Feelings vs Thoughts

“The need to feel good versus the necessity to think well is the main reason that inhibits change and blocks self-improvement.”

The truth is often inconvenient and when forced to face the dislikable truth, our emotional tendency is to deny, ignore and deflect the facts in order to preserve our preferred thoughts that make us feel good. We deny, ignore, and even attack the truth or the messenger because the truth does not match our preferred feel-good perspective; even though that perspective might be incorrect, fallacious, and nonfactual.

If the message of the truth conflicts with how I want to feel, I must attack the truth or the messenger.

We lie, especially to our own self, because we want to avoid pain and we want to feel good. Lying allows us to avoid pain, to feel good, or at the minimum; to feel less-bad about something. We lie to our Self because facing facts is often an emotionally difficult task as facts that require change are often uncomfortable to deal with. We do so by denying, ignoring, and altering facts and evidence in order to alter the perception of reality to be the way that we want reality to be, rather than how reality is. Changing our thoughts and perceptions of reality to how we want it to be is much easier and quicker than actually facing the uncomfortable reality; because recognizing and changing the unfavorable reality requires time and effort. Hence why we often fool our Self because we don’t want to get out of our comfort-zone, no matter how unfavorable, inhibiting and even dangerous our comfort-zone might be. To stop self-deception, we must learn to think factually so that we will deal with reality as reality is, and not as we want reality to be.