Needs
👉 Our thoughts tell us what’s happening in the world, while our feelings add color to those thoughts so we know what that means for us, and we can act accordingly.
Importantly, feelings are not just for physiological needs like food 🍎and water 💦.
They also help us understand when our needs for safety, belonging and self esteem are out of range.
Our feelings that 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 unpleasant and humans mix them up all the time to ill effect.
Cognitive behavioral therapy gives us a nice framework to understand how our thoughts and feelings work together to help us act to meet our needs. In upcoming sections, we’ll talk 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.
Thoughts in themselves don’t mean very much. The thought “There is a cat in my room” doesn’t tell us anything about what to do about it.
Feelings interpret thoughts and motivate actions to meet our needs.
Even just the hypothetical thought of a cat in the room probably evoked some mild reaction – did you feel warm and cuddly, primed to approach the cat? Or did you feel aversive, primed to avoid the cat (allergies, scratches)? The thought describes the situation, the feelings tell you how you need to act to meet your specific needs given that situation.
🤔 Reflection of the Day: Think about the last time you felt a strong emotion, or really were aware of how you were feeling. What was the situation? What thoughts led to that feeling? Was the thought a fact or a belief? What did you do when you felt that way to get your needs met?