Emotions

Your alarm clock goes off. To your despair you realize that it’s already time to wake up for work. It felt like you literally just laid your head down…now work is screaming your name. The dread and despair are enough for you to gamble with a short “power nap” before you shower. You know if you play your cards right, you can barely squeeze it in your morning.

Into sleep you go. Your eyes open up and the nightmare of seeing you’re now twenty minutes past your leave time sucker punches you in the face. You hop up, skip the shower and toss your clothes on. Your morning is officially ruined, you must now race to work.

As you push your foot down on the pedal, making sure you don’t pass any cops, you find yourself slamming on your breaks from a car that pulled out in front of you. To make your mental anguish even worse, this driver is going painfully slow. It almost feels like he specifically did this on purpose to ruin your day even more. What is wrong with him? The amount of disrespect! The audacity of people! You immediately honk your horn and find yourself screaming to yourself out of bitterness. Your blood pressure would make a doctor cringe with discomfort. Your morning is only getting worse…but not because of any reason other than your own mind.

We as humans are so emotionally involved in small, insignificant things. Petty is another way to say it. If you actually step outside the box and pay attention to your emotional well-being day to day…We can easily discover the reality of this. From reading a comment on social media, to the way someone talks to you…we seem to emotionally hug every little thing. Our days are not full of consistent joy…instead of a flat line it’s more like a roller coaster. For many, they’re always only a moment away from being unhappy simply because they have no comprehension of their emotions.

Imagine having your thoughts on such a tight leash that negative emotions rarely occur in your mind. The overwhelming majority of our lives our emotions are griping tightly with matters that we won’t even remember that evening. let that honestly sink in for a moment. The matters we are so emotionally destroyed by are only as important as that moment and nothing more. Take the example I used above. Car pulls out in front you. Think about this for a moment…it happened. It’s over now. You’re ok, just startled. Nothing happened to you physically. Family still doing fine. Your home is still waiting for you to return later. Your life is the exact same as it was before, except for a slight reduction in speed. Why destroy your happiness with emotion?

Take all of these words into deep consideration. How often throughout the day are you anxious? Scared? Are you frustrated? How often do you find yourself thinking about something that happened the day before that really makes no difference to your life now? Ask yourself these basic questions then understand this: your negative emotions are thriving from each one of these thoughts. It doesn’t matter if the thought comes from the past, moment or future. Each thought has the potential for negative emotion. This means we are facing thousands of potential negative emotions daily. To be able to reject emotion when a thought arises is one of the big steps one must take to reach mental liberation and happiness. Imagine being able to control the relationship between a thought that arises and the emotion that follows?

do me a favor…consider your happiness.