Part of our universal experience as human beings is that we have an inner landscape of thoughts and feelings. For some people it is difficult to separate the two, and this leads to confusion in all sorts of areas of their lives, not least their emotional lives.
If you are troubled by unwanted feelings there are a couple of key ideas to be grasped in order to get more control over how you feel, and how you behave.
The first is that thoughts and feelings can be separated. You can have an unhelpful feeling, like, for example, feeling you don’t want to get up in the morning, and you can think something different like “Time to get up!”.
The second idea stems from the first; just because you have a feeling it doesn’t mean you have to act on it.
Unwanted feelings hang about longer the more you focus on them. If you have a bad feeling simply acknowledge it and move on to thinking what to do next to distract yourself (choose healthy behaviours).
