How You Feel Later Comes From How You Choose to Act Now

Your feelings and choices are separate

Many people believe that their choices are determined by their feelings, and that they can’t change their feelings. The common presumption is that your body controls your mind and that your happiness is a result of your external circumstances or your body chemistry. Those who believe this see their actions and emotions as fused together and act as if they have control of neither.

When people believe that their actions are dictated by their emotions, they will act more poorly than they otherwise would. Every facet of their lives, including their character, will only be as good as their environment. People like this can never feel good about themselves, because life is difficult enough often enough that evidence of the existence and optionality of their flaws will be too abundant to ignore.

While most people live their lives as slaves to their emotions, you must realize that you are the master of your own life. If you let your emotions dictate who and how you are, you will never have anything like what you could otherwise have.

How you feel certainly makes it easier to choose one way or another, but every person has the power to choose however they wish, no matter how they feel.

It’s not simple, it’s not easy, and it’s not instantly possible to fully achieve, but with consistent effort, you can learn to subdue your body to your mind and discern and choose the best options no matter how you feel.

You can act contrary to your emotions

Emotions come through the body, but both their generation and our response to them depend on choices in the mind. Emotions occur at a subconscious level, but the choices we make that influence their creation and dictate our response to them occur as conscious choices. A great deal of their generation comes from our past choices, and what we do with them thereafter is completely dictated by us.

How you feel about something is completely separate from what you do about it. As sentient beings, humans have the power to choose how we act based on our thoughts, no matter how we feel. It is possible to act to most fully advance your purpose even while feeling your worst.

Acting contrary to your emotions can feel as challenging at first as choosing to hold your breath while walking into tear gas: it is unnatural, you have to do it on purpose, and it is uncomfortable, but it is still obviously better than the alternative.

Often, it’s not enough to merely try to think differently. Contending with emotions can be a full body exercise. When you seek to feel differently than you do, engage in physical activities or go to physical spaces that are more likely to produce the feelings you seek. For example, when you are angry, you can do things that generate peace. When you are overwhelmed, you can do things that bring completion. When you are depressed, you can have some fun. When you are exhausted, you can rest.

The more you intentionally choose what is rational over what is emotional, the easier doing so will become. The more you practice rational self-control, the more you will find your emotions bending to your actions, rather than having your actions bending to your emotions.

Choosing how to react to your emotions

A large component of emotional regulation consists of what we do with our emotions after they are generated.

Most people don’t choose how to act based on reason. Instead, they act in response to feelings formed as subconscious internal responses to their external environment:

Feeling => Reaction => Reason

For these people, reason is only used post-hoc to contrive justifications for decisions already made, typically subconsciously.

Basing your decisions on the interaction between your external environment and your subconscious emotional response to it is a terrible idea because it is so unlikely to even approach the possibilities that intentional response can.

You should never do or not do something only because of how you feel in the moment, whether those feelings are good or bad. If you operate only on what you feel, you will never undertake the conscious and deliberate effort required to attain the potential joy you can experience in life. There is a better way.

It is possible to exercise reason before acting, proactively shaping your environment, and enjoying the feelings that come from constantly doing the best you know:

Feeling => Reason => Action

In order to become more rational, it is necessary to learn to insert a separation between emotion and action. Learn the art of pausing and thinking, even in the most intense, surprising, or boring events.

Every human action is a choice, even habits

The idea that human action is a choice has been resisted by some who ask: “What about unconscious actions?” Habits are situations where our reaction to stimuli is not determined in the moment, but determined by the sum total of many conscious decisions over time.

Where an unconscious action came from is far less important than the fact that its continuation is your choice. Regardless of the source, every action is subject to your choice of whether or not to change it. We can change the way we react to things.

Choice and difficulty of choice are two different topics. It is undeniably more difficult to lose several hundred pounds than it is to lose several pounds. It is undeniably more difficult to shed a lifelong habit of anger than it is a new one. But all of these are questions of cost, not questions of possibility. Every single habit is breakable—the formability of habits prove the possibility of their undoing.

