Yesterday I went house hunting.
I looked at two houses that I was interested in and the feelings I got from imagining myself living in those houses went from anxiety and uneasy feeling in one home, to feeling more relaxed and at peace in another.
It was a weird.
I couldn’t figure out why I felt anxious in one home but the other I felt great… so let’s figure it out!
Feelings vs Emotions
Firstly, let’s learn what Emotions and Feelings are..
According to the graphic above “Feelings are subjective experiences that arise from emotions, influenced by personal interpretations, beliefs and experiences”
And then “Emotions are intense, short-lived reactions to specific stimuli, encompassing a range of responses such as joy, anger, fear, surprise and more.”
Interesting!
So first we have an emotion and than we subjectively interpret that as a feeling.
So it’s Emotions > Feelings.
According to most psychological understanding, emotions are largely triggered by our thoughts, as our interpretation of a situation through our thoughts determines the emotional response we experience; essentially, how we think about something significantly influences how we feel about it.
Alright!
So it’s Thoughts > Emotions > Feelings.
And I just know, based on experience how we feel generally dictates our behavior..
So it’s Thoughts > Emotions > Feelings > Behavior
So with that understood let’s try to figure things out about the situation..
- What was the Situation? The first house I looked at while house hunting I had an uneasy feeling about it and was anxious for some reason.
- What were my Thoughts about that situation? My thoughts were I didn’t like certain things about the house I was viewing. I noticed the layout was odd. I noticed it looked smaller than in the pictures. I noticed the outside area wasn’t as nice. It looked a bit rough.
- What Emotion did I have associated with the thoughts? I got anxious.
- What Feelings did I have at the time? I felt worried, fearful and a sense of impending danger. And at the time I didn’t know why I felt the way I did but I trusted it in the moment.
- When did I have similar feelings? Now that I have done some reflection on it the house reminded me of a house I lived in 7 years earlier where it was old, unkept and the layout was bad. And I did not enjoy that house. I had the same feeling living there as I was having in the moment.
- What was my reaction to the feeling? I took a mental note of it and moved on. I crossed it off my list of potential houses because of the feeling I got.
- What are my findings? My feelings alerted me to the fact that the house was very similar to a house I didn’t like 7 years earlier. I didn’t know it consciously at the time but I trusted in my instincts that it would be a house I wouldn’t like and crossed it off my list. What happened was as I was thinking thoughts, I felt anxious. The thoughts were things I didn’t like about the house and that triggered an emotional response. By reviewing what thoughts I had during that experience, I could link it to a previous experience 7 years earlier and clearly understand why I was triggered and felt the way I felt.
Wow!
So I had a situation that I didn’t understand at first and by doing some simple reverse engineering I figured out why I felt the way I did.
The cool thing is I learned my feelings were valid.
While at the time I didn’t know what they were trying to tell me, upon reflection I can see my feelings were triggered by a previous experience in a house I didn’t like. And so when I saw similar patterns in the house I was viewing, those past emotions were triggered.
That’s cool!
Now this can be tricky because what often happens is our brain will associate current circumstances as though we are experiencing a past situation even though logically, it’s not the same.
This is why those with PTSD can still be effected years later to similar stimuli but in totally different situations.
All it takes is to be triggered by something that reminds you of a past situation for you to flashback to that experience and your body to react. It’s neat!
It’s a useful survival mechanism but it’s not always the correct response.
This is why it’s useful to utilize tools like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help you quickly see if your response was appropriate or not.
CBT helps you more logically understand the situation instead of just blindly following you feelings (which again isn’t always correct).
This time for me, I feel my feelings were appropriate and I acted correctly.
I felt anxious and unease about the house because it was reminding me of a past experience that I didn’t like and thankfully I understood this to mean to cross that home off my list which I did.. and in fact the next home I looked at I decided to put an offer in and hopefully I get it.
Yay!
The feelings wheel might be useful in helping you understand your feelings and link them to an emotion:
And here is a how our mind works:
Here is a CBT Thought Record you can use:
Here is another example:
I didn’t touch on core beliefs but it’s fundamental. Our core beliefs are the lense in which we view the world and from there it goes your: thoughts, emotions, feelings and behavior.
When you change your core beliefs about a thing (which we know is possible) than our view of ourselves, others and the world, shifts.
As our core beliefs change, it affects the thoughts we have and as we have just learned that leads to different emotions, feelings and behaviors.
So if you want to change something about yourself, find out your core belief about that thing, challenge it, drop it and adopt a belief that better serves you and you’ll see your life start to shift to reflect that core belief.
When people talk about manifestation, this is it.
The mind is so interesting!
