Do Your Feelings Have You?
Behavior wags the tail of feelings… We do, then we feel.
David K. Reynolds
We talk about feelings and emotions as if we possess them.
“I have a good feeling about this.”
But sometimes it seems as if our feelings “have” us.
We let them control our mindset and even our behavior.
Even the legal system recognizes crimes of passion.
When we try to stop bad habits or start good habits, our feelings seem to be working against us.
“I don’t feel like going to the gym today.”
We know we will be glad tomorrow if we go to the gym today.
We are aware of the enormous health benefits of physical exercise.
We know that we aren’t as fit as we once were.
We know we should go to the gym, but we don’t feel like it.
Maybe you have the fitness thing down cold.
You enjoy being at the gym. You can’t wait to get there.
But what happens if you run into traffic on your way there?
Do you let the slow drivers, the distracted drivers, and the “stupid” drivers cause you to act aggressively?
We all have times when we find our behavior being influenced by our feelings.
Sometimes that happens because we are unaware of exactly what we are feeling.
Men tend to express all unpleasant emotions as anger.
If they are embarrassed, they react with anger.
It is safer for a man to be angry than to admit that he feels vulnerable.
On the other hand, we can pay so much attention to our emotions that we let them dictate our moods and our behaviors.
Either extreme leaves us without agency.
We should work to develop our emotional intelligence.
We are emotional beings.
Our decisions are made emotionally and justified afterward with logic and reason.
This makes us vulnerable to manipulation.
Music, movies, and memes all influence our emotions.
And our emotions influence our behavior.
We also can allow our circumstances to dictate our emotions.
Our emotional reactions kick in before we have time to process exactly what happened.
But we always have some degree of agency, no matter how small.
Even though we can’t use one of our three wishes granted by a jinni to get more wishes, we can use our limited agency to get for ourselves more agency.
Don’t wait to “feel like it.”
Take action and let the feelings take care of themselves.
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