So let's go to our first topic, which is what do emotions do for you? So emotions do three things. They motivate action. They communicate to others, and they communicate to yourself. The reason we have emotions in the first place is emotions are very rapid firing, automatic responses to common situations and problems that humans and other animals have to deal with. What they do is they prepare us for action. Let's think about anger.
What does anger do? If you get attacked by somebody or someone's rushing to attack you, generally the emotion that gets fired is the emotion of anger. And anger, more than any other emotion, prepares the body for physical action. So anger readies us to block someone who's ready to harm us or block someone who's interfering with one of our goals or something that we want. There's a reason why coaches try to get football players anger.
Because if you can get them mad at the other team furious, determined to win, they become stronger, run faster, and hit harder. It's this relationship of emotion to action that actually can make it extraordinarily difficult to change emotions. So let's imagine for the moment, for example, that you're in a house and the house catches on fire. Okay? And so what do you think you would do if that happened?
Without thinking about it, you would probably start running to get out of the house. So let's imagine that I then try to get you to reduce your fear before you run. This would be extremely difficult, mainly because the fear automatically gets you to run. What if there were no emotions? What if you could have a baby and not have any emotions?
Now what do you think makes anyone get up in the middle of the night to feed a baby, do all the things that people do for babies? This is a good example of where love and other positive emotions also get us to do all sorts of things. Emotions regulate action, and every emotion has some sort of action that's all hooked up with it.