So, have you ever wondered what comes first, thought or emotion? This is a question that people who embrace philosophy and new thought debate. It is also one of the keys to getting to the root cause of addiction.
Most addicts have a ritual that leads to their addictive behavior. The ritual typically starts with some emotionally triggering event.
Recently, I was at a gathering with the Board of Directors for a new thought organization that I’m involved with and we were debating this very point. My personal belief is that emotion comes before thought, but I will say that there are people who believe the opposite just as strongly; that thought comes before emotion.
So, let me explain my theory.
I believe that there are some emotions that are primal. When we hear a loud noise, we don’t stop to think about it. We just feel fear instantly without knowing whether there is a reason to be afraid. Fear is a primal emotion and a natural reaction that we can say is instinctive.
Once we experience the emotion, it creates such discomfort in us that we start to have thoughts that attach to the emotion. These thoughts begin seeking an explanation.
At this point, we begin to have thoughts like; What was that loud noise? Am I in danger? Do I need to protect myself? Those thoughts then trigger memories of prior experiences and create what I refer to as a thought spiral. This may trigger different emotions or intensify the emotion that we originally felt.
At this point, we have a choice. It may be challenging but the choice is there.
We can either continue to have similar thoughts that intensify an emotion that is making us uncomfortable, or we can choose to end the line of thought that feeds that emotion. For example, That could be a lot of things. Let me go check it out before I assume it’s something that I need to create a big to-do over.
So, in philosophy or new thought, our goal is to become more and more aware of our thoughts and to choose the thoughts that we perpetuate. We believe that our thoughts create our reality. You may have heard that before and there’s a lot of scientific proof from quantum physics related to creative thought. It is well-documented your thoughts create your reality.
Over time, with more and more training, more and more awareness, and consistent behavior, we can lessen the degree that we allow the initial and instinctive emotion to intensify. We learn how to make a conscious choice to stop the thought spiral more quickly.
We can gain more control over our reaction to experiences with training and familiarity, in the same way Emergency Medical Technicians are trained to respond calmly to emergency situations. But, even if we practice and condition ourselves for predictable experiences, there will still be instinctive emotions and the originating thoughts related to that emotion, that we can’t control when faced with the unexpected.
So, what comes first – emotion or thought? Emotion definitely comes first, followed in the next nanosecond by originating thought, and then by choice.
You can choose to let the ritual that has been put into motion continue by fueling this line of thinking or to stop it in its tracks and choose to think differently. Because you know that your thoughts are going to create your future experiences. You can think about it this way – emotion actually fuels addictive behavior and causes addiction.
