Your Feelings & Emotions Are Lying To You (even if they feel so real)
Engineer your personality and decide your future
I’ve been on holiday for a week now, and I’ve used the opportunity to give myself some much-needed time with myself — doing what I want.
I’ve walked around, popped into my favourite coffee shops and written — both online and in my journal.
This week I reflected on my self-esteem from before, compared to now. I remembered being victim to my feelings and internal chatter — being thrown around life like when a rogue wave takes you under.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
This week I wrote about a critical part of moving forward in life.
Your Feelings & Emotions Are Lying To You (even if they feel so real)
Your feelings, emotions and the voice inside your head have been chatting away in there since you were a little child.
You build a relationship with these feelings, you feel these emotions and you listen to the voices in your head.
There’s one small problem → they lie.
If you take all your feelings and emotions as gospel, you’ll be swimming in anxiety and fear. You’ll live life on a rollercoaster — up one minute, down the next.
Your feelings and your emotions are not facts, no matter how real and true they feel.
The thought factory
Think of your brain like a cookie factory. It’s designed to create tonnes of cookies, but not all of the cookies are good for sale. Some of the cookies have blemishes, some are too hard, and some are too soft.
The factory workers quality check the cookies, packaging up the useful ones and throwing the bad ones in the trash.
Not all of the thoughts you have are true — some of them will be self-deprecating and negative, some will be helpful and positive.
You need to throw out your bad cookies and hold on to the good ones.
Why are there bad cookies? Is your brain lying?
No, your brain isn’t actually lying, it’s throwing ideas at the problem. It’s trying to engineer its way through your daily challenges, no matter how big or small they are.
When you try to solve a problem, you go through lots of possible solutions in your mind until you land on the one that works.
It’s an average Thursday afternoon — it’s raining outside. Your neck’s hurting because your laptop is too low on the wooden desk.
Solution 1: A cardboard box — bends too much in the middle. Try again.
Solution 2: A thin piece of wood —it snaps under the weight of the laptop.
Solution 3: A stack of old textbooks from school — it works!
Not every idea you come up with is going to be the correct solution — your day-to-day thoughts are no different.
You should see how many stupid words I type on this page before I land on the final article.
Self-defence mechanism
Aside from this machine-gun approach to problems, your brain also interprets things and tries its best to keep you safe.
If it senses danger, it’ll flood you with scared feelings and emotions to stop you from continuing. If it feels your reputation is at stake, it’ll put up the walls and find a way to protect your status amongst the pack of humans.
There are pros and cons to this.
If a boulder is rolling toward you, your thoughts tell you to get the hell out the way. This is helpful — without it, you’d be squished by the boulder (I’m thinking of those Crash Bandicoot missions).
The problem is that you’re not always in actual danger.
Sometimes, your brain thinks people are judging you and that your reputation is at stake. It’s trying to prevent you from being in “danger”, and protect your status. Anxiety and self-conscious thoughts stem from you trying to address the problem before other people can have that thought .
I see a psychologist called Dr James Welch — an absolute legend who’s full of gold nuggets. As I was sitting in his office, I told him that I felt anxious when someone was upset in the same room as me — I felt like they were upset because of me. I even mentioned that when I’m driving the speed limit and someone is behind me, I feel like I have to speed up so that they aren’t mad at me.
He asked me if what I was thinking was logical.
I replied:
It’s not logical, but it feels so real.
Then, he absolutely dunked on me with this anecdote:
I make my patients watch a scary movie. Once they watch it, I ask them how they felt during the movie — they generally answer “scared”.
So I ask them, “Were you in danger?
“No.”
“So, then your feelings lied.”
Your criteria decide who you are
Remember the cookie quality check from earlier? You decide which cookies to keep and which ones to throw out.
This is where you decide what kind of person you want to be. Which will you pick?
A positive person keeps the positive thoughts and discards the negative
A negative person keeps the negative thoughts and discards the positive
Will you be the person who accepts self-appreciating thoughts or self-deprecating thoughts?
It’s your criteria, your choice to make. You can engineer your personality by simply deciding which thoughts you latch onto, and which you wisp away into the void.
You’re not born with criteria — you create one.
So, what will you become?
Thank you all for reading.
I wish I could’ve given past me these kinds of mindset shifts, so I’m trying to reach as far and wide as I possibly can. Please share this post with someone who you think might enjoy it too.
Until next week,
Eren
Enjoying reading your thoughts every week Eren!