How does money influence emotions?

How does money influence emotions?
Money always plays an important role in the life of everyone and consequently influences everyone’s emotions. From my own experience I would say that money can influence our emotions in three different ways: positive, negative, and neutral.

Usually we get positive emotions when we either receive money or spend money. People get their salaries, dividends from stocks, royalties and sometimes even inheritance, but always the very moment of acquiring money affects our emotions in a positive way. We feel happy. We are full of energy. We become more optimistic and self-confident.
On the other hand when people lose money they become depressed, weak and pessimistic. The interesting thing is that spending money produces positive emotions at the moment of purchase, but later if spending wasn’t satisfying emotions change vector and the spender becomes depressed.

It might sound quite strange but some people are emotionally neutral to the fact of losing or gaining money. Who are these people? They are people who either work with other people’s money or have special training. People who are working with other people’s money are ordinary people, accountants, brokers, cashiers, etc… However, people that specially trained their brains aren’t ordinary. Usually they are self-made rich people. Why would a rich person push himself to be emotionless when dealing with money? Well, first of all one of the requirements for anyone who wants to build wealth is to be able to be calm both at the time of gain and loss. For example, if a person spends way too much at the department store because shopping produces positive emotions they won’t be able to save and invest enough. Another reason to be emotionally neutral when dealing with money is that rich people have financial plans of how to be rich or be richer and they have to follow these plans whatever their emotions are. Finally, if you can rule your emotions, you can rule your money!

-O.

I think this idea of money neutral also ties in with being able to delay rewards and see the big picture. Financially successful people can delay the good feeling received from spending money because they see the greater possibilities. One of the points you made was that the positive emotions are produced at the time of purchase. These feelings tend not to last long. Financially successful people can see past this short term quick gratification and work towards a greater reward down the road.

Control Emotions by Pretending

Our emotional state influences us a lot more than we might like. I think as most of us know, if we are happy and motivated we get a lot more done than if we are bored, lazy or depressed. If we are confident and secure we can often make better decisions then when we are controlled by fear or nervousness.

One of the best ways to change our emotional state is to pretend we already feel the way we want to feel. So if you are feeling bored or unmotivated, simply pretend that you are incredibly driven and really motivated to get going. If you are feeling unhappy, then just pretend you are happy and it will start to change.

A study was conducted where there were two sets of participants. The first set of participants was asked to relive a particularly stressful situation. The other set was asked to simply make a facial expression that would display stress. Amazingly, both groups showed the same changes in body temperature and heart rate, which indicated emotional response.

This shows us that our emotions can actually be influenced and even completely changed just by changing our facial expressions. So, if you want to feel better, just start laughing and smiling. Try it for a minute, right now.

I’m sure you noticed, as I did, that you felt a bit happier and more excited just by smiling and laughing. This works on a small scale for happiness, but this tendency for our emotions to be controlled by our physiology and actions extends even further. By pretending like we are confident, motivated or happy, we can literally create those emotions within us.

A lousy emotional state does not need to be long lasting. While using a technique such as this cannot solve your problems, it can give you the emotional motivation and supportive mindset so you can find those solutions.

A key to this technique working is you have to be willing to feel a little silly at first. Smiling and laughing when we feel lousy or walking around with our head up when we feel nervous often feels awkward at first. However, if you can stick with it, in a short time your emotions will start to adjust to the physiology you are displaying.

This technique of pretending can be extended to more than just emotional control. If you’ve been having trouble motivating yourself to start working on a task or chore, simply start doing it. Once you start doing it, use this technique to put yourself into a state of confidence, ease or happiness. Do this and you will find it is far easier to work on a task that you normally find boring or stressful.

Once you have aligned your physiology with how you want to feel, the next step is to align all of your actions with how you want to feel. If you lack confidence in a certain situation, once you have adopted a physiology that you associate with feeling confident, then make sure all of the actions you take are actions you would associate with that feeling of confidence.

If you are about to start a new goal or project, once you have put your physiology into a state of focus and motivation begin taking the immediate actions you would if you were in that state. Begin working on the project immediately and take steps towards it. Even if you aren’t quite sure what to do, changing your physiology and then your actions will rapidly create the emotional state you need internally.

One of the worst parts about a bad emotional state, is it changes how we make decisions. When we are feeling lazy, depressed or fearful, it is easy to believe that our emotions are the result of good rational judgement. Unfortunately we often realize how wrong we are once the emotional state passes.

In situations like that, it is usually best to make changing our state to be more positive should be our first priority. Whenever we are feeling depressed, angry or lazy, changing our state to a more neutral area will give us greater access to our problem solving skills. As long as we are in that bad emotional state, it is hard to solve the problems that got us there in the first place.

Realizing that our internal emotions, motivation, courage, happiness, are completely under our control is the start of achieving that control. As long as you believe that something good must happen in order for you to start feeling happy, it will be impossible for you to change your state. As long as you believe that you need some outside stimulus to become motivated about a goal or project, it will be very hard to create that motivation.

So, if you are having trouble controlling a particular emotion, start by changing your physiology. If you want to be happy, start smiling and laughing. If you want to be motivated stand or sit up straight and begin moving faster. Changing your physiology is the first step.