Those struggling with unwanted habits frequently lament at how difficult they are to break. Habits can be broken the same way they are formed: one choice at a time. The amazing thing about habits is not how hard they are to break, but rather how quickly they can be broken relative to how long they take to form! In nearly if not every case, the time required to break a habit is only a fraction of the time taken to practice it.

You have to feel bad for a bit before you feel good for a while

Short-term negative emotions are frequently required in the path to the greatest long-term joy. To obtain the greatest long-term joy, you have to develop a continuous habit of sacrificing the present for the future.

Any limit on present sacrifice necessarily translates to a limit on future joy. Meaning is what produces the longest and strongest joy. Intimacy, investment, commitments, and all other things that generate the greatest meaning require the greatest sacrifice.

What makes you feel good right now will probably make you feel terrible long-term, and vice-versa. The path to unspeakably great longterm joy can be unspeakably terrible in the short-term. For example, great loss reveals areas where you lack what is required for greater joy, significant affliction seems to be the only path to gaining true appreciation for what you would otherwise undervalue, and both of these lessons are required to attain deep joy.

When it comes to joy, you can't have the greater positive without first going through a greater negative. If you see a purported path to greater joy that doesn't include new costs, the path is a lie, any apparent increase in joy from it will be temporary and, in the end, it will leave you with less joy than you started with.

Comfort almost always inclines away from growth, and growth alone can maximize long-term positive feelings. The pain of improvement is always less than the pain of staying the same.

Your present feelings are determined by your past choices

Most decisions are made based on how we feel here and now, and yet so much of our feelings come from how we decided in the past. The composite of your past choices establishes the foundation of your present feelings.

Your present feelings are the result of a past chain of decisions, whether you recognize them or not. Feelings flow from long term choices, much as the water in your house will run in the direction and to the destination of the pipes that carry it, whether you see those pipes or whether they are hidden within the floor. Those familiar enough with how this works can accurately predict how you will feel later based on what you are doing and why you are doing it now, just as a plumber can locate and trace your pipes.

Even feelings that seem to occur all of a sudden are actually the result of a process. The more enduring a feeling, the greater the likelihood of longer processes to generate it. While intense feelings can occur in a moment, those that do don’t last. An enduring feeling builds over time across countless decisions, much like building a retirement account.

When the result of accumulated choices is negative, you will face the daunting but navigable challenge of reversing the course through successive actions oriented in the opposite direction. This visceral process is well-known by children who have had the pleasure of creating a whirlpool in a circular pool and then spinning around to reverse the flow.

When the result of accumulated choices is positive, you will face the tailwind of continuing to make things even better with the help of momentum already flowing in that direction. Every additional effort impels greater acceleration, much like cycling downhill while shifting gears.

In all likelihood, the amalgamation of your present mood is not the result of a monotonic process up or down, but the culmination of decisions that each yielded contributions in either direction. The more unified your actions are over time in one direction, the more actions it will take in the other direction to significantly alter your long-term feelings.

Your future feelings will be determined by your present choices

The connection to future feelings is through present actions, not present feelings. Present feelings only connect to future feelings through the actions you take in response to them.

The intensity of positive feeling in one moment does nothing to indicate what will be felt in the next. In fact, some of the strongest negative feelings are a result of greater joy retroactively revised by new unexpected information. For example, when someone you love very much betrays you, the pain is not limited to the action, but how it destroys the perspectives underlying the prior joy you experienced over the duration of your relationship.

We long for the past and future while being imperviously oblivious about the present, when the present has so much more to do with how we feel long-term than the past or the future.

The most important thing you can do when feeling less than ideal now is choose how to act to feel better later. You may not know how to turn a cloudy day sunny, but you can choose what you will do on cloudy days in order to best enjoy the sunny ones when they happen.

