent on your personal memories.
There are nostalgic places in the world, and you can yearn for an experience you never had, but the truest feelings of nostalgia come from your own life, your own experiences.
You can feel happiness, sadness, and anger anywhere in the world, but moments of nostalgia are few and far between.
Acceptance
Together, happiness and sadness create more than just nostalgia. This combination defines another rare and powerful emotion: acceptance.
Acceptance is a feeling of mindful contentment, which comes after moments of grief, disappointment, or frustration. When hearing the word acceptance, most people immediately think of death.
Acceptance is usually framed as the final stage of grieving. After denial, anger, bargaining, and depression comes acceptance. When you accept that someone has passed away, you come to terms with your loss.
You still feel sad, you're still unhappy that you've lost someone important to you, but the impact of their loss begins to decrease. You stop resisting the reality of your situation, and you experience a period of emotional calm.
Now, while acceptance and nostalgia come from the same two emotions, they're very, very different in practice. Nostalgia is happiness colored by wistful sadness. Acceptance is sadness lessened by peaceful understanding.
They stem from the same emotions, but acceptance and nostalgia are almost exact opposites.
Freedom
Last but not least, freedom is one of the hardest emotions to experience for yourself. In our lives, we have very few opportunities to act completely on our own.
At work, your boss tells you what to do. At home, you have chores to finish and responsibilities to check off your list. And by the end of the day, most people are too tired and stressed to do much of anything.
Life and work may be constantly weighing on your mind. You're so wrapped up in the stress of your everyday life, even a vacation doesn't feel like much of a break.
Because our lives are so demanding, emotional freedom is something we rarely feel. In fact, many people actively avoid that feeling of freedom.
They associate freedom with a lack of control, and that lack of control is too unpredictable to face head-on. But emotional freedom is important.
It lifts your spirits, it invigorates your motivation, and instills in you a sense of independence that you won't find anywhere else.
| Emotion | Characteristics | Triggers |
|---|---|---|
| Amazement | Combines happiness and fear | Nature, architecture, new experiences |
| Courage | Drives to face fears, resist temptation | Dangerous situations, standing up for others |
| Empathy | Understanding others' emotions | Personal connections, shared experiences |
| Inspiration | Unpredictable, creativity and innovation | Art, music, challenges |
| Nostalgia | Combines happiness and sadness | Personal memories, past experiences |
| Acceptance | Contentment after grief or frustration | Loss, change, resolution |
| Freedom | Sense of independence, lack of constraints | Opportunities to act on one's own |
