Thinking Better to Feel Better

Very often, we believe that our feelings are a reaction to what is happening to us, or to what other people are doing around us. We often hear statements like, "My teacher made me so nervous," "I got angry because my husband was late," or that "I am upset because I didn’t get that job." We assume that someone or something is directly responsible for the way we feel. But if we stop to understand the connection between what happened to us and our feelings, we will learn that there is another step in between.

Understanding Automatic Thoughts

What really makes us feel and react the way we do, is not always the situation or the words or the behaviour of others, but how we understand it.

Let’s try to understand this through an example.

Imagine walking down the street and seeing your friend on the opposite side of the road. You call out to her and wave, but she doesn’t respond.

There are many ways you could understand this situation. You could think, "Wow, she’s rude" or you could think, "She doesn’t want to talk to me anymore", or "Maybe she was in a hurry to get somewhere?"

You may have realised that in the same situation, you could have had different thoughts and each of these thoughts made you feel a different emotion - angry, upset and neutral. Very often, we do not notice how these thoughts influence our feelings, but they are always present and impact the way we feel.

You may have noticed that when you are walking or eating, you don’t always pay attention to what your body is doing, instead it seems to happen almost automatically. In the same way, we often don’t realise what we’re thinking. Our brains process many different thoughts and ideas at any given moment, we often find it difficult to slow down and be aware of all the thoughts going through our head- making these thoughts ‘automatic’.

These automatic thoughts can be about anything - worries and concerns, something we have seen or heard, or something that we learned. Looking at the previous example, we can see that there are three kinds of thoughts:

• Neutral thoughts: "She must have been in a hurry to get somewhere."
• Positive thoughts: "It’s a good thing I didn’t have to stop, I would be late."
• Negative thoughts: "She is rude and lacks social etiquette."

Thoughts vs. Feelings

Negative thoughts, in particular, can cause us to feel upset or angry or other negative emotions. People dealing with depression, stress or anxiety tend to have more negative thoughts, which in turn leads to worsening of symptoms.

An easy way to know the difference between thoughts and feelings is that thoughts are usually a sentence while feelings can be expressed in one word.

Example: While we may say: "I feel like no one pays attention to me", this is actually a thought. The feeling this thought causes would be "I feel lonely" or "I feel ignored".

If you’re having a difficult time recognising your feelings, here is a list of words that describe feelings. It isn’t a complete list, but it’s a good place to start!

Tense Enraged Frightened Cheerful Annoyed Happy Panicky Exhilarated Unhappy Ecstatic Frustrated Angry Calm Lonely Uncomfortable Scared Anxious Irritated Sad Fearful Depressed Joyful Tired Exhausted Angry Excited Disappointed Jealous