Welcome back to the podcast today. I want to talk about our feelings, so last week, we dove into the model; we call it our circumstance-thought-feeling-action-result. Okay, just a refresher: we have a neutral circumstance. We have all kinds of sentences in our minds about that circumstance; those are our thoughts. We pick them, sometimes we want to pick them all the time. Okay, those thoughts create feelings, which is what I want to talk about today - our feelings or our emotions.
Now, feelings or emotions, they are just vibrations in our body. Okay, so they feel differently depending on what feeling it is. Sometimes, feelings or emotions can be overwhelming, especially if it's a big negative feeling. Sometimes, we don't want to feel it. These are things I hear all the time. Sadness or grief is one of those. Personally, I've dealt with that myself. Afraid to really feel it, afraid if I really felt the sadness and grief, that I would just not be able to come out of it, that it would overwhelm me. But I can tell you, most feelings, most vibrations in our body, only last about 90 seconds. This works best when we allow ourselves to feel it.
So, I'll give you an example. If we have a thought that creates a feeling and we feel the feeling, how do we feel our feeling? Sometimes it helps to name it first. We're going to name the feeling, and then we're going to sort of scan head to toe in our body and see how our body feels with this feeling. Understand the vibration. I'm telling you, feelings are a vibration in your body. I want you to go into your body and feel what that means.
So, if I feel anxious, this is the feeling I'm very good at feeling. Now, anxious, to me, when I go into my body, it feels like a very tight feeling. I can almost physically feel my body sort of crunching on itself. It feels very tight in my chest, it feels warm, it sort of radiates up my neck, my neck feels tight, I can feel my heart rate get faster, right, my temperature, I always get a little sweaty, and my brain starts to buzz a little bit. So, it's a very active energy vibration for me when I feel anxious. That anxiety always comes from a thought.
So, I have a thought, I feel anxious. These are the feelings I start to feel. I can take the temperature of that feeling down immediately by just naming it. So, I can say, "I know this feeling. Okay, I'm anxious." It already goes from like a 10 out of 10 to like an eight out of 10. And then, if I do my body scan and I just feel it, I can feel it start to decrease even more, seven out of 10, six out of 10. And so, when I am at a five out of 10 or less, I can do some work on this feeling if I want to. I can go back and see what the thought is causing it.
Okay, let me back up and say that five out of 10 for me, that's fully processed anxiety. Okay, I rarely get to a zero out of 10 anxiety buzz feeling. You want to fully process it down to whatever number that means for you. And then, we can go back and ask, what's the thought that caused that feeling? And it might be a thought that's just going to hang around.
If I'm in a big social setting, if I'm at a holiday party, there's some sort of self-conscious self-talk. I don't know that I can get rid of that at the party. So, I have some choices here. I can try and get rid of it, I can try and change the thought, because that's where my power is, and changing the thought can change the thought. For something like anxiety in a social situation for me, I can just choose to like place that anxiety kind of in the corner, so I can just live with it for now. It doesn't need to take over. It doesn't need to be the primary feeling causing my actions. It can just be there, hanging out. That's okay.
Some feelings that might be harder to process and just leave in the corner might be rage, very acute right now, grief, some of those feelings we're not going to be able to process down and keep with us and continue on with our day. But things we live with a lot, anxiety, stress, okay. If we take a minute, name them, feel what it feels like in our body, we can process through that. We are not taking action from those feelings.
When we take action from big feelings, I know we've talked about this before, that beautiful planning executive part of our brain, that prefrontal cortex that wants really good things for us and takes a lot of time planning our future, cannot always be accessed when we're having big feelings. So, when we're having big feelings, this naming and processing I think becomes even more important. And then, remind yourself, I don't need to do anything while I'm processing this. I don't need to take any actions while I am processing this emotion. Sometimes, when we take action from big emotions without our prefrontal cortex stepping in to lead the way, we can get into a little bit of trouble. And it happens. It's not a problem. It's not a problem. But it doesn't always end in actions that are in full integrity.
Right. If I am just furious, and I take action from that, I am going to say something or do something that is not really in line with my values or how I want to show up in the world every day. So, for me, just to name the feeling and take non-action for a minute while I'm processing through is probably better for me in the long-term. Now, if I just can't do that and I take action from there, I can always, with emotional maturity, recognize that and make amends if I need to. I might not need to. Whatever action I took might be just fine. But we understand that these actions come from our feelings, and our feelings come from the thoughts that we're in charge of.
