Which comes first – the thought or the feeling?

“Change your thoughts and you’ll change how you feel.”

The idea that the happiness in your life depends on the quality of your thoughts crops up a lot in coaching, personal development and psychology. It's straightforward and sounds easy to do.

Something happens to us, we think something about it and that creates an emotional response. So change the thought and we can change how we feel. Ta da!

Yet, without getting into the complexity of the neuroscience, our brains and bodies are not that simple.

So which does come first?

From my understanding, after wrestling with this topic personally and professionally for many years, the somewhat frustrating answer is... it depends!

There is good evidence that what we think and how we interpret something can affect how we feel. For example, if I interpret a difficult conversation as evidence that someone doesn't respect me, I may feel angry. If I interpret exactly the same conversation as someone having a bad day, my response may be quite different.

This is where coaches might start to get curious about the beliefs and assumptions we hold about the world and our place in it, which filter how we experience what happens to us.

However, that's only part of the story because sometimes our bodies and emotions seem to get there before our conscious thinking does.

I can be sitting perfectly happily with my cup of coffee, remember something I'm worried about happening next week, and suddenly feel my stomach drop and my heart rate pick up. Or I can wake after a poor night's sleep feeling out of sorts, join an important meeting and start thinking, “I'm actually feeling nervous about this!”

In CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and other approaches, we're often encouraged to notice the relationship between our thoughts, emotions, feelings and behaviour.

However, I wonder if it might be more useful to think of thoughts, emotions and our body as a constantly moving system. All three are influencing each other, all the time.

They're also being influenced by what's happening around us, our previous experiences, what we've learned, what we expect, the people we're with and the physical state we happen to be in.

While the physical sensations we experience with some emotions may be remarkably similar (for example, the thrill or terror of a rollercoaster ride) the meaning we give them can contribute to a very different experience.

This is one reason our thinking matters, but it doesn't mean that every uncomfortable emotion is the result of some faulty thought that we need to hunt down and correct.

Sometimes we're tired. Sometimes something has genuinely hurt us. Sometimes our nervous system has reacted before our conscious mind has caught up. And sometimes an emotion might be giving us useful information.

Perhaps we're asking the wrong question

Through my work I'm interested in helping people understand themselves better. But there's a point where trying to work out exactly why we're feeling something can become another thing to get stuck in.

Being curious about what caused a particular feeling, or why I reacted as I did, can sometimes be useful. And sometimes it really isn't.

Plus we have a tendency to find what we go looking for. If we set out to uncover a particular explanation, our brains are very good at noticing the patterns and evidence that support it – and paying less attention to what doesn't. What we find may be true, but it may not be the whole story.

If thoughts, emotions and our bodies are continuously influencing one another, there are also several different places where we might usefully create some movement.

We might question our thinking: “Is there another way of seeing this?” Or work with our body: breathe, move, eat, sleep or rest. We might take some action, change something in our environment or have a conversation.

Or we might simply notice the emotion, name it and allow it to be there for a while without immediately trying to make it go away.

More noticing, more choice

Rather than trying to establish which came first, it might be more useful to ask ourselves:

“What's happening for me right now – and where do I have some choice about what happens next?”

That might mean noticing the story we're telling ourselves. It might mean paying attention to what our body is telling us. It might mean getting curious about an emotion rather than judging it.

And sometimes it might mean recognising that we're tired, hungry and grumpy and should probably just go and have a snack or a nap!

What I'm slowly coming to peace with is that we don't necessarily need to understand every part of the machinery to work with it. Sometimes noticing what's happening gives us enough space to choose how we respond.

So perhaps the takeaway is actually quite simple: notice, get curious, then choose. Explore the 'why' when it's useful, but don’t get stuck there. We don't always need to understand exactly why we feel the way we do to have some choice about what we do next.