Essay: How Your Thoughts Create Emotions (and how you can control them)
Learn how to improve emotional stability cognitively
Parable of The Wise Chinese Farmer.
Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all the neighbours came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. That is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
Cognitive Appraisal Theory of Emotions.
According to appraisal theories of emotion, thinking must occur first before experiencing emotion. Richard Lazarus was a pioneer in this area of emotion, and this theory is often referred to as the Lazarus theory of emotion.
The cognitive appraisal theory asserts that your brain first appraises a situation, and the resulting response is an emotion.
According to this theory, the sequence of events first involves a stimulus, followed by thought, which then leads to the simultaneous experience of physiological response and the emotion. For example, if you encounter a bear in the woods, you might immediately begin to think that you are in great danger. This then leads to the emotional experience of fear and the physical reactions associated with the fight-or-flight response. However, if the bear is just a bush, you may have had the response unjustly.
Thought is a simulation of the real world. We evolved thought as a means of running the experiment of what will happen next? Without having to actually go and do the thing and risk death. A fine skill, until we habitually mistake the words and images of the mind for the gospel truth. In the parable, we see the virtue of intellectual modesty on display and learn that emotional stability is based on an important realisation: Not everything you think is true.
The neighbours in the Chinese parable are trying to make predictions based on what has happened and constantly being proved wrong. The wise farmer knows you get an emotional reaction when you jump to conclusions and so reserves judgement and doesn’t suffer the rollercoaster of emotions as a result. William James Theory of Emotion also, shows how emotions can create thoughts, reflections on a physiological response taken out of context, however the solution of with-holding and questioning judgements is the same.
Tips For Emotion Stability.
“If any external thing causes you distress, it is not the thing itself that troubles you, but your own judgment about it. And this you have the power to eliminate now.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.47
The mind likes to go places it shouldn’t and to make final conclusions as quickly as possible. For the Stoics, we react emotionally to our opinions about the events in the world, not the events themselves. Therefore to control our emotions, we must check our opinions. As Scott Waltman, Socratic CBT author, says:
“Intrusive thoughts and worries can be like mental clickbait. Learn to recognise and don’t fall for it.”
Epictetus, Stoic Philosopher, recommended putting a question mark at the end of your thoughts so you can look at thoughts as suggestions rather than commandments, and to treat them with the appropriate scepticism of unfounded suggestions which may or may not be aimed at your goodwill. He recommends not allowing judgements about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to pass through your mind unexamined.
The farmer while possibly internally tempted to jump to conclusions with the neighbours resists and thus doesn’t have a pointless and counter-productive emotional reaction that turns out to be false. Controlling emotions with the mind is an inner discipline to avoid making judgements rashly without evidence and to engage in a process of questioning your assumptions and opinions.
Starting to interact with the thoughts in your mind, not as the gospel truth, but more as suggestions, asking for evidence, and seeing your judgements are deeply subjective and often wrong - offers you the tools to freedom. Everybody can do it. The locus of control is on your attitudes and judgements and not the external world. You just have to expend the moral energy to change the habit of constantly making un-examined judgements about what is good and bad; Most problems are because you think something good is bad and something bad is good.
The Chinese Farmer is wise because he does not get caught up in the judgements of the neighbours and thus doesn’t come to false conclusions before he has enough information to judge properly. He controls his emotions by not misjudging the situation and by practising the virtue of intellectual humility. You should take the same approach in your mind and question the assumptions about their validity or not, which is under your control, and the key to emotional stability.
If you want to read more about this topic, I highly recommend Donald Robertson’s ‘How To Think Like A Roman Emperor’ and Ward Farnsworths ‘The Practising Stoic’