F#@k Your Feelings

This week, we dive into part 3 of our series on William James’ Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals.

The previous editions in this series focused on harnessing our children’s natural impulses for good and leveraging the power of habits to shape our lives.

This week, we’ll explore a powerful reframing of the relationship between how we feel and how we act, and how this insight can propel us toward our goals.

🎯 The Idea In a Nutshell:

• Everything we want lies on the other side of action.

• But too often, we wait to feel ready before we engage.

• We let our emotions dictate our behavior.

• William James says we’ve got it backwards.

• Our actions shape our feelings, not the other way around.

• This counterintuitive insight has far-reaching implications.

• While we can’t always control how we feel, we can choose how we act.

📝 Diving Deeper

Imagine being on a quiet hike in the woods when out of nowhere, a giant bear comes crashing through the brush in front of you. You’re gripped by fear. Your heart begins to race. Your muscles tense. Your mouth gets dry.

What’s happening here?

The relationship between your emotion — fear in this case — and your body’s response is so obvious that most of us never stop to question it. We experience fear, so our body kicks into fight or flight. The cause-and-effect seems intuitive. The only problem is: it’s wrong. Or at the very least, incomplete.

James proposes something radical: our bodily responses precede emotion, not the other way around. Our heart doesn’t race because we feel fear; we feel fear because our heart is racing.

This might sound like a pointless academic distinction, especially in the event that a bear is considering whether or not you’d make a tasty snack. But in the grind of our day-to-day lives, the implications of the so-called James-Lange theory of emotion are profound.

You think you’re skipping your workout because you feel tired. In actuality, you feel tired because you’re routinely skipping your workouts.

You think you snapped at your partner because you were angry. In actuality, you feel angry because you allowed yourself to lash out.

You think you’re unmotivated at work because of burnout. In actuality, you’re fatigued because you’ve mentally checked out.

In my experience, the causal relationship between actions and feelings isn’t always so cut and dry; sometimes you really are just too tired to exercise. But even in these situations, it’s helpful to understand that we’re dealing with a feedback loop. Our actions, if not creating our feelings outright, are, at a minimum, reinforcing them.

The big takeaway from James’s theory is that while we cannot exert direct control over our feelings, we can always choose our actions:

You don’t need to wait until you feel like a good dad to play with your kids. You don’t need to feel inspired to take the next right step at work. You don’t need to feel loving to hold your wife’s hand.

You just need to take action. And trust that your feelings will catch up.

👉 Why it matters:

• The James-Lange theory of emotion is empowering.

• It gives us increased levels of agency, lessening the grip that our volatile emotions play in our lives.

• It teaches us that we can choose to act with intention, with kindness, with love, and with discipline… even when we don’t feel like it.

🤔 Prompts for Reflection

• What’s one area of your life where your emotions are holding you back?

• What is a specific action you could take in spite of these emotions?

• How would your life look different if you consistently took action, regardless of how you felt about it?

Make today impactful,
~Jason