Having made our way through Anger, Fear, Sadness, Calm, and Happiness, we finish strong with the most exciting emotion of all: Excitement!
There may be no better feeling than the pinnacle of excitement, when we’re so positive and full of energy that anything seems possible. Returning briefly to Empath’s emotional wheel helps us to understand excitement in the context of the other five primary emotions. Like its negative cousin, anger, excitement is a feeling that is difficult to sustain — eventually, the high wears off and we come back to earth, either because we habituate to what made us excited in the first place or because we simply run out of energy. Meanwhile, excitement is diametrically opposed from sadness, which is both negative and low energy. This indicates that excitement and sadness will tend to be experienced at different times and driven by opposing patterns (e.g., I tend to feel excited when my favorite sports team wins, vs. sad when they lose).
Keeping this in mind, let’s look at all the great things that get me charged up, as well as when and where I feel most excited. Back to my journal:
As with other positive emotions like calm and happy, my family and friends are a huge source of excitement in my life. However, the nature of my excited posts is a bit different. Unlike calm and happy posts that relate to loved ones, which tend to express positive sentiment in the present moment, my excited posts are often made in anticipation of getting to spend time with the people I care about. This often happens before a long weekend in the mountains, a trip to visit friends in another part of the country, or my annual vacations over Thanksgiving and Christmas to see my family. I also tend to feel excited when enjoying novel experiences with loved ones that are new and different. These posts provide a few good examples:
Another major source of excitement in my life is football. The word “Vikings” might seem wildly out of place in my word cloud if you didn’t know that I was born and raised in Minneapolis and am a die hard Minnesota Vikings fan. Actually, if you look back through my other word clouds, my favorite football team also shows up in journal posts related to anger, sadness, and happiness -as anyone who has followed football for the last couple decades knows, being a Vikings fan is not for the faint of heart. But more than anything, rooting for the boys in purple makes me excited, which helps explain why I keep coming back year after year (yes, even after Gary Anderson missed the chip shot field goal that would have sent the Vikes’ to the Super Bowl in ‘98).
In fact, it’s precisely because the Vikings are so unpredictable that makes them such an exciting team to watch. Just when you think they can’t possibly lose, they’ll find new and creative ways to let you down. And then, every once in a while, they’ll do something like this…and TOTALLY redeem themselves!
So why bother? As my brother has pointed out to me multiple times, only one team gets to walk away winners at the end of the season. The Vikings have never even made it to the Super Bowl in my lifetime. Why invest so much emotion in a game where you’re so likely to end up disappointed? The answer for me is that it’s not about the end result, but the journey - being part of a team and a tradition that stretches back since before I was born. Hoping each September that this might just be the year the Vikings win it. And anticipating what it will feel like when they finally do. You can feel it in my posts:
So now that we know more about what lights me up inside, what patterns can we identify as far as when and where I get most excited? And how do these patterns relate to my other emotions? Let’s look at the data:
- I over index on excited posts in the early morning. Sure enough, I also tend to feel anger (another high energy emotion) early in the day right after I wake up, while I tend to feel calm and sad (both low energy emotions) more in the afternoon and evening.
- I over index on excited posts later in the week, particularly on Thursdays and Saturdays. Now that we’ve explored every emotion, a clear pattern has emerged: I tend to start the week feeling anxious, gradually shifting into anger and sadness or calm depending on how things are going, then into excitement in anticipation of the weekend, culminating in happiness on Saturdays. Sundays also tend to be happy, but can be angry or sad depending on how I’m feeling about the week ahead.
- More than any other feeling, I over index on excited posts while traveling. An incredible 24% of my excited posts occur outside of Colorado, and another 17% occur outside of Denver. To put this in perspective, I’ve made more excited posts outside Colorado than I’ve made angry posts anywhere. This data reinforces the importance of loved ones and novel experiences, both of which I get on vacation, as major sources of excitement in my life.
- As with all my other positive emotions, a significant share of my excited posts within Denver occur away from home and work, often on weekends while I’m out experiencing the city with my family and friends.
Now that I have a better understanding for what makes me excited, what can I do to live a happier and more fulfilling life? It turns out I post about feeling excited more than any other emotion, so clearly there’s no lack of excitement in my life. But there are a few lessons I can take away from these findings:
- I can seek opportunities to spend time with loved ones in new places.
If there’s one thing I’ve taken away from this entire blog series so far, it’s the importance of spending time with family and friends. When it comes to excitement, adding a new place to the mix can put a delightful twist on everything I already enjoy about being with people I love. This can be as exotic as an extended overseas vacation, or as simple as a new hiking trail to explore in the Boulder foothills. - I can recognize that life is exciting because it’s unpredictable.
One of the reasons I love being a Minnesota Vikings fan is because I never know what’s going to happen next. The same is true of life. As humans, we spend so much of our lives trying to avoid change because we’re afraid of what will happen to us. This is a natural part of the self-preservation instinct we talked about when we covered fear. But change is inevitable, and if we approach it with the right attitude, it can also be really exciting. Given that so much of life is outside of my control, the best I can do is embrace the chaos and have faith that everything will work out in the end. - I can remember that even when life is hard, there’s always tomorrow.
One of the great things about constant change is that things rarely stay bad for very long. Looking at the patterns in how I feel over the course of a typical week, it’s funny to see that I enter most weeks feeling anxious but almost always come out the other side feeling excited and happy. The middle of good weeks are more calm while the middle of bad weeks are more angry and sad, but after a few days these feelings pass and the whole cycle begins anew. There’s always another day to look forward to.
Well that about wraps it up. We’ve explored my emotional fingerprint through the lens of each of my six primary emotions: anger, sadness, fear, calm, happiness, and excitement. I’ve certainly learned a lot along the way, and hope you have as well. In that spirit, and given the incredible response I’ve gotten to this series, I’ve decided to write one more post synthesizing my takeaways and tying it all together. Join me tomorrow for a special encore!
