9781422287729

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STRESS AND TENS I ON

Your emotions are produced by things going on inside your brain.

Emotions take place inside our brains. That’s why we can’t separate them from the rest of our bodies—because emotions take place inside the body and they affect the entire body. These feel- ings are caused by chemical reactions and the way our brain cells communicate with each other. Different kinds of situations in the outside world will trigger different reactions within our brains. Each brain reaction feels a little different. As very young children, we learned to give those brain feelings names at the same time we were learning to talk. We started out with very simple and basic categories for our emotions—happy and sad. Pretty soon we probably added “angry” and “scared” to our vocabularies. As we grew older, we learned more and more words to describe many shades of feeling. By now, we take those feelings for granted. They’re just part of life. Emotions have important jobs in our lives. They point our at- tention toward things that need our attention. When something