500 Words a Week - Action Precedes Feeling
Recently I’ve been reading around dealing with uncertainty, dealing with low confidence and other associated feelings. There are some similar topics brought up in an attempt to deal with these feelings. The main one being action precedes feeling. You can’t just will yourself to feel more confident or assured. You have to take the action you perceive as having confidence. For example, you are asked to give a speech. You can’t wait around until you feel more confident before you then do the speech. You do the speech, the confidence comes. You constantly put yourself in challenging situations where you feel out of your comfort zone.
This expands beyond just low confidence, the shortest and most reliable way to change how you’re feeling is to change what you’re doing. When you’re feeling bad, it’s not always optimal to wait around until you feel better to do something. I’ve been in those places, when you give into how you’re feeling, when you let Netflix keep replaying until the message “are you still watching” appears. Unfortunately, it rarely helps. It’s a distraction. A distraction from you paying attention to how you are feeling, or attempting to do something that may make you feel better.
It's a cycle. We might feel like giving up, so we eat something or sit down to watch something. We begin to feel bad because of what we are doing. As we are feeling bad, we just succumb to the couch or to eating more.
We need to recognize the patterns for when we are in these types of places. For me, it’s easy, it’s binge watching tele. Which normally involves several large chocolate bars. It’s trying to distract myself from the difficult feelings I'm having.
It’s hard to control our feelings, but we have more control over our actions.
What really clarifies the whole “action precedes feeling” for me, is that when I get home from work the first thing I do determines how my evening will go and how I feel. If I do something productive, have a healthy snack, do some rehab work on my knee or read from a book, I feel more energized, more productive, and more like myself. However, if the first thing I do is grab some chocolate and sit on the couch, I feel sad within myself and find myself trapped in a mood I can’t get out of.
We can’t always do the right thing, we can’t always have a steel-clad mindset. There will be those times when we reach for the chocolate and turn on Friends or the Office. It’s just during these times, when we find ourselves spiralling down and begin to feel a heavy burden on our shoulders from what we are thinking, can we do something to take ourselves out of this mood. We know doing just one action might help. Be that putting a few glasses in the dishwasher, be that reading a page or two. Knowing action precedes feeling can help us during these times.
