How do our thoughts affect our emotions? Or, do our emotions affect our thoughts? What comes first, the thought or the emotion? Understanding the answer to these questions can help us feel better and think more positively. This can also help us heal from the grief of losing a loved one. (more on this in my YouTube video). So, let’s take a look at our mind.

There are automatic, habitual responses that we have been conditioned to have. If a child sees a parent freak out about a bug crawling across the floor, the child may mirror that behavior. When the child grows up, they may see a bug and before a thought crosses their mind, they scream in horror. In this case, a fear of bugs has not been dealt with. A new, conscious response has not been created and so we fall back into our conditioning. This is why we can feel fear before a mental story has time to play out.

Other times, a mental narrative can drive our emotions and make us feel overwhelmed with our lives (hear how to overcome whatever challenges life throws at us, reenergize, and recenter ourselves in my podcast). As we think about a story that has happened to us or may happen to us, like wondering if we will get a promotion, our emotions can go up or down depending on what is happening within the mental story in each moment. In this case, our thoughts drive our emotions. But, even those thoughts are conditioned by our past.

The difference between these two scenarios is that one is caused by external circumstances and one is caused by internal circumstances. Our mental conditioning drives us in the first scenario because we are in a hypervigilant state where we react without thinking. In the second scenario, unconscious thinking drives our emotions.

In both cases, unconscious stories are driving our behaviors, thoughts and emotions. Whether we are modeling a parent’s behavior or we are imagining some nightmare scenario, both stem from unintentional, unmindful, unexamined conditioning. As soon as we start to look inward, we see the cause behind the effect. Once we see the cause, we gain the freedom to unlearn and relearn. Once we unlearn and relearn, we can begin to live a life of conscious choice rather than unconscious reaction.