Are You Your Thoughts, Feelings, or Actions?

One of the most important questions of our lives that perhaps we do not give enough thought to is:

“Who are you?”

I think so much about everything that, at many points in my life, I would have assumed that I was my thoughts.

For many people, they may feel so much that they may conclude that they are their feelings.

For others, they may feel so compelled to act that they may come to conclude that they are their actions.

For others still, perhaps some quality has become so central to their lives, whether it be their work, their beauty, or their intellect, and they identify with such qualities so much that the quality becomes them. When they think of themselves, they see a particular quality or set of qualities they embody as part of their human spirit.

Growing up, if someone told us over and over how hardworking, or smart, or beautiful we were, perhaps we ended up learning to identify as what we were told we were.

Unfortunately, if we were repeatedly reminded of our faults and how we were not good enough, perhaps this is how we came to identify ourselves. Rather than being something, we came to see ourselves as lacking something we were supposed to be.

The interesting part of being human is that we get to define what or who we are. Whether we relate more to our thoughts, feelings, actions, or some other quality of ourselves, we get to choose to live our lives based on what we find to be important.

Often, we like to simplify things to make sense of them. It’s easier to see myself as my thoughts. But the reality is that my feelings and actions help me to arrive at my thoughts. Most people tend to know what they feel or believe, and then they use thoughts to rationalize or explain this. If I feel angry and I don’t know why, I will find a way to explain it, probably based on whatever actions just took place.

Feelings flow into thoughts. Of course, thoughts can flow into feelings too. If I am obsessively thinking about something, I may have a strong feeling about whatever I was thinking. And it seems that if we feel strongly enough, we will be compelled to take action. And again, our thoughts or our reasoning will help convince us further whether we should take action or whether it is unsafe to do so.

Often, our feelings compel us to action, and our thoughts reason us out of having to take any action. If you feel more, you may take more action. If you think more, you may take less action.

Feeling too much with not enough thinking can lead you to take actions you regret or to take actions in ways that were not properly thought out and perhaps would lead to undesired consequences. Thinking too much with not enough feeling can result in not taking enough action. You may miss many opportunities, having thought them through too deeply and focused on all the things that could go wrong, thinking yourself away from taking action. The other danger with thinking too much with not enough feeling is that we can find it difficult to relate to other people. Usually, people find it more interesting to surround themselves with impassioned people, as they tend to be more relatable and entertaining to be around. Thought or reasoning without any feeling can feel dry, empty, and purposeless.

If your feelings and thoughts are in balance, then you may find the way to take the proper actions when needed and to avoid taking unnecessary actions or actions that will lead to undesirable consequences. Reaching this point can take self-reflection, practice, and of course seeking balance in one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.

A key issue to keep in mind is that it is quite easy to get stuck. Thoughts can get to a point where they loop around. I suffered depression in the past (e.g., many, many years ago), and at some point, there were just negative thoughts looping in my mind repeatedly. After sinking deep into these thought loops and having hundreds of negative thoughts in a row, it isn't easy to form a positive thought or positive action in your life. And so thoughts can build a sort of momentum, and when they get going in a certain direction with enough power, going against them can be like trying to stop a speeding train.

A path to get out of these loops is to realize that our thoughts have gone out of control and force ourselves to take positive actions (e.g., exercise or socializing with friends and family) even if we don’t feel like it. If you feel stuck in your life and unable to make progress, I recommend seeking professional help.

We can also get stuck in our feelings. Have you ever felt bad for someone? Perhaps a friend just lost his job. Then you spend your time worrying, thinking about his family and how they may struggle to pay the bills. You may worry about how they will pay for that new car they just got. You don’t want to call your friend and bother him, as you know he is probably worried and busy. And also, a part of you doesn’t want to call because if he asks for help, you fear that you are not in the position to offer any. You would be happy to listen to his problems, but ultimately you cannot do much of anything to fix it. When we find ourselves in these situations, it’s quite easy to get stuck in our feelings. It can drag down our whole day if we get stuck there.

