“Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”
― Wayne W. Dyer
What causes your feelings?
Maybe you think your partner does, your kids, your bank account or your health? It’s common to believe our feelings are caused by people or situations in our lives – and for good reason. It’s easy to assume our feelings are caused by these things because the brain processes information so quickly that’s it’s practically invisible. But when we slow the mind down and take the time to peer inward, it becomes clear that the true source of our feelings are not the circumstances of our lives but our interpretations of those circumstances (aka thoughts). The result is a kind of cognitive illusion that can can wreak havoc on our mental health and leave us feeling helpless and disempowered.
Learning the distinction between the situations of our lives and what we make those situations mean (ie. thoughts) can be the difference between causing ourselves suffering and knowing how to mitigate it.
What is a situation?
A situation (aka circumstance) is something over which you have no immediate control. This includes what other people do, say, think, feel & act as well as things that happened in the past, physical pain, medical conditions, etc. Things that happen in our lives or in the present moment which are beyond our control are all situations. Another way to identify a situation is to recognize it as a fact of reality that cannot be changed in the present moment (ie. traffic jam, health condition, money in bank, weight on a scale, etc.)
If it were true that situations caused our feelings then the only way to feel better would be to change what we can’t control. Thankfully, it’s how we think about situations that determine their effect on us, not the situations themselves. This means you are not at the mercy of situations in your life after all!
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
– Victor Frankel, Holocaust Survivor and author of Man’s Search For Meaning
What is a thought?
A thought is a sentence in the mind. This statement reflects the meaning you make from a situation. It’s been said we have sixty to eighty thousand thoughts a day. Thoughts run through our mind like a ticker tape always interpreting, evaluating and assessing. All our beliefs, opinions and judgments are thoughts based on our conditioning, experience, culture, etc.
We generally believe our thoughts & accept them as accurate observations of reality. In fact, they reflect only our interpretation of a situation & often based on cognitive distortions. Nonetheless, we accept our interpretations as truths, not because they are but because we’ve thought them so much for so long. The brain prefers to keep thinking the same thoughts even if they don’t serve us because it’s more efficient and less effort to do so.
It makes sense that we naturally accept our thoughts to be accurate reflections of reality. Except, they’re not. In fact, there’s an abundance of research to show our mind’s susceptibility to cognitive bias and capacity to distort reality. Without skills to work against these tendencies, we will effectively believe our thoughts as truths and our feelings as facts.
Most of our thoughts are like a program running in the background. Once the brain has thought something enough times, it’s stored as a kind of procedural memory. Storing thoughts this way allows us to operate from our beliefs automatically without having to bring them into our conscious awareness (ie. once we learn to drive a car we don’t have to consciously think about all the steps required to do so). This is an efficient process with a lot of advantages, but it can backfire when our thoughts work against us or create results we don’t want.
The difference between a thought and a situation.
This may sounds like a simple distinction but it’s harder to make than you might expect. The brain likes shortcuts and fusing situations with our thoughts about them is effortless. Learning how to differentiate a situation from a thought is a cognitive skill. The ability to make this distinction has many benefits. It allows you to get perspective you cannot access without it. It also gives you the ability to get some distance on your thoughts, which increases objectivity while decreasing reactivity. Not only that, it empowers you to decide how you want to interpret circumstances in your life instead of believing everything you think by habit or history.
Here’s an example of the distinction between a situation and a thought.
Situation: Sun is out and clouds are in the sky
Thought: It’s a beautiful day.
In this example, it may seem like the thought, “it’s a beautiful day,” is a fact but if you worked outside, you may have a different thought such as, “It’s so hot today, I wish it would rain so I could go home.” When you’re willing to open the lens on your perspective, you’ll discover there are many interpretations for every situation and your thought is only one.
We often confuse our thoughts for facts and, as such, we don’t recognize that they are optional or changeable. Luckily, we’re able to use the more recent part of our brain called the Prefrontal Cortex to decide what we want to think on purpose. Thinking deliberately takes effort and persistence, but it’s possible and many people do it. For example, I used to think I could cause (and therefore fix) other people’s feelings. As a result, I felt responsible for things and people over which I had no control. This self-imposed burden of responsibility contributed to chronic anxiety and emotional exhaustion. Once I learned believing this was optional and wasn’t serving me, I decided to change my thoughts around what I was and wasn’t responsible for. In doing so, I was able to free myself from a lot of unnecessary suffering.
Often clients challenge this idea with the assertion that the death of someone in your family clearly shows that a situation does cause sadness. But death itself does not cause sadness. If that were the case, you would feel sad as soon as someone died even before you found out they died. You only feel sad once you learn about their death and therefore have a thought about it. Also, not everyone feels sad when someone in their family dies. There are those who feel relief. This means that death does not actually cause sadness. What creates our sadness is the thought we have about someone dying.
Exercise to Separate Thoughts From Situations
- Write down all the thoughts you’re having right now.
- Now go back and underline the ones you identify as Situations (ie objective facts that cannot be changed in the moment). This includes yours and others’ actions, your physical body, events, circumstances that happen, etc.
- Review your thought list again and this time circle ones that reflect your opinions, judgments or subjective interpretations (aka Thoughts).
- Notice how many of the statements you wrote down were thoughts compared to how many were situations. Usually thoughts far outweigh the situations.
If you want to learn more about what causes your feelings, here’s another article on the topic.
