I spoke last time about choosing joy. This is always a good thing to do, but often difficult, because we just don’t feel joyful.
Today I want to talk about choosing thoughts vs. feelings. Emotions are complicated. Stored in a part of the brain all by themselves, they are more difficult often to intentionally access or change. They sort of just live with us, and are there as we need them, but don’t always change with a push of a button or a click of a mouse. They’re more hard-wired into us, and we don’t always have control over them.
But we do have control over our thoughts. As I’m typing this I’m thinking about what to say as I type and, hopefully, am putting together thoughts that make sense that you will then think about, interpret, agree or disagree, file or throw away. Some of this process is based on emotion, but most is intellectual, giving us more management over it.
Here’s my point: we can’t always change how we feel immediately, but we can change what we think about it. For example, if you say something rude or hurtful to me, I may not get out of my mad or hurt feelings for a while, but I can change my thoughts around it. You were probably having a rough day, or maybe you didn’t mean it the way I heard it or I might not choose to hang on to that negative message.
When it comes to joy or happiness, we might not be able to pop ourselves right into one of those moods, but we can learn how to change our thought processes around that mood. We can think about the people or memories that truly make us smile with gratitude, and thereby guide our present mood or feelings into a different place.
