Thoughts vs. Feelings: What is the difference and why does it matter?
Do you know the difference between thoughts and feelings? While these concepts may seem simple, they often are more complicated than they appear, especially when we are in the middle of an emotional struggle. Thoughts and feelings are both parts of our internal life that we can both experience ourselves and express to other people. Feelings are single-word descriptions of how something makes us feel emotionally (e.g. sad, angry, frustrated, disappointed, happy, proud). Thoughts are in some ways more complex, and sometimes describe why we feel a certain emotion, or why we think something is happening (e.g. “I’ll never be able to do this,” “she’s always mad at me”). While it may seem like a trivial distinction to make, differentiating between thoughts and feelings is a first step in managing both of them and feeling better.
When we have a challenging feeling, thoughts often follow immediately after, and we can get very pulled into those thoughts, and the thoughts can feel true, even if they are not. Here is an example: Imagine that you and a friend have plans together, but your friend stands you up. You might feel sad, angry, and hurt. This might then lead you to think things like “my friend doesn’t want to spend time with me,” which can then increase those feelings of sadness, anger and hurt. It can even lead to more thoughts, such as “I’m boring,” “no one will want to hang out with me,” and “I’m going to spend my life alone.” These thoughts and feelings continue to spiral and worsen each other, until you are feeling even more distress than you were initially.
Our minds naturally think and try to come up with explanations or meanings for things. It’s one of the great things about being human, but can also be problematic when it leads us to stay stuck in difficult emotions or come to conclusions that aren’t helpful, like in the above example. Rather than continuing to allow your thoughts to spiral, sometimes being able to label the actual feelings using one or two words can be helpful. First, it helps you to slow down the spiral of thoughts. It can also help things feel more defined, and less vague and overwhelming. So for example, rather than feeling like you are dealing with lots of confusing feelings at once, you can narrow it down to sadness. That in itself may not seem like much, but it is a useful step.
“Being able to label the actual feelings using one or two words can be helpful.”
Another way labeling emotions can help can be a bit more difficult to grasp when you have not experienced it yourself very much: It can help to not only be caught up in the emotion that you are experiencing, but to be able to step outside of it and look at it somewhat from a third person/outside observer perspective. Often what we tend to do is get very caught up in the feelings we are having and the associated thoughts. Stepping outside of that for a moment and labeling what is happening (sadness, worry, frustration, etc.) without continuing further with the thoughts can calm things down a bit and interrupt that cycle of constant thoughts.
Once you know which emotions you are experiencing, you can start to think about how to work with those emotions. This is different from thinking the problem through or trying to figure out how to solve something. You are specifically looking at how to manage the emotion. So for the example above, where your friend didn’t hang out with you, you would not want to keep focusing on the thoughts you were having, or even try to solve the problem (yet -- that can be saved for later when emotions calm down). Instead, you might think about what helps in coping with sadness, anger, and hurt. For some people, this could be something distracting, like a hobby they enjoy or something that takes some thought and concentration. It could also be something comforting, like spending some time under a warm blanket. Things like writing, listening to music, or talking to someone can also be helpful. Do you see the difference between this strategy and what was described above?
It can be a little tough to really understand when you just think about it abstractly, so practice can sometimes make a difference. Maybe even during a fairly neutral time over the next couple of days or during a set time (like after dinner, before bed, etc.), you could think about using one-word labels or a few one-word labels to think about how you are feeling, or how you were feeling at a particular moment in the day. See if you can notice what it’s like to label the emotions themselves while setting the thoughts aside.
Here is a large feelings list that may be helpful: https://www.cnvc.org/sites/default/files/feelings_inventory_0.pdf