A person who generates feelings lives a life unrecognizable from one who follows feelings. One who makes choices to generate future feelings is wholly different from one who makes choices based on present feelings.

Are you a feeling generator or a feeling follower ? Do you act according to how you feel now or because of how you want to feel later? Do you work, sleep, eat, exercise, play, or do anything else you do because of how you feel now, or because of how you will feel later?

It is well known that the more you think about your emotions, the more terrible you feel. Focus on improving your choices and your feelings will automatically improve. You change how you feel by changing how you act. There is no better way to feel better than to become better. The more you improve your actions, the better you feel. This is well-known in neuroscience, but you don’t need to be a scientist to figure out what every honest person understands easily enough.

You maximize present pleasure by doing what feels best now. But to maximize future pleasure, you must do what is best now, no matter how you feel. Act according to how you want to feel, not how you actually feel, and you will find yourself feeling better in no time at all —usually later in the same day, and almost always by the next morning.

How would you feel if you did the best you could possibly do, all the time? You would feel the best you possibly could! To maximize enduring joy, always do what is best. You will never feel your best while doing less than your best. You will never feel your best until you do your best.

When you don’t feel your best, it is much harder to do your best, but realize that when you don’t feel your best, your best becomes less than it would be if you did. Always do your present best, no matter how depleted you may feel. The investment of whatever you have to give is all it takes to turn around bad feelings.

Training yourself to push through bad feelings with good action is only possible through rational appraisal of long-term value. Relying on rationally-calculated long-term value is required to entice a person to do what does not feel good at first or in the moment in order to encounter greater long-term outcomes.

One way to change how you feel is to make and follow a plan: enumerate and choose actions that best advance your purpose, given

your present resources. When you find yourself in a poor mood, focus on planting your next crop. Every gloomy moment is the fertile soil on a rainy day that provides the ideal environment for planting a bumper crop for the next harvest.¹

Improve how you feel by improving how you respond to others

Your power to affect how you feel relies solely on your own choices, not the choices of others. Most of your emotions are a result of what you do. As you make better choices, maintain rational direction, and train your perception of yourself and the world, you will vastly improve your emotions.

As long as you let life control you, you will be miserable. Any happiness you feel will be fleeting, or it will be robbed from you later, and you'll end up worse off.

As long as you are alive, you have the ability to choose. Your mind is unassailably sovereign. You probably also have a lot more power over what happens to you than you would like to admit.

You can’t always choose what happens to you, but you always have the choice of what you will do about it. For example, if someone else hits you on the finger with a hammer, you will feel pain whether you like it or not. However, you have full control over how you respond to that signal. You get to choose whether to shout, shake your hand, dance around, retaliate, or laugh. As holds true in many cases, most of these options will share similar outcomes, but one has an outsized effect, for better or worse. In this case, retaliation could land you in jail and severely curtail your remaining opportunities in life.

What you get out of life will not be determined by your environment, but by what you do in spite of your environment. What you get out of life will not be determined by what happens to you, but by what you do in spite of what happens to you.

You are not an automaton. You should not act like one, you shouldn’t talk about yourself as if you were, and you shouldn’t allow others to, either. Every time someone does something that bothers you, ask: “What am I going to do about it?” If you have options, go with the best. If you can’t think of a way to improve the situation, let it go.

Improve how you feel by investing current feelings for greater future feelings

When you encounter a positive feeling, you will tend toward seeking to preserve it. You will undertake behaviors that sustain the present good feeling instead of investing the present good feeling for the greatest good feeling in the future. This is why it is so difficult to start the next task after finishing a goal, or to get down to work when you feel euphoric.

This pattern of behavior is not too different from how people react to sudden windfalls of cash. Those who win lotteries are much more likely to spend their newfound wealth on short term pleasure instead of using it to preserve or grow their assets.

