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