After you’ve changed your physiology, start changing your actions immediately. If you want to feel motivated, start working on your goal or project immediately. By changing your actions you can create a longer lasting emotional change that can’t be created just by changing your physiology.

While negative emotions are far more likely to cripple us, it is possible to get into such a positive state that we start ignoring our problems. In those situations you are just as disabled to taking effective action as you are when you are in a really negative emotional state. Try to use this technique to bring yourself to a positive, yet manageable state. Once you get to this state, begin focusing immediately on solutions for your problem at hand.

The key to knowing whether you are at the correct balance of positivity to solve your problem is if you are taking effective action to solve it. If you aren’t taking action, then you need to change your state so that you will. While too much positivity can be dangerous, the risks of that happening are far less then a crippling negative state.

Controlling our emotions can sometimes be a difficult process. By pretending, first in our physiology then in our actions, we can gain a lot more of that control.

Ivana Tasev, photographer of silence, emotions and details

Ivana Tasev is a journalist by profession and vocation. For more than 12 years she works in the printed media, and in the last 6 years she is employed in the highest circulation weekly in Macedonia, “Tea Moderna”. She writes articles and interviews related to the art and cultural life in her country and the world. Sometimes she feels that the language is too constrained or limited to express certain delicate emotion. Therefore, where her words end, she continues her expression through photography.



For her it is a terrific hedonism, especially since it is not her primary profession. It means that she does not feel it as a daily duty, or, god forbid, as a burden; instead, she enjoys it, she gives it a chance to challenge her. It is more of a passion, need to express herself fully. Her photography is not so polished and glazed, even less aesthetically flawless commercially. It is, indeed, rough, somehow the very grain which she adore in photography, gives it a “vintage’ timeless artistic note. She is a self-taught photographer. It all started by chance. In 1999 she had a camera within her hand’s reach and she wanted to use it to freeze/capture the sunset, which she watched from a mountain, and a host of paragliders in the sky, hanging like lanterns.



She still consider that photograph one of her best, and this is how it all started. She makes her photographs on the principle of instinct and emotion, and probably relys mostly on her intuition. She has always been fascinated by details, not in photography only, but in life, generally. As the small, and yet so amazing things that Amelie Poulain liked to do when she was little. Such ordinary things, that almost no-one pays attention to, and yet they are here, in front of us. Such fragments, which pass unnoticed by most of the people, draw her attention. Such depth, minunciosity, level of details, fragmentariness are registered by her emotion.




For instance”, she says, “when in a studio recording, I catch David Sylvian inhaling between two verses, when I catch an extra in an expensive production in a mass scene being very much aware of the camera and unable to hide their excitement of being filmed; when in a smoky nightclub I notice a lover discretely touching the palm of his loved one …«

»I don’t know, even more minute details, the nose of a certain person, which gives lucidity to his expression; the way in which he holds the cigarette, twists hair between the fingers, nibbles on the lower lip, wrinkles the forehead, crosses the legs … the way in which someone’s body posture transforms depending on how pumped it is in (lack of) self-confidence




I really love black and white reflections, mirror images in the water, trees full of silence, thoughtful and emotional photographs, half empty, simple, unpretentious, shadows, silhouettes, contrasts, huge artistic grain in the photography, vintage looking, so that you could not gauge when the photograph was made; mistakes in the lighting, burnt contrasts, blurred, works that rebelliously overstep the boundaries of the traditional school of photography, I love works created by the heart, and not the proper exposure and composition. There is a lot of silence in my photographs, partially emptiness as well, lack of presence. My photographer’s emotion, as it matures, mostly unintentionally and unconsciously rather than in a planned fashion or calculated, tries to step on the path of some noble simplicity, revisiting the natural, the essential. What Chekhov often writes about between the lines. Or what David Sylvian sings about. I am a follower or maybe better, I am a humble worshiper of such emotion. I dislike pretentiousness and megalomania in the photography and also in life. I don’t want grand ambitiousness, which makes you and arrogant, vain and popular photographer. I dislike a photography staged to perfection, sensationalist, which makes you turn to it on the first glance and say “woooow ”, and then on the second glance start thinking why have you turned, when it looks like an overdressed girl with her eye on the marriage, whose quantity and strength of perfume makes sinuses strain; a coquette, with war paint visible from the moon. And actually, such are the times we live in, illustrate with glaring colors, with tons of computer make-up. This is why most want to create megalomaniac photographs. I have no such ambitions. But most of all, I am fascinated by the people in all their humanity, fragility, superiority, frustration, beauty, sensitivity. I want to photograph them dresses, half-nude, nude, depending on the inspiration of the moment. What I do not like is glazed (sugar-coated) photograph, modern, sterile, impotent, technically perfect, and still empty. Love in itself is my driving force in the creation. However pathetic and disappointing it may sound, for these shallow and promiscuous times full of lies. While I am writing this text, a fantastic video clip catches my attention. In Ohrid, by the lake, they ask two Roma, adolescents, how they imagine LOVE. One of them says : “Through the heart”. This is it: through the heart





Thus far she has had eight solo exhibitions. Five in Skopje, one in London, Great Britain, one in Berlin, Germany, and one in Novi Sad, Serbia. This year Ivana Tasev will exhibit in Maribor, Slovenia, mid-September.