Although feelings are important to each one of us, only few take the time to understand their feelings and the ways they function on a deeper level. Feelings are a crucial part for any person’s well-being and they influence the entire life experience, so it is very important to have a basic understanding of how feeling works. There are many questions we need to ask ourselves: How feeling works? How should we deal with it? How can we control negative feelings and emotions — or should we control them at all? The answers to these questions are quite simple, if you approach the matter from the right perspective.
We Feel What We Think The most common misinterpretation of feelings is the one saying that feelings come from the outside, and that someone or something makes us feel something with their acts. The truth is we don’t need something external to happen for us to feel good or bad. It is our perspective that makes us feel, not the events themselves. We never feel anything just because something external happened. We develop feelings because we think something about the event. We quite literally feel our thinking.
If our feelings were really created by external events, we would always have the same feeling in case of some repeating event. For example, let’s say our partner gives us a nice present. Do we always feel grateful and loved, or do we sometimes feel suspicious about our partner’s intentions, due to various circumstances? The difference in our reaction to the same event lays solely in our way of thinking about the event, and that is how feeling works.
Choose What You Think We learn to choose specific thoughts over others during our lifetime. The more we choose what to think, the more the thought we have chosen reinforces. The thinking routine works quite simply. Thoughts we have previously thought form a path in our brain, and it just follows that same path each next time This happens because thinking brand new thoughts is hard work and very tiresome for our brain, so it automatically chooses the path it had already created.
Understanding How Feeling Works Emotion always follows thought. The second we think of something, an electrical impulse is created in our brain. This impulse makes our brain produce a neurotransmitter, which spreads through our entire body, and makes us feel something. The intensity of an emotion depends on the type or transmitters we let circulate through our body.