Helpful or Unhelpful only you can know.

It never ceases to amaze me how often helpful emotions/feelings can be so uncomfortable and unhelpful emotions so much easier to feel.

What do I even mean when I say helpful and unhelpful in relation to emotions?  I mean an emotion that drives us to take action. I believe all emotions have their purpose, after all everything we do, or don’t do is because we either want to feel something or don’t want to feel something.

You might be thinking, “what on earth is she talking about” well we all desire to be described as courageous, we admire and remember people for acts of bravery, but the way this emotion feels in the body is intense, expansive, it is physically uncomfortable, difficult to tolerate.  It needs to be, because it requires us to get up and move, to take action either towards or away from something.  If it was comfortable, we would all sit down and enjoy it.  That’s the human design, our DNA, for example if we all enjoyed feeling hungry, we would all sit and starve to death.

Then there is feelings like guilt, confusion, overwhelm. These emotions are uncomfortable but tolerable, because physically they are isolated and create a lower vibrational energy.  We don’t enjoy them but because we can tolerate them, we can spin and get stuck in a place of inaction. These emotions provide little purpose they can build up and result in high levels of anxiety or states of depression.

Then there is the desire to feel happy, content, satisfied these emotions are pleasant and easily felt by our bodies, but they encourage us to stay in a comfort zone, to sit on our bottoms.  They do not help us achieve goals unless that is what we think we will feel when we get there, so it is not what we are currently feeling it is a desire to feel it that is driving action.

You might be thinking “so what”, why does knowing this even matter.  It matters because our thoughts create our feelings/emotions and our emotions drive our actions, and yep our actions create the results in our lives.  Now whether this occurs consciously or unconsciously that is how it works.  I am not talking about sensation which is something our body experiences without thought, such as when it touches something, or notices a smell.

I am talking about a situation occurring, that triggers a thought in your brain, you either pay attention to that thought or not, but if you believe the thought a feeling will happen and your actions will be driven by that feeling and create a result, a result you may or may not want.

Now let’s face it there is a lot of literature about just how many thoughts can occur in the human brain in a day so there is more often than not multiple thoughts and feelings occurring at any given time. (picture a multi lane highway that goes round in a loop and is being used as a race track with cars going over 250 miles per hour, oh and they are constantly passing each other). I’m not suggesting you suddenly start noticing all your thoughts and trying to change or control them so you can feel what you want, but this information is good to know so that you can acknowledge this process as it is happening and this helps you manage your experience from a place of emotional self-responsibility rather than blaming the situation or other people which only leaves us feeling powerless,  reactive and often regretful.

The human body is designed to feel, our feelings are not life threatening despite what our brain might like to offer. So how do we know if our thought/s or feelings are helpful or not, by the actions we take and the results those actions create.

If the results in any area of your life is not what you want you are the only person who has any power to change them.

Want to learn more, I did, I learned how the human brain works and how to create the results I wanted. Join me, book an appointment at www.pampoole.co.nz