THINKING OR FEELING.

Anxiety is an unpleasant mood sensation. And it has something to do with thoughts the content of which is (something along the lines of) that something bad might happen. For example if I am due to sit some sort of test in the morning and I am thinking I might mess it up. This will make me feel anxious the evening before. If I wasn’t thinking that I might mess it up then I wouldn’t feel anxious. The thought and the feeling go together.

But is that account of anxiety correct? Maybe not, because surely even people who don’t feel anxious about a test can still have the thought that they might mess it up. Is it that the anxious person is thinking that thought more intensely somehow? Or more frequently? But again that doesn’t sound right. You could imagine a non-anxious person sitting there thinking over and over that they might mess it up but it still not making them anxious. The non-anxious person is someone for whom the thought does not lead to the feeling. So what’s the difference between the non-anxious person and the anxious one here? Why does the thought cause the feeling in one but not the other?

So: the chain is: the fact - your thought about that fact - your feelings.

If you feel upset at the thought that your pet cat has died it is the thought that your cat is gone (caused by the fact it has) that is causing you to feel upset. But after a year the exact same thought doesn’t cause any such feeling. Therefore thought doesn’t necessarily cause feeling. You can have the thought but not the feeling. Maybe there is some trick by which you can dissociate the feeling from the thought without having to wait a year.

In general if some thought is causing an unpleasant feeling then you should try to change your thoughts. A lot of unpleasant feelings are caused by people thinking negative thoughts about world or about themselves. You could practice ‘positive thinking’ to feel better. (You could “always look on the bright side of things”.) About your cat you might think it had good life and about your life you could think you can get another cat.

Sometimes you can have the feeling but there seems to be no negative thought causing that feeling. Like you might feel anxious but you can’t see any thought that is causing the feeling. Or suppose you take a happy pill and so then you feel happy. But there’s no corresponding positive thought.

When you have both the thought and the feeling is there still a question of what comes first? What if the prospect of a forthcoming event causes a sensation of anxiety and then this causes (or is somehow manifested by) a thought about what might happen.

What is it about the thought that you might mess up the test that causes the sensation of anxiety. What if it’s not the messing up but the not knowing, the prospect of the uncertainty. So if I told you that I can see into the future and I know that you will mess it up. Then you wouldn't feel anxious any more.

What about other sensations? Is the sensation of ‘vertigo’ caused by the thought that you might fall? Is fear of the dark caused by the thought that the dark might be concealing some horrible monster. If someone tells me I'm an idiot and that "hurts my feelings" are my hurt feelings caused by me thinking that I am an idiot (or that people think I am one)?

When I pay attention to the actual feelings I find anxiety (apprehension) to be similar to excitement (anticipation). In terms of the kind of sensations they are and where (mostly in the bowels) they are. Maybe the two sensations are exactly the same and the difference is only how we perceive them. Like the duck-rabbit picture. And an anxious person could convert their anxiety into excitement by just switching their attention the way you do with the duck-rabbit picture. So you could change your feeling from dreading the thought of the test in the morning to gleefully looking forward to it.

Often the anxiety that a bad thing might happen is worse than the bad thing. Similarly the anticipation (excitement) that some good thing will happen is better than the good thing.

What if there were someone who never felt anxious or fearful about anything? Is that what courage is? Or is courage feeling the fear and doing it anyway? Being courageous isn't the same as being fearless.

What if Jack got attacked by a dog one day. And from then on he felt more anxious and fearful when he walked by a dog. Is this because, since the attack, he believes an attack is more likely? That doesn't sound right. He is a rational person so he knows that the likelihood of another attack in the future is the same as it was before the attack. And he believes that. So the increase in his fear feelings are something else.

If you feel overwhelmed when confronted by a massive task to do. Then if you change the way you think about it. If, in your mind, you split the one massive task into many sub-tasks which you only have to deal with one at a time. Then you will not feel so overwhelmed.

Are all feelings 'mediated' via beliefs? Consider feelings of anger, or envy.

We could add behaviour to the chain so then we get “event - thought - feeling - behaviour”. For example if you are thinking and feeling anxious, you might also behave in an anxious way, like fidgeting. So then if you stop fidgeting, that will stop you being anxious. (This is that “fake it till you make it” idea.) And if you want to be happy then behave the way happy people do, smile and walk with a spring in your step. All of this sounds wrong because it‘s backwards: anxiety causes fidgeting not the other way round. But it has a kind of plausibility to it. The good thing is that behaviour, unlike thoughts and feelings, is something you can change directly. Also, it has an affinity with the theory of ‘logical behaviourism’ which kind of says that mental states just ARE behaviour patterns, that there's nothing more to them than that.

[27 December 2010]

[amended later many times]