Choose Your Thoughts, Choose Your Feelings…

This is a relatively minor example of how our thoughts can directly influence – or create – our feelings.

Here is another.

Years ago, I had to fly to Paris, France for a business trip. Unfortunately, I could not find my passport. I looked and looked, and got progressively more anxious, tense and upset as the hours passed.

Once I realized the panic I was getting into, I took a deep breath, and said the following to myself:

“Either I will find my passport, and go to France, or I will not find my passport, and I will not go to France.”

This really helped me relax, and took the ground-shaking tension out of the situation.

As long as the absolute statement was: “I must go to France,” there really was no limit to the emotional escalation.

The moment that I gave myself a choice – or rather recognized the true options – my tension diminished considerably.

Either I was going to France, or I was not going to France – but I certainly did not “have to” go to France.

As the old saying goes, the only thing we gotta do is die.

Attempting to sustain two opposing thoughts – “doublethink,” in Orwellian terms – creates an enormous stress and tension within our minds, and tends to crank up our “fight or flight” mechanism to the boiling point.