I feel like we see the representation of how this should not work in, right? Something will happen, so and so hurt my feelings, and so, I retaliated and did XYZ, right? JoJo said something mean to me, hurt my feelings. I punched JoJo in the face, and I'm making it all JoJo's fault. The truth of the matter is it doesn't matter what JoJo says, that's the circumstance. It's my thoughts about what JoJo said. So, if JoJo called me fat and I believe him, I'm going to be hurt, not gonna be mad, I'm going to be hurt or embarrassed. It's not really what JoJo said, it's about my thought that he's right. And then, I hurt my feelings, and then, from that place of being embarrassed or insecure, I'll take action, smack JoJo. Okay, really, JoJo's fault, my feelings cause my actions. Our feelings cause all of our actions.
This is important because this is why people feel like they want to be motivated, right? Because we have all felt motivated before, and the actions we take from motivation just feel great, right? It's like we're firing on all cylinders, like easy street. I'm super motivated to eat right and lose weight, making those choices easy, breezy. So, we all want the feeling of motivated. We just have to go back and get the thought that creates motivation. It doesn't just happen. None of these feelings just appear out of thin air. Feelings are always caused by our thoughts. But our feelings are powerful in that they do create actions. They drive our actions, and our actions give us our results.
So, the two things I want to talk about a little more. If we are looking for a feeling because we want to take certain actions, then we have to go back to our thoughts. So, for 2024, if I have a goal, if I have an intention that I've set, if I have habits I want to change, I have actions that I want to take, I have to find the feeling that will generate those actions. And that feeling doesn't come out of the air. I have to generate that feeling with my thoughts. So, if I have all these actions I want to take and I'm waiting for divine motivation, it's not gonna happen. If I want to feel motivated, I need to go back and do some work and figure out what thoughts make me feel motivated.
So, that's sort of on the positive spectrum of our feelings, right? We're looking for these positive feelings to generate these positive actions for the changes we want to make in 2024. The other thing I just want to touch on is that the more specific we can be with our feelings, the better. Because when I have a thought that generates a feeling, that feeling creates actions. So, if I have a very limited vocabulary of naming my feelings, then those feelings are going to generate the same actions no matter the thought.
So, let me make this make more sense to you. I actually use a feelings wheel with my clients and embrace it down. So, the first inner circle is sort of the most general, right? So, we have happy, sad, surprise, fear, anger, disgust. Those are sort of general, and then it breaks them down. So, let's use a positive, and then we use a more negative. If I just say, "I'm happy," my feeling is happy, that might create a certain amount of action. But if I go all the way out on my wheel, and I get so much more specific, right under happy could be hopeful, inspired, confident, liberated, courageous.
Now, for me, hopeful and courageous might generate slightly different actions. So, the more specific I can be in what feeling I need, the easier it is to find a thought. If I just want to find a thought that makes me happy, there's probably a lot of choices. But if I want to find a thought that makes me feel courageous, it's gonna be more specific. And the more specific I am with my thought, the more specific the feeling it generates, and the more specific the action.
On the opposite side of our feelings, I'm angry, and I have the same actions for anger, that might not always be what I want, right? So, if I go out to the edge of my circle for anger, I have embarrassed, jealous, furious, hostile, irritated, withdrawn is even on there. Okay, so the actions and feelings, let's start with the feelings, the vibrations I feel for embarrassed are a different vibration that I feel for furious. And I'm not trying to parcel out exactly what I'm feeling. My reactions, my actions to these feelings might not be entirely appropriate. So, if I just say, "I'm mad" or "I'm angry," angry is even less specific than mad on the wheel.
So, I'm angry, and I lash out by screaming, hitting, or withdrawing. Okay, all three I might not want to do. If I am embarrassed, right, if the true underlying feeling is embarrassment, then maybe lashing out is not really what I want to do. Withdrawing might still be something I would want to do. In the same vein, I'm furious, withdrawing might not be what I want to do. I might want to lash out if I'm furious. But if I haven't named these feelings a little more specifically, if I haven't figured out that embarrassed and furious feel different in my body, than every time I'm furious, I'm going to lash out instead of maybe just feeling suspicious, and that doesn't require a full lashing like when I'm furious.
So, I hope that makes sense. The power in naming our feelings is there because the more specific we can be, the more nuanced our reactions or our actions can be. And then, if we work all these models backward, we can get very specific in what thoughts are going to generate exactly what we want to get the results we want. So, I can find very specific thoughts that create very specific feelings that generate exactly the actions I want to get me exactly the results that I want. So, there's a lot of power in our feelings, and I really nuance them out. I hope this made sense.
Okay, the awareness and curiosity of all of this work is so important at these stages where we're really talking about our thoughts and our feelings and our actions. Okay, I want you to get the results you want to get in 2024. So, understanding the thought model, how these things interplay, and why we want to be specific is so important. So, if you've learned anything today, please share this with a friend. Until next time, have a wonderful week.