In each moment, we receive the dividends of our past actions. While you don’t have a choice to avoid suffering, you do have the choice of how much you use it to improve yourself and others. Good choices tend to frontload suffering, and always pay a return on the investment. Poor choices do not escape suffering; they only delay it, and at a very high price. For example, the pain of regret never goes away without paying the price of the honesty you refused to initially exercise, plus all the interest you have accrued in delaying it.

Just as there is a difference between building a dividend and paying it out, there is a difference between creating positive outcomes and enjoying them. Just as with good financial choices, with practice and intent, you can learn to merge the good feelings of the result with how you feel in the actions that produce it. Those who are successful tend to associate positive feelings with what generates them instead of a separate phenomenon. For them, the reward is less separable from what generated it.

Doing what it takes to feel good does not feel good until you’ve amounted so much experience that you’ve conditioned yourself into a deep expectation of relatively constant good feelings through tenaciously consistent best action in spite of unrelenting bad feelings.

When you repeat an action over time, the feelings of the effects will merge to become experienced during the cause. The stronger and more correct your beliefs, and the more continuously you live up to them, the more you will come to associate good feelings with the actions that generate them. Consider, for example, what happens to a person who establishes a habit of health. When they first begin eating healthy foods, exercising, and getting sufficient sleep, they will see all of these things as a sacrifice. Within a short time, they will see so many benefits and tie them so strongly to the inputs that generate them that they will feel the endorphins of a workout as they workout, see sleep as much more valuable than anything else they might otherwise do, and healthy foods as being more satisfying than alternatives.

The value in each moment

Each day this modern world presents to us a constant immersion into limitless demands for our attention. It seems to require a neverending effort to remember from moment to moment that we remain the arbiters of our attention, even while it is necessarily focused on whatever we are attending to in the moment. We retain the choice of what to attend, in spite of how powerfully anything draws us in.

In whatever fashion they may come, and whether they be prolonged or momentary, occasional breaks from the intensity of the demands of life provide opportunities to exercise our choice and remind us that we have it.

In moments of unstructured time, our subconscious desires will guide our actions. It is no secret that when outward pressure to attend something specific is alleviated, most people revert to seeking short term pleasure. The automatic guidance system of human beings is toward feeling as good as they can right now. There is an alternative guidance system—that of feeling as good as you can all the time — but that requires the intentional exercise of reason.

Through reason, a person can exert the moment-to-moment effort required to remember the value of each moment. Our lives are composed of nothing but moments, and it is in each moment that we realize or miss the only chance we have to make the most of our lives.

While most people regard most moments as having little meaning, a rational outlook shows that every single moment is connected to the greatest possible meaning. In the default emotional outlook, the only thing that matters is how you feel right now. In the rational outlook, anything that matters—no matter how long it takes—is maximized through what you decide right now. The rational view suggests that every moment has the greatest value that will only be attained through using it in the best possible way.

Every moment is a choice from an ever-changing set of options. When you make present choices well, you gain power and wisdom to make future choices better. When you ignore the choices before you, they will be made for you in ways that will most assuredly make your life harder than it already is.

Most modern people are so busy that their lives seem like a neverending conveyor belt of factors beyond their control than a wellmanaged series of decisions. Life will keep feeling out of your control until you begin to take control. Your life will only become more manageable as you recognize and take responsibility for the things you can control.

Perhaps the most important time to take extra care in what you choose to attend is in the early morning. By waking up earlier, you create a buffer zone before the demands of life place you on a more rigid track for the duration of the day. The early morning, after some acclimation, is the time of day that provides the ideal resources to marshal for the greatest daily impact. Early in the morning, you will have the freshest mind and the greatest hope, and these combine to form the ideal setting for contemplating the deep things in life or making consistent contributions to some meaningful long-term project.

In the rational view, time is worth whatever you make of it. There is no such thing as free time, only wasted time.

