Category Archives: Emotion

The Facts, And The Stories We Tell About Them

Facts happen.  But in order to know how to feel about the facts, we create “stories” — we decide which of the facts are important, and what the big picture is underlying the facts, and relate that to our own …   Continue reading →

We’re All “Addicts”

People who have been addicted to a substance know that it can be incredibly hard to break that addiction.  Fundamentally, I think of addiction as a conflict between very strong feelings that shout “DO THIS!” and a “wiser” set of …   Continue reading →

Firework Feelings and Children At Play

For me, one of things that sometimes gets in the way of being happy is the everyday barrage of unpleasant thoughts, often about relatively minor things I have to do, things that might go wrong, things I’ve screwed up in …   Continue reading →

What Causes Feelings: A Question For Psychology?

A central interesting question about people is “what causes us to have certain feelings?”  For example, what kinds of situations cause anger?  Anxiety?  Happiness?  While we all have some rough ideas about these (such as “anger is caused by someone …   Continue reading →

Hacking Feelings

In my previous post I discussed my thoughts on how feelings come about — that they’re based on “pretty good” cues from the environment in times past — pretty good, but not perfect.  I also mentioned that in my view …   Continue reading →

Some Thoughts On “Feelings”

People talk about “feelings” all the time, and yet there are so many words and ideas associated with feelings that it can be hard to know just what someone is referring to when they mention feelings.  People talk about “trusting …   Continue reading →

Seeking Good Things vs. Avoiding Bad Things

In the situations of your everyday life, what are you thinking about most of the time?  Do you think more about the good things that could happen in a situation and how to obtain them, or are you thinking more …   Continue reading →

Five Ways To Feel Great

There are many thoughts about happiness, and many techniques that attempt to achieve it.  From my perspective, these boil down to about five high-level strategies for feeling great, outlined below.  Of course, I’m not necessarily advocating any of these. Have …   Continue reading →

Tori Amos And A Moment Of Happiness

Walking home from work today I had a moment of real happiness.  A few days ago I dug my iPod out of its place at the back of my dresser drawer where its been for a few months, and have …   Continue reading →

Can Feelings Ever Be “Wrong” Part II

In Part I of this post, I talked about how feelings can give us valuable, correct information about the world and about the actions we should take in it.  Be can feelings ever be “wrong”, in the sense of giving …   Continue reading →