Do our Feelings Lie?
Our day to day experiences can seem to generate fear, anxiety and other negative emotions. We may even make some very important decisions based on how we emotionally “feel”.
Hold on now! Our emotional state of mind should be the direct result of what we are thinking. The things in our lives and our actions do not by themselves have feelings. So if we have positive thoughts about a thing or action we create a positive emotional state of mind. That makes sense to me.
However, we do the opposite. We believe that a strong negative emotion means that we are about to do something wrong, or that something “bad” is about to happen. In this way, our emotions can miss lead us. The problem is that our emotions do not have any content. Emotions are a state on mind and are not real. In reality our emotions come and go based on how we are thinking.
Strong positive or negative emotions mean only one thing....
We are having positive or negative thoughts about the past, present or the future. That’s all.
Making decisions based on how we emotionally “feel” may result in poor quality decisions. Why? Because how we think about the past, present and future is subjective. Each person sees the world differently. And our beliefs change over time. What we believed to be bad yesterday could be perceived to be good today. We can change the way we think about the world and this will change our emotional state of mind.
Our moment to moment emotion state are very important. Our emotional state of mind gives us valuable feedback about our world. Strong negative or positive emotions can help us understand what we are focused on or thinking about. What we want or what we don’t want.
So, do emotions lie? Well, perhaps they don’t lie because they can't. However when we assign a meaning to our emotions we put the cart before the horse. Perhaps our emotions do not have any actual meaning. Perhaps our emotions are just a reaction to what we are thinking.
What do you think?
More later ...
Steve Oliver
May 2010
While it is true that emotions and +/-(positive/negative) mindset are two seperate things to begin with although they have some connections relations tied in together.
ReplyDeleteEmotions do not lie, Emotions are an expression displayed from an innerself, for example when someone had fallen sick, they would display an emotion of pain, suffering, feeling very weak and lethargic, however you can be in the state of either positive, neutral or negative when you are sick, a positive mind will be, "well at least I dont have to go back to school and I can have a good rest and my body will become more immune to such illness after I recover", a negative mindset will probably be something like "crap, now I will have more homework to do, and I will probably fail a few test due to missing all the lessons" but to me, at the end of the day, this person is still lying on bed because he is sick and the only thing that he is thinking are his thoughts.
His life still continues to move on, it is both true that he will become more energetic after he recover but had missed his school lessons and more homework to be done.
Many times in life, mindset always changes from time to time, experience by experience. It is important to stay view things as a whole, both its positive and negative and neutral effects,benefits of being in such mindset in order to make a more proper and truer decisions in life that makes you, you.
and I guess sometimes in life, one doesn't have to think so much, but rather just do what you feel the most that affects you,because things still happen and life still moves on.
ReplyDeleteLife is actually very simple but we as human seems to always make it complicated