How do we know what we need?
STAYING IN RANGE
Importantly, feelings for humans are not restricted to physiological needs like food and water.
They also help us understand when our needs for safety, belonging and self esteem are out of range. And our feelings to indicate when these needs are out of range are, in fact, as specific as our feelings of hunger and thirst. And just like hunger and thirst, they are often unpleasant and humans mix them up all the time to ill effect.
Cognitive behavioral therapy gives us a nice framework to understand the interplay between thoughts and feelings. We will talk in upcoming sections about how the brain builds a model of the world around you. This model is composed of thoughts and feelings. Thoughts are generally speaking declarative, descriptive statements of fact or belief – whether they are conscious or not. There is a cat in my room. There is no food in my fridge. This is the conscious internal form of our beliefs and model of the world.
Feelings interpret thoughts. Thoughts in themselves don’t mean very much. There is a cat in my room: is that good or bad, reward or punishment, approach or avoid? Will that cause an allergic reaction, a trail of feline destruction, or an afternoon of cuddles and warmth?
