Let us start of with another bold claim: Feeling bad is not down to emotions at all. As David D. Burns, M.D. puts it in ‘Feeling Good‘: “A change in how you feel is of no more causal relevance [to depression or feeling bad itself] than a runny nose is when you have a cold.”
Feeling bad is a symptom – a consequence – of bad thinking! Distorted negative thoughts underlie every stressful feeling we’ve ever experienced. Have you ever felt sad and cried during a movie, or felt triumphant when the hero finally beats the bad guy at the end of a good book? You were sad or happy then – but did it ever make you feel bad? Did you feel stressed or pained?
You see, positive emotions can accompany negative events, and vice versa. But every painful or stressful emotion is always and necessarily accompanied by negative thoughts. Most of them are completely involuntary and automatic, and usually hidden from us by our subconscious!
Let’s start looking at emotions in a new light: There are no good or bad emotions, only positive or negative experiences. Emotions are neither positive nor negative until they either cause us or relieve us of stress or pain.
Any emotions that are traditionally seen as either good (like excitement, or the feeling of being in love) or bad (like anger and sadness) can also be both positive and negative, depending on… Our attitudes, thoughts and perceptions!
We need only look at the friend who laments falling in love again, making another one of those “mistakes,” and hates herself for it! Or look at someone like Nick Vujicic, who thinks a life without limbs can actually be a blessing in disguise!
There are no such things as good or bad emotions, good or bad thoughts, or good or bad events. The only question that you should ever want to ask yourself:
“What I feel, what I think, what I believe over what is happening: Is it helping me, or not?”
Are your thoughts helping you? Is your anger doing something useful, or just causing you more pain? If it is helpful, it’s worth keeping. If not, it’s stress you don’t need. Whether or not something is helpful is the only question worth asking.
Negative thoughts are destructive. Negativity causes your mood to become gloomy, your self-image to crumble, your body and willpower to become exhausted, and your actions and emotions to defeat you. Nothing breeds negativity like negativity, and this negativity is due to a lifelong cycle of negative thoughts that we were never taught to strip of their power, because we have never taken the time to convince ourselves that they aren’t helpful in the slightest.
So, our goal is to trade in our automatic and start switching the gears manually! Change your thoughts, change your reality. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, if it were all so easy as thinking positively, then people’s often well-intended encouragement to “cheer up” or “look on the bright side” would actually be a pleasant experience, and not the unnerving and often counterproductive guilt-trip it can be. Furthermore, if it were that easy, why can people be stuck with their negative thoughts for sometimes an entire lifetime?
Well, there’s a wrong and right way for doing anything, and practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice does. Even the best of intentions don’t always give the best results, so together we will learn a method that allows you to do things right.
But before we get started with that, let’s get rid of one more seemingly intuitive, but completely inaccurate lies we’ve learned and maintained over the course of our lifetime: the persistent untruth of having ‘real problems.’
Let’s talk about The Problem With ‘Real’ Problems.