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"There are more and more people who live like emotional puppets and act on impulse, reacting affectively to external stimuli without thinking about whether this is the right way to behave." According to the psychologist, psychiatrist and professor of the School of Education and Psychology Fernando Sarráis, this way of living, emotionally reactive to environmental events, leads many people "to be consumerists, submissive to fashions and customs, emotionally dependent and, in many cases, addicted to things that make them feel good but take away the freedom needed to be happy".

Fernando Sarráis has just published The keys to understanding affectivitya book to help understand how emotions and positive and negative feelings arise in each person, and how they influence psychic functioning and behavior.

According to this specialist, nowadays, with the focus of attention on the outside world and the advance of new technologies, young people know many things about life, but "it is striking how little knowledge they know about themselves, about the motivations of their behavior. Therefore, they only know how they feel, think, perceive, imagine, remember and act at any given moment, but they do not know the cause or the consequences of their way of living".

The University of Navarra professor affirms that an authentic person is one who lives as he or she thinks. "To do so, one must think before acting, because the opposite means acting on the impulses of the affections that arise in response to environmental stimuli". This last way of living makes the person "impulsive, unstable, inconstant and fickle. And what is authentic - what is proper to the human being - is to be rational and free," he stresses.

Balance between reason, will and affectivity

In the book, the psychiatrist and psychologist talks about the importance of a good knowledge of one's affectivity and the hierarchical balance that should exist between it and the will and intelligence, in order to achieve a mature and happy personality. "The Education has been forgetting the importance of the inner world, of the psychological balance between reason, will and affectivity of the mature and positive personality, which is the variable staff most related to happiness", he emphasizes.

According to the author of the book, published by Teconté editions, what makes a person happy is what is good, beautiful and true, which costs a lot to achieve and requires a continuous effort to achieve. "Only people with a strong will continue to strive for the great goals that make people truly and profoundly happy. To achieve this virtue of the will, it is advisable to begin to perform acts of strength from a very early age and persevere in them throughout life."