Imagine your emotional system as an emergency call center. An alarm sounds when someone steps on your toe. Another when your boss says he needs to meet with you. Another tells you that a loved one has died. And yet another when your favorite TV show has been canceled.
However, your central office has no filters or priorities: it responds with the same level of urgency to all these notifications. The result is chaos and emotional exhaustion. That, in a nutshell, is what happens to a person with a deficit in emotional hierarchy.
What is emotional hierarchy?
Emotional hierarchy is our emotional system’s ability to organize, classify, and proportionally weight our emotions and feelings according to the relevance of the event that triggers them. Not all emotions, no matter how intense they may be at the moment, have the same significance in our lives.
For example, feeling frustrated because someone didn’t say hello shouldn’t carry the same emotional weight as grief over loss, betrayal, or a personal crisis. Yet many people experience any discomfort as a Greek tragedy… and act accordingly.
The deficit in emotional hierarchy lies at the root of emotional catastrophizing, but unlike catastrophizing, it is not limited to negative emotions; rather, it confuses the relevance of all types of emotions, including positive ones. For example, a person may experience the same overwhelming enthusiasm for a positive comment on social media as for a truly transcendent piece of news.
Everything is experienced as an “extraordinary event,” without filter or proportion.
The mechanism behind a good hierarchy
At the neuropsychological level, emotional hierarchy is based on the interaction of different brain structures:
- Amygdala. It’s primarily responsible for detecting threats, so it triggers intense emotional responses to make us act accordingly. Its motto might be: “It’s better to exaggerate than to remain calm in the face of potential danger.”
- Prefrontal cortex. It’s responsible for evaluating, contextualizing, and regulating these emotions. It assesses the real significance of what we feel, asking itself, for example, whether it’s temporary or a life-changing situation. Its motto might be: “Calm down, breathe, let’s analyze what’s happening.”
- Hippocampus. This is the structure that provides memory and meaning to what we’re experiencing. It allows us to compare past situations and gain perspective. In practice, it reminds us that a stubbed finger isn’t so terrible, or, on the contrary, warns us that we really should be worried.
When everything is working properly, the prefrontal cortex acts as a kind of orchestra conductor. It assesses what’s happening, listens to the alarm signals the amygdala is sending, and decides: “This is important, this can wait, and this other thing… is just noise .”
But when there’s a deficit in affective hierarchy, we have an overactive amygdala and a prefrontal cortex that seems to have gone on vacation. Emotion dominates the game board.
In some cases, this occurs when we grew up in environments where emotional granularity wasn’t fostered , so we don’t learn to distinguish between “I feel bad ” and “this is really serious.” Traumatic experiences and unstable contexts can also lead to a state of emotional hypervigilance that causes us to always have our emotions on edge.
The consequences of the deficit in affective hierarchy
- Emotional exhaustion. Feeling everything at the same level is exhausting. It’s like living with the emotional volume on full blast from the moment your alarm clock rings until you collapse into bed at night. There’s no energy left to process what’s truly important, which ultimately leads to mental fatigue and physical exhaustion.
- Interpersonal conflicts. If every little annoyance turns into a drama, those close to you begin to tire. Coexistence becomes tense, unpredictable, and exhausting. Over time, important bonds fray and may even break.
- Difficulty making decisions. If everything is equally emotional, how can you know what needs urgent attention and what can wait? This confusion paralyzes, generates anxiety, and fuels constant rumination, even over the simplest decisions.
- Internal disconnection. Paradoxically, perceiving everything as important can lead us to misunderstand nothing. We feel overwhelmed, lost in a sea of emotions without a compass. This state of chronic confusion weakens our connection with ourselves; we stop trusting our emotional judgment and feel more like a spectator on our own internal roller coaster.
Techniques to learn to prioritize emotions
The good news is that the ability to prioritize emotions can be trained. Some very simple psychological techniques can help you regain emotional control:
1. Emotional traffic light
When you feel an intense emotion, ask yourself:
- Red. Is this serious? – It means you need to pay attention and take action.
- Yellow. Is this annoying but temporary? – It means you might need to think again.
- Green. Does this just require me to take a deep breath and move on? – Accept it and move on.
Adding colors to what you feel will help your brain categorize emotions easily and quickly without automatically exaggerating.
2. The hierarchy diary
This technique is very useful for teaching your brain to put things in perspective, so that it gives them the place they deserve, no more and no less. For one week, write down each day:
- What made you feel bad.
- What emotion did you experience?
- Rate from 1 to 10 the actual impact of that event on your life in the long term (within one to three years)
This way you can learn to distinguish between what “feels intense” and what “really matters or is significant.”
3. The 5×5 principle
To prioritize emotions, it’s essential to maintain psychological distance. This simple exercise will allow you to react immediately before an emotional hijacking occurs.
Basically, if what’s happening isn’t going to matter in 5 years, don’t give it more than 5 minutes of attention. When you feel an intense emotion, ask yourself: How much will this matter in 5 years? This technique is brutally practical and serves as an emergency brake against emotional catastrophizing.
Prioritizing doesn’t mean denying what we feel, or ranking which emotions are worthwhile and which aren’t. All emotions are important, but each one must be given its space and time. Like in an orchestra: not all notes have to be equally high; if that’s the case, the music won’t make sense.
Learning to prioritize our emotions is an act of self-care. It means regaining control of our emotional ship and stopping reacting as if everything were important, urgent, or epic. Because it isn’t. As Viktor Frankl said: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our power to choose.”
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