Emotion plays a key role in our lives.

A recent interview on Salon got me thinking about the connection between emotion and blogging.

From The scientific argument for being emotional:

I think that emotions are such an important part of our experience and behavior.. They came about over the course of evolution for a reason; to promote survival — to facilitate the adaptation of organisms to their environment. Emotions evolved to solve specific kinds of problems that arose over the course of our history. They wouldn’t be such a robust part of our experience if they didn’t have this deep evolutionary origin. Having said that, it’s also the case that we now live in an environment that is vastly different from our evolutionary origins. So some of the emotions that played a very important role in our past can be maladaptive when they are triggered in response to stimuli in our current environment. This is why developing strategies to better regulate our emotions may be particularly important for us now.

There is much more included in the article. This excerpt is longer than I normally include, but there is much more in-depth thought to read if you follow the link. The only thing that frustrated me was really understanding the argument for being emotional. If you find it in the article let me know.

In the meantime, I’ll try to pull out my own conclusions.

The Argument for Emotion

Now, controlling emotions and using them for good is something to apsire to as a human. There are advantages to be had by those that understand how emotion plays a role in our lives.

For life in general, emotion can be used to form relationships with people. This can have a positive influence on life when used correctly. One example would be how people display confidence and compassion when romancing a woman or even a man. Confidence is such an important part in many facets of life that understanding how to foster the emotion can be a huge win for people.

Happiness is something people use to their advantage as well.

Have you ever been around someone that is negative all the time?

If you’re smart, you limit these interactions. Negativity can wear you down. A complainer will wear you down and impact your life in a negative way. You might find yourself down on the world. Productivity can wane and you lose interest in work and life. It’s not good.

Now, on the other side, you can find people that are generally happy and optimistic about life. These people can be great for your morale. They can bring you up when you’re donw. Their enthusiasm for life can actually wear off on you and make you feel like doing great things.

Emotion is a key factor in a successful life so it makes sense it would have the same impact on blogging.

Emotional Blogging

Some of the best blog posts I’ve read and written have involved emotion.

It wasn’t too long ago when I touched on this subject with the post about angry blogging. You can channel anger on certain topics to generate real content from your brain. When you’re fueled by passion (in this case anger) you can really get your actual feelings out on the screen. And it’s that real content that people want to read and connect with.

Now, you don’t have to be angry to really get to the meat of certain topics. There are other emotions that lead to great blogging.

Happiness can bring about great blog material. If you find yourself enthusiastic about a certain topic you can really get passionate and find yourself digging into the details. I felt this way when I wrote the Funny Country Songs post. I was happy writing it. I was smiling. I cared less about what people would think of the content and just let the words flow.

The key to emotional blogging is finding the emotions that bring out the best content in you. This could be anger, happiness, and even sadness.

One thing to remember is that it’s probably good to let a post sit for a day before publishing it. Especially with the anger-fueled posts. You might want to let those simmer for a day or so before actually publishing them. You don’t want to bring too much negative attention to your company.

But some is always good. It’s what brings in the attention of new customers.