A path to get unstuck from our negative feelings is finding a small positive thought or action we can do to help and then actually do it. For example, this could be notifying our friend of any job openings you know about, or offering to listen if he wants to talk, or meditation or prayer. Such actions can help us relieve the negative energy inside us and transform it into positive action.

We can even get stuck in our actions. Imagine two men who struggle to move a heavy sofa from one room to another. So they ask a couple of friends to help them. The sofa is currently positioned in the hallway between two rooms. The men get to their positions, two on one side of the sofa and two on the other side, and they proceed to push the sofa. They struggle and struggle, but the sofa doesn’t move. They check to see if something is blocking the sofa from moving, and there is nothing there. It should be able to move freely. The furniture is heavy, but not so heavy to where four men would not be able to move it.

What is the problem here? The men were not clear on their direction. They were all pushing the sofa forward, meaning they were canceling out their forces and working against each other. If two men are on each side of the sofa, one side should be pushing and the other side pulling. If everyone is pushing, as is what happened here, then we have a problem.

When we get stuck in our actions, we can stubbornly push forward, even when we shouldn’t be pushing at all. Sometimes, we should think more deeply before we act, or we should consider how we feel. Our feelings or intuitions may reveal that this is not the proper course of action, but our desire for progress may keep us moving forward nonetheless. Sometimes, the best course of action is to do nothing – to wait and see what happens. Not every situation demands action, and most situations will not benefit if we push forward without thinking through the implications of our actions.

Everyone gets stuck in action occasionally. But if we often push forward and cause undesirable problems in our lives, we should think more deeply about our true goals. We should come to understand that action without any reflection can cause catastrophic problems and waste time, meaning we will have to perform more and more actions in a loop that becomes frustratingly difficult to dig our way out of. This can result in burnout, as we do more and more but accomplish less and less. To perform meaningful or useful actions, we will need to engage in thought.

This can take practice, but see if you can learn to use your thoughts, feelings, and actions to help you move forward in life, rather than getting stuck in them. Try to balance these different parts of yourself and see what happens.

Default Thoughts vs. Reflective Thoughts

There are two types of thoughts. Default Thoughts are those you arrive at as a natural consequence of your prior thinking and your prior actions. For example, as a Hispanic American, if I arrive at a store and a clerk looks at me with disgust and walks away from me rather than greeting me, my immediate thoughts may be that the clerk is a disgusting, racist person. (While this has happened to me, it is infrequent, thankfully.)

Every day we have the option of whether we will stick with our default thoughts and assume them to be true or whether we will engage in more reflective thinking.

Reflective Thoughts are when we choose to more deeply process our default thoughts. Some of my reflections in this particular situation may be as such:

Okay – this clerk appears to not like me and is perhaps a prejudiced person, but what do I gain if I purposely look for confrontation with him? If I do that, then if I am correct about thinking he is a racist, I am just reinforcing his beliefs, “proving” to him that people like me have attitudes, are unlikeable, and cause trouble.

So if I act according to my default thoughts, causing me to get an attitude with this person, then I am making the world a worse place, losing this opportunity to positively impact the people and environment around me.

Please bear with me through this mental exercise. I just want you to understand that it is quite easy to form default thoughts, assume they are the truth, and allow them to affect our whole day. Meanwhile, our default thoughts often represent great falseness in our lives. This case example may not be one you relate to – that is fine, just imagine any scenario where someone appeared to have a distaste for you, without a good reason.

My trick in many life situations (I’m sure I did not invent this) is to pretend that I am not aware of certain things I am actually aware of. I believe this technique is used much more by women than men, but it can be quite useful. If I perceive that someone is in a horrible mood or seems to be prejudiced against me, I will simply behave as I always do, pretending that I did not notice their mood or attitude. Of course, I may quickly look for a way to give them their space.

