Separating thoughts and emotions isn’t easy. But when we are feeling overwhelmed it can be an invaluable skill. I am all too familiar with being overwhelmed by emotion or tortured by thoughts. Nonetheless, despite significant stress, these things are not an issue at the present time. I believe this is due to the education I’ve received in regards to the nature of thoughts and feelings and the ongoing practice of simple principles in relation to them.
How to Separate Thoughts and Emotions
The first key to navigating thoughts and feelings is developing an understanding of the difference between the two. Although our culture has taken significant steps towards the acceptance of a variety of feelings and has developed a greater understanding of the nature of thoughts, much of our terminology still confuses the two. A feeling describes an internal state. There are six fundamental feelings: happiness, sadness, surprise, disgust, anger, and fear. Other feelings express various degrees and combinations of these basic emotions. Contrary to the adage “Feelings aren’t facts,” I believe they are. If you are sad, happy, or angry that is a factual statement about your inner state. I think it is where we make judgments or draw conclusions on our emotions that we go from the realm of objective reality to perception and from feeling to thought and fact to possible fiction.
There is a legitimate reason for the confusion, some thoughts ‘masquerade’ as feelings. When we say we feel abandoned or betrayed we are drawing conclusions about someone else’s actions. There is beneath these phrases an underlying emotion, which can be accessed by asking ourselves how we feel internally when we think someone has abandoned us, for example. Another red flag for pseudo-feelings are sentences that begin with phrases like “I feel like…” or “I feel you/I/she/etc…” These invariably speak again of thoughts rather than feelings.
The second necessary understanding is the ways in which emotions, thoughts and the body interact. This interaction is most easily seen in the processing of unpleasant emotions. For example, when a person experiences anger, this tends to trigger both bodily changes (increased heart rate, etc) as well as certain thought processes (defensiveness, etc). Both of these make us increasingly sensitive to further aggravation, thus perpetuating continued or increasing anger.
Interrupting chronic negative emotions
Therefore when we have chronic unpleasant emotions, we need to interrupt the ‘body loop’, the ‘thought loop’, or both. Interrupting the body loop might include breathing exercises, mediation, exercise, and other relaxation methods. It also may involve distraction and other physical self-soothing strategies. Other factors can be taken care of preemptively, by getting proper sleep and nutrition, thereby eliminating certain physical causes of emotional distress.
Interrupting for thought loop is more difficult, but I believe it to be more useful in maintaining a general sense of well-being. This involves objective observation of your mental and emotional processes and habits. It involves a deeper level of awareness of the mental and physical responses to emotional distress, and the chains of events that lead to being overwhelmed. This in itself takes time to develop, and it must be accompanied by a strong genuine desire to change in order to have any effect. The habits of the mind are not easy to break. We must train our minds, much the way an athlete trains his body.
We often must learn by making mistakes. Mistakes are beautiful if we learn from them. I’ve learned that I must address my anger long before I’m drunk with rage. I must recognize the physical and mental symptoms and stop the chain reaction in its earliest stages. By learning the difference between thoughts and emotions and interrupting the spiral of negative emotions we gain reprieve from the uncontrollable floods and storms. It’s not foolproof, but if we are willing to forgive ourselves when emotion gets the best of us and love ourselves through all of our emotions it will get easier.
