What Comes First? Thought or Feeling?

Aug 5

Key points

Thoughts and feelings influence each other.
By changing how you think, you can change how you feel.
You can use your feelings as a guide to the thoughts that trigger them.

n psychology, the classic chicken-or-egg conundrum boils down (sorry) to the question of whether thoughts precede feelings or feelings precede thoughts. That is, do feelings generate thoughts or do thoughts determine feelings?

Do We Feel First and Think Second?

It may seem that feelings precede thoughts in the natural order of things. But this may be a case of the tail wagging the dog. We feel sad or anxious and then become aware of the sad or anxious thoughts bouncing around in our head. Although you might first become aware of the feeling, the order of operations may actually be the reverse—you think depressing or anxious thoughts, triggering the accompanying feeling states. Understandably, you might first notice a feeling state, as feelings are difficult to ignore. Feelings also tend to linger, but thoughts are fleeting things—ephemera that drift in and out of consciousness. But were you to scratch a disturbing feeling, you’d likely find an underlying negative thought driving it.

Why does it matter whether thoughts or feelings come first? The distinction is important, as learning to manage your emotions depends on identifying how your thoughts trigger your emotional reactions. Emotions are tethered to our thoughts, but we may not recognize the threads of the tether that bind them. The lesson here is clear: to better manage our emotions, we need to catch the underlying thought triggers and practice thinking differently. But there’s a catch: How do we catch such a slippery target as a passing thought?

Emotions Don’t Exist in a Thought Vacuum

To test for yourself the connection between your thoughts and feelings, you can try a little exercise I do with my students. Try to make yourself angry while keeping your mind blank. Go ahead and try it out (no one is looking). I expect you’ll be unable to feel real anger unless there are thoughts or images rummaging through your mind—typically of people or institutions you feel have mistreated you or done you wrong. Yes, you might feel some muscle tension if you clench your muscles while keeping your mind blank, but I think you’ll agree that it is not the same feeling as real anger.

Emotions do not exist in a thought vacuum, any more than fire can exist in an oxygen vacuum. Troubling emotions are the residue of the excess meanings we impose on events we experience. When our interpretations of events, which we express in the form of our self-talk, become twisted and distorted, our emotions become twisted and distorted as well. By focusing on our inner speech, we can become aware of misconceptions and misstatements and correct them by substituting rational alternatives.

Scratch a feeling and you’ll find a thought lurking beneath it. As a cognitive behavior therapist, my role is to guide patients through a process of identifying the thought triggers that make them miserable and help them substitute more rational or adaptive ways of thinking. The conceptual model of CBT is grounded in a philosophy called stoicism, which traces its roots to ancient Greece and Rome. As the Roman stoic philosopher Epictetus taught some 2,000 ago, we are not influenced directly by events themselves, but by our thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and interpretations about the events we experience.

While thoughts can trigger feelings, feelings don't necessarily depend on a precedent thought. Imprinted in our brains is an alarm system that alerts us to a perceived threat. Say you are walking in the woods and encounter a curved object in your path. Even before you can articulate the thought, “Oh, my God, it’s a snake,” your fight-or-flight response is triggered, summoning you to fend off the impending threat or flee from it, so you may find yourself reflexively jumping out of fear. A few seconds later, the thinking part of your brain kicks in, and having now evaluated the perceived threat and finding it to be but a harmless stick, you have a good laugh at yourself for reacting so strongly. In effect, when it comes to a potential threat, feeling (fear in this case) can precede thinking.

Thoughts and Feelings: A Two-Way Street

The relationship between thoughts and feelings is not a one-way street. Thoughts and feelings form a bidirectional relationship in which thinking affects feelings and feelings influence how we think. In cognitive behavior therapy, we identify the triggering thoughts and the disturbing feelings in this feedback loop so that people can change how they think, how they feel, and what they do.

Say you are awaiting the results of your latest medical tests and begin thinking the worst, which sends your anxiety level soaring. Your emotions, fear and worry, strengthen your worst thoughts, potentiating them, which in turn further reinforces your anxious feelings. Similarly, for depression, thinking self-damning or catastrophizing thoughts can put a damper on your mood, and feeling down can bring negative thoughts more readily to mind.

What Is the Egg and What Is the Chicken?

As applied to psychology, the chicken-or-egg problem is predicated on a false dichotomy between thinking and feeling. Let’s get this straight. Thoughts and feelings are as closely intertwined as the two sides of the same coin. Thoughts trigger feelings, but feelings, like fear, can trigger thoughts that might allay the fear (“it’s only a stick”) or strengthen it, as in the face of an actual threat (“I better get out of here, pronto”). We can also use our feelings as a guide to our troubling thoughts. For example, when feeling worried or apprehensive, you can survey your mind to find the underlying anxious or worrisome thoughts on which the feeling hinges.

The takeaway message is that how we think affects how we feel and how we feel affects how we think. We can learn from our feelings by using them as a guide to identify triggering thoughts and change our thoughts to change how we feel. As for the more general question of which comes first, the chicken or the egg, I once read that the answer, of course, is that it depends on who's serving the meal. (Hmmm).

General Disclaimer: The content here and in other blog posts on the Minute Therapist is intended for informational purposes only and not for diagnosis, evaluation, or treatment of mental health disorders. If you are concerned about your emotional well-being or experiencing any significant mental health problems, I encourage you to consult a licensed mental health professional in your area for a thorough evaluation.

Brittany Herrera