Continuing from my last post on our thoughts, we will talk about how they affect our feelings and emotions. Remember that after a thought comes a feeling or an emotion. Lets say that you are thinking about how you do not feel like getting up out of bed and facing the day ahead of you. As you lay there thinking about that you start to feel dread come over you. As the dread increases you notice that you are starting to feel energy zapped as well. Then the thoughts of what you are not looking forward to facing that day start running through your mind and you continue to lay there. When you finally get up you are in a bad mood, short with the spouse and kids, you spill your coffee, adding to your already fustrating start of the day. Because you allowed yourself to think negative thoughts, you started to have negative feelings that lead to bad emotions.When we have down, negative, bad, sad thoughts, we become depressed, down, sad, irritated, or angry. It is possible to lose all hope for everything by the thoughts that we think. Worry, anxiety, depression, anger, dread, doubt, guilt, shame, fear, are all fed by our thoughts.

Just as all those negative feelings are fed by our thoughts, happiness, peace, contentment, love, and freedom, are also fed by our thoughts. So when we think good, uplifting, positive, encouraging thoughts, we become uplifted happy, positive, outgoing, and encouraging. We can turn a bad mood into a good mood by thinking about good things, happy things, positive things. We can encourage ourselves by thinking about positive things. We can calm our anger by thinking about peaceful uplifting things.

To describe what I mean and ways that I used my thoughts to help my moods I am going to give you some examples of my thoughts and the thoughts that I made myself think on purpose.

If I was having thoughts of feeling sad or gloomy or down I would think things like, this is the day that the Lord has made so I will be happy and thankful, I am blessed, I have so much to be thankful for, today will be a good day, God loves me and is with me all the time. If I was thinking about something that I had to do that I really did not want to do I would think things like, I can do what I need to do with ease cause Jesus has my back, I am going to do what I need to do and be happy doing it, it will not take me long to do it and the sooner I do it the sooner it will be over. If I was feeling lazy and thought about how I did not feel like doing something it would make me more lazy so I would think things like, get your butt up do what you need to do, just do it, once you start on it that time will go by fast, I am going to get exercise doing it and I will feel much better, I am going to feel so much better once I get it done, I am looking forward to doing it, I want to get this done. By the time that I thought things like that for about 5-10 mins my mood would brighten up and I would have motivation to get it done. If I was thinking about how someone had done me wrong and I would start to feel upset I would think things like, My God is a God of justice and will pay back those who wrong others, I trust God to work it out for me, I will let the situation go and move on, I will not get myself upset because of what someone else has done even though I did not deserve to be done that way I choose to put it behind me and let it be, that person is not going to cause me to lose my peace. I will also think of ways that I have been blessed to get me out of that mindset. Since our thoughts and our feelings feed off of each other we have to keep in line. Our thoughts can make us feel and our feelings can make us have thoughts. So if they are not in sync we are in a mess. Thankfully we can choose our thoughts to make our feelings catch up. Our feelings will come and go but our thoughts tell them what way to go.

We can have a much brighter day simply by thinking about good, positive, uplifting, honorable, lovely thoughts. We can also have a much dimmer day by thinking down, wrong, negative, bad, hopeless thoughts. Lets use our thoughts to help us instead of harming us. Next time you are feeling down, sad, dreary, upset, hopeless, or afraid, think about what you have been thinking about and then choose to think of good things.