My default mode of behavior is to be polite with everyone, to treat everyone as if they have some internal importance that I may not be aware of. Every person you see every day is more important than you think. This person may have saved someone’s life, may be managing a multi-million-dollar company, may have raised a family of doctors and teachers, or may have had the potential to do all the above things if he had ever simply been given the opportunity.

When people assume that you are a certain way, and then you show them that you are not like they had assumed, hopefully, this helps to change their perceptions. Hopefully, they can begin to see that they do not need to assume everyone of a certain race, religion, or political party is bad.

Most people are good, or they aspire to be good most of the time. Sometimes, of course, we think we are doing good, but the effects are actually bad. Ultimately, it is our default thoughts that poison us all against each other. And to be frank, often this is driven by news media, social media, and all the people who are stuck in “us vs. them” thinking to an extreme level, who forever blame someone else for all the ills of the world. Many of these people and media have the loudest voices, reminding us over and over that our group hates that group. Or their group hates our group. Or this group started this, and the other group needed to get revenge.

This creates and spurs endless psychological and even physical warfare. Because these are the loudest voices, many of us assume that we live in a scary world, but it can’t possibly be as bad as it is portrayed to be. For instance, the news is built to report mostly negative news – positive stories are rarely reported.

The major caveat here is that the more we think the world is a scary place, the more closed off we all become, afraid to get involved with anything we see, afraid to help, afraid to ask for help, and as you may guess, these thought processes will probably make the world a scarier place to live in.

By thinking we live in a scary world, we make it so.

Something I wish all of us to learn is that our thoughts are potent. We don’t understand the power of a simple thought in this age. And the collective thoughts of masses of humans are incalculably powerful – they are responsible for inventions, religions, philosophies. Still, they are also responsible for needless vitriol and toxicity, misinformation, and warfare.

We must take our thoughts seriously.

How can you help make the world a better place? Do this.

Start thinking about your thinking. Take note of the types of thoughts you often have. Here are some common thoughts people tend to have:

• I am not as good as my peers

• I can never seem to attract any good, successful people into my life

• Everything I do seems to fail.

• Many people don’t like my personality.

• If I had more money, things would work out.

• I’m not smart enough.

I did specifically choose mostly negative thoughts, as these are the ones that tend to cause the most harm in our lives.

Let’s take the thought, “Everything I do seems to fail.”

We have to examine this more carefully.

Everything you do cannot possibly be failing. You are breathing, and your heart is beating, so your body’s systems seem to work just fine. Perhaps you mean that much of what you do at work isn’t going well. Then we can examine certain projects you worked on and see that perhaps there is a pattern of failure. Then we should examine the parts of the projects more carefully. Perhaps 90% of the tasks in your projects went quite well, but that 10% that did not were critical enough to cause big failures. Fine – you can use this information to improve and stop being so hard on yourself. Achieving 90% is an A in school, but sometimes it is a failure in a real-life project.

Be very cautious with general, all-encompassing words, such as Everything / Nothing, Everyone / No one, Always / Never. If you use such words in your thoughts, this should be a big signal that your default thinking is flawed.

As a general rule, we can assume that our default thinking is indeed flawed. This means that if you do not engage in reflective thinking, that most of your thinking is probably flawed. And if most of your thinking is flawed, your whole life may be headed on a path that is not best for you.

You do not need to think reflectively about every single thought you have, but at least try it out for your most common thoughts. If you are not aware of your thoughts, try this exercise. Set the alarm for every hour of the day (at 8:00, then 9:00, and so on). Every time the alarm goes off, write down what you were thinking at that moment. Later on, look for patterns in your thoughts. Then, think reflectively about your thoughts. Scrutinize them carefully. You will find mistakes, fallacies, incorrect assumptions, and you will see that you can improve your thinking.

If you find it difficult to properly examine your thoughts, it may help to read about cognitive biases, logical fallacies, or other books in the psychology / self-development domains.

When you improve your thinking, you will improve your behaviors, which will help create more positive and fruitful thoughts, and you will create a virtuous positive cycle of thoughts and actions in your life and possibly others’ lives.