#1 Your Emotions Are Your True Feelings:

If that were the case, why would you stop crying just five minutes after a gut-wrenching scene in a movie?

If that sadness, pity, or pain was your ‘real’ emotion, you should have been feeling like that for a substantial amount of time, right?

But as soon as a joke makes you laugh or the mood of the movie changes, your emotions follow suit.

The truth is, your emotions don’t define the world around you. Rather, the world defines your emotions.

That world can be external (your environment) or internal (your self-talk and beliefs), but the moment something changes out there, your emotions change.

So, when you’re feeling down (and beating yourself up for it), think of that emotion not as the cause, but as the effect—the reaction to a change. 

Then, create a conscious change (listen to your favorite song, dance like a madman, or whatever gets your juices flowing) and BAM! You have a new emotion.

You can control your emotional state. You can choose to be happy. You already had the capacity; I just made that an easy option for you to choose now.

#2 You Must ‘Process’ All Your Emotions to Heal:

Let’s be honest here.

If you did that for everything you felt, even a lifetime of processing would fall short. No human has the capacity to process all their emotions and feelings—especially not on the level of deep, profound healing.

And I know you would rather live your life than process it in a slow, boring way.

The way you do that is by breaking free from this lie.

Saying, “We need to process every emotion,” is like saying, “Every single wound—even the smallest splinter and cut—needs surgery and stitches to heal.”

Just imagine how overrun our hospitals would be if that were true!

But somehow, it’s okay to overrun ourselves with feelings we know we cannot process (and honestly don’t need to).

It’s time we learn the difference between an emotional splinter and an emotional broken bone.

Here it is:

Splinters are the temporary shifts, upset feelings, uneasiness, and discomfort that randomly pop up throughout your day. You don’t need to process them. Just shift your mood (that is, apply the band-aid) and move on with your life.

That’s all it takes. Quick fixes are incredible when you know how to use them.

But Band-Aids don’t heal broken bones. 

Just like that, quick fixes don’t heal broken emotional patterns. They will not make the pain go away, no matter how many times you use them.

That’s when you need to process things, write them down, heal, and choose better, empowering emotional patterns to replace the old ones.

It’s a simple distinction: Process when you need to. Move on quickly when you can. And you start living your life instead of just processing it.

#3 You Can’t Control ‘How’ You Feel or React:

You most definitely can.

I know that doesn’t align with the story you’ve heard for the longest time, but it’s true.

Your emotions and reactions are in your control. When you accept responsibility for them, you stop the negative emotions from taking control of your life.

That choice, regardless of circumstances, is always with you.

And how you execute it depends on your beliefs about yourself.

Let’s take a simple, universal negative circumstance that all of us know: bullying.

It doesn’t matter if you’re in the richest American Prep School or a makeshift school in a desolate village; you’ve probably gone through it, seen someone go through it, or worse, been the perpetrator of it.

And there are not unlimited ways to bully someone. If you set out to count them, they would probably fit on your ten fingers.

So, the experience is universal, but the reactions aren’t.

Some kids suffer through bullying, shy away, and lose themselves—essentially becoming the ‘loser’ the bully says they are.

Other kids turn that bullying into a source of motivation and set out to prove those bullies wrong. Instead of letting the pressure break them down, they use it as fuel to grow and succeed faster than any of those bullies could even imagine.

How can the same experience give us such drastically different reactions? 

Because the experience doesn’t give us the reactions at all. The reaction is a result of how the person interprets the experience and connects it to their beliefs and self-image.

I’m not saying that one reaction is better than the other, or that one person is stronger than the other. We don’t need to decide that.

But what I am saying is that your experience doesn’t control how you feel or react; you do.

Or rather, your beliefs do.

And you can change them in any way you want.

That’s the truth, my friend, you are in the driver’s seat of your life.

This is your reminder to make the best of it.