An Affective Body-Budget

In the past couple of posts, we’ve been going down the rabbit hole of the work of neuroscientist and psychologist Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the work she has done around emotions.

First, we looked at how the brain is in fact predictive, not reactive. It doesn’t wait for sensory information to react to, but instead makes predictions based on past experience in order to anticipate what comes next.

Next, we looked at the role of learned concepts in our brain’s predictions. Concepts we learn through language shape the way our brain predictively carves up the pie of experience. For example, we learn through our cultural concepts of color how to divide up and label the spectrum of light in a rainbow.

Let’s look now at a third important ingredient in the way our brain makes emotions that Dr. Barrett describes, which is called “affect”.

Affect

Take a moment to pay attention to the sensations in your body.

What do you notice?

Can you feel any pressure, tingling, warmth, relaxation, or other sensations?

It’s not uncommon for this to be a tricky exercise, especially at first, and with good reason. The sensations we feel inside our body, what scientists call “interoception”, are generally less vivid than other sensations, like sound or vision.

Dr. Barrett makes the comparison that if vision is like a high-definition television, then interoception is like a black-and-white 1950’s TV with poor reception. And, if you think about it, thank goodness! If all the workings of the inside of our body were so vivid, we’d never be able to turn our attention to the outside world.

Notice, however, that these vague sensations of the workings of our body come with a couple of characteristics. They tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum between high-energy and low-energy, or what you could describe as somewhere between jittery and calm. This is called the “arousal” level. The vague sensations of our body also tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum between pleasant and unpleasant, or what is called the “valence”.

You could put these two spectrums on a two-dimensional graph as a way of charting how high/low-energy and pleasant/unpleasant any sensation from your body is.

This two-dimensional experience of sensations in our body is what Dr. Barrett and other scientists call “affect”, and it is one of the basic ingredients that our brain uses to make emotions.

Take a moment again to check in with your interoceptive experiences, the sensations inside your body. Where would you put them on this affect graph? 

Do you feel high-energy and unpleasant? Low-energy and unpleasant? High-energy and pleasant? Or low-energy and pleasant?

Wherever you might plot your current experiences of your body, that is your affect at the moment.

Affect and Body-Budgeting

So what is affect about? What is it for? Why does it matter?

Well, ultimately your brain has one job: keeping your body alive. And it does this by trying to manage all the resources your body needs, including things like water, glucose, salt, oxygen, etc. There’s a lot for your brain to manage, like a huge budget of resources to track. Dr. Barrett calls this “body-budgeting”.

Your brain constantly tracks your body’s budget of all that it needs to stay alive, and your perception of the state of that budget is your affect.

In other words, your affect is the summary of your perceptions of your body’s budget at this moment.

Feeling that high-energy/unpleasant affect? This perception of your body is saying something about the state of your body’s budget right now. For example, if you are in fact feeling a high-energy/unpleasant sort of affect, maybe it’s because you had too much coffee and now there’s all that caffeine in your body. Or maybe you’ve got a lot of cortisol and adrenaline in your body, as your nervous system prepares for a threatening situation you just imagined.

Affect and Emotion

Let’s tie all of this stuff about affect back to emotion, and see where it’s relevant from a therapy perspective.

Affect is one of the basic building blocks that our brain uses to create emotion.

For example, an affect of high-energy/unpleasant might be one of the ingredients the brain uses to make an emotion like Fear or Anxiety. An affect of high-energy/pleasant might be an ingredient in making an emotion like Excitement or Joy. Low-Energy/unpleasant might be part of Sadness or Depression. Low-Energy/pleasant could be part of Calm or Relaxed or Contented.

The emotion that our brain makes with affect depends on several other ingredients, such as context and concepts, but that’s a topic for another post.

What we can take away from all of this stuff about affect is that the state of our body-budget matters A LOT when it comes to what we feel emotionally.

If your body-budget is constantly running a deficit, then, as Dr. Barrett puts it, you’re going to feel crappy, it’ll just be a matter of what flavor of crap.

What this means for all of us when it comes to taking care of our emotional health is that we need to tune into our affect and start to learn about what our body needs in order to effectively manage its budget. 

Does our daily schedule line up with the natural rhythm of day and night by which our body functions are regulated, or is the rhythm of our day erratic and misaligned?

Are we eating enough calories and getting enough nutrients and water for our body to function well, or do we tend to live on sugar, processed foods, and caffeine while being chronically dehydrated?

Are we moving our body each day by getting some exercise, or does our day mostly involve sitting?

Are we getting enough sleep so our body can repair itself and consolidate its resources, or do we have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep?

Some of these questions and the strategies that may be most impactful to address them are beyond the scope of psychotherapy. But they do point to the relationship between emotional health and physical health.

This is why it’s always a good idea to see your doctor along with going to therapy, so that you can get a better understanding of what’s going on with your body’s budget. Not only is this important for your physical health, but directly impacts your affect, and so directly impacts your emotional health as well.

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