Continuing to progress in spite of unproductive feelings

Any system that requires perfect motivation is going to fail. The fact is that everyone has to deal with energy and mood variations, and while there are many tricks to reduce their frequency and occurrence, they will persist.

What you get done is going to depend to a large degree on what you do when you don’t feel optimal. What we do when we feel the worst tends to matter the most.

The best time to set goals, make plans, and execute tasks is when you feel good. But you won’t always feel good. Most people will feel at their best only a small fraction of the time. One of the benefits of planning is what it enables you to do, even when you feel bad.

The worse you feel, the more intentionally you will have to be to impart forward motion to your goals. Many would call this willpower, but doing so diminishes the clarity of what is happening, ascribing too much of it to some magical inherent force rather than empowering you with an actionable mechanism to do more and better than you otherwise would.

When you feel unmotivated, switch over your fuel from short-term pleasure to long-term purpose. This is akin to your body switching from aerobic to anaerobic respiration: it’s much less easy, but it can keep you going for a lot longer. It takes a different approach, but that approach works, and it is fully within your control.

The beauty of the life plan system is that it gives you everything you need to make the most of the times when you aren’t at your best. Continuously focus on the highest priority item you have the resources to handle, and you will keep moving forward. This is much more than a mere matter of productivity—the more you continue to work through bad moods, the faster you will get over them!

When your mood is low, the secret is to just keep moving forward, no matter how slow your crawl becomes. Don’t act based on how you feel right now. Instead, become robotic in rational consideration of what you are doing. When you aren’t feeling great, you need to apply laser-like and even robotic focus on execution. Just stick to your to do list, and keep going. Turn off your senses. Ignore them.

Most accomplishments are the culmination of many small actions, not the result of one sudden act.² You will be amazed at how much your willingness to plod forward in suboptimal situations will culminate in exceptional productivity in the long-term. You will be amazed at what you can achieve even under the greatest opposition by simply focusing on and accomplishing the tiniest next step.

The life plan provides you the option to remain in the highest possible productivity even when conditions require flexibility. No matter your internal or external conditions, you can scroll down your priority list and find the highest impact item that you can handle at present. And you will keep moving forward.

In times of less than perfect mood, you are going to have to shift your priorities, and that’s ok. If your highest priority task requires hitting a boulder with a heavy hammer as hard as you can until it is broken into small pieces, you will not be able to uniquely work on that task while it remains incomplete. You will have to repeatedly whack it when you have strength and the skin on your hands remains intact, go do something else when that is not true, and come back after you recover. The boulder might remain the highest priority, but while you lack the resources to address it and are doing what can be done to get them, you will need to shift to the next highest priority.

Every gloomy moment is a gift to increase your near-term and long-term joy through exercising the faith to mentally recognize that your present feelings do not define inescapable reality, and that better feelings are most likely to come after better works.

Goals provide concentrated value against unproductive feelings

When you aren’t pursuing goals at all, or when the goals you set are not actually something you want very much, you’ll find yourself filtering your actions by what feels good right now. Worthwhile goals will almost always require you push through short-term negative feelings.

Well-constructed, purpose-based goals will provide a source of value that exceeds the temptation to soothe your feelings. For example, if you really want to get into or remain in shape, your desire to do so will exceed your desire to stay up late, eat poorly, and cut workouts short.

Tasks provide granular choices against unproductive feelings

Each person will constantly be assaulted by waves of feelings that will impede their ability to plan audacious, purpose-focused goals and execute the highest priority tasks toward those ends.

As you conduct your planning sessions early in the morning, at the end of a day, or whenever else you are best disposed to have the greatest optimism and hope, you will always have a daily to do list that places you on the firmest possible foundation to fight the emotional battles of each day.

As you work through each day, use the granularity of your to do list as an asset in the battle against unhelpful emotions. It will be much easier to convince yourself to keep moving with a specific task at hand, consisting of a particularly focused action for a limited amount of time, than it would be to pursue some open-ended generic work.