1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 5/74)

If you think about it that way, thought and emotion are both in part feelings, that is, to some extent you feel them right away, in addition to them resulting in feelings later on. But that still means that feelings are always the end result. Then again, thoughts might be the result of current thoughts. That is like emotion, unconscious emotional thoughts are going to result in unconscious emotional thoughts later on. Even feelings could be called unconscious thoughts, because thought is just focusing on one thing for a brief period of time. [When thought about that way, what is the difference between an unconscious thought and an emotion? Is the unconscious thought stronger, more specific, or just something that has more of an influence on what you are thinking than feeling. Thoughts might have a better influence on other thoughts then they do on emotions (and emotions might have a better influence on emotion then they do on thought). Think of it this way, if you are doing something, but you "feel" like you don't want to do it, that isn't going to stop you from doing it as much as you thinking unconsciously over and over that you don't want to do it. The thinking in that instance seems like it is just more intense than the emotion, but not necessarily "felt" as much since it is just thought, not feeling. It has more of an influence over your actions, however, and maybe would generate anxiety instead of emotion. It is like the unconscious thought in that instead comes from your understanding that you don't want to do that activity, and since understanding is a function of thought, you would say that your unconscious thoughts are stopping you from doing it more than your emotions are stopping you.]

Therefore emotion, thought and feeling are really just periods of focus on certain things. With thought you just recognize what it is that you are focusing on. With emotions you feel deeply about what you are focusing on, and with feelings you are focusing on it less. Physical stimulus also results in feelings, and then you focus on those feelings, you aren’t necessarily focused on what caused the feelings (the physical stimulus itself) however. [This ties into the idea that someone can only pay attention to a few number of things at once (including emotion and thought) because if you are focused on one thing, you are probably going to be less focused on something else.]

Thus life is really just different types of feelings; you could categorize all of life as feeling. Even when you think you are in a period when you’re not feeling anything, you really are feeling something; you just don’t recognize what it is that you are feeling. Remember that feelings are thoughts you can’t identify. And since a thought is going to be about something, another way to think about life is just stuff happening. Stuff happening results in feelings in your brain, where more stuff happens. It is all-concrete. [And stuff happens all the time, so you are probably going to be feeling something more than you can recognize when you are feeling something.]