Action: Why You Do the Things You Do
Think, feel, act. It’s what we do as humans. Once you really understand this cycle, you can use this tool, think-feel-act, to not only understand why you do what you do, but to get in touch with the thoughts and feelings that lead you to take action for your own life.
If you want:
- More self-confidence
- Higher Self-esteem
- To go for that promotion
- To not snap at your loved ones
- To speak to your perfect self with more kindness
- To heal your body
- To start that exercise or meditation practice you’ve been taking about
All of this self-care, all of this self-love, it all starts with understanding the think-feel-act cycle and how to apply it to your one perfect human life.
All of our actions lead to results. Our inactions do too.
For example, if you speak your needs directly, you’re more likely to get what you want and need and you might drum up some more confidence in the process. When you don’t set clear boundaries, you might find yourself rolling around in resentment when people cross your unspoken lines.
Action and inaction. They all lead to results. If you want to get unstuck, to live your one precious human life with more confidence, feel the power of your own worth, to make bold decisions for your own deal healing and wellness, you’ll want to get clear on why you do the things you do. Why you take the actions you take.
Why awareness, acceptance, and action? Our actions come from our feelings, which come from our thoughts. It’s really vital to start with awareness because you can’t change what you can’t see.
If you don’t understand the thoughts you’re having that are leading to your feelings, how will you ever really know why you’re taking the actions you’re taking? When we’re planning actions for our lives, it’s important to pause and look at this process as well.
Many well-intentioned plans to take action like starting to exercise, to eat differently or to think and feel differently are made without taking a deep look at our thoughts and feelings.
How many of us have set New Year’s resolutions without really looking at our thoughts and feelings about the action we’re trying to take, about the reasons why we haven’t been doing this thing all along?
We’ve just jumped to action only to find ourselves not doing that thing like a week or a month or two months later. All those people who were there in January are gone by March if they haven’t paused to ask the question, gosh, why haven’t I been exercising? What are my thoughts about the gym? How do those thoughts make me feel?
Again, if in the back of your mind there’s this thought, well, I should exercise, that makes you feel maybe kind of resentful of it or like, not really in. You’re not going to be all in. So you’re not going to continue to take an action that you don’t feel great about.
You’re smarter than that. Why would you keep doing something you just don’t want to do? If you want to change your life to achieve your dreams, to stop arguing with your partner or partners, to not take life so seriously or to not take things so personally, you get to pause. To raise your awareness of your thoughts and feelings first before diving in to take action.
When you raise awareness of your feelings and accept that they’re happening, you can take the action of creating some space between you and identifying with the feeling.
This is where your power lies, my love. You are not subject to your feelings.
You can take back control by learning to manage your mind. To get curious about the thought and feeling you’re having, to ask yourself what’s up, to feel it in your body and to ground yourself in it. It’s so magical. It’s also the science of how our brains work. You can choose your next thought. Mind-blowing.
What happens for most of us is that we aren’t in touch with our feelings. We don’t pause to deeply feel them, let alone pull back and find the thought that’s leading to that feeling. So we try to change the situation. A circumstance. When we feel feels we’d rather not feel like anxiety, frustration, sadness, feeling disrespected.
But the truth is that the situation has nothing to do with your feelings. Your thought about it does.
Taking action to try to change the world, things out of your control like people, places, and things – that’s right, nouns – will do nothing for how you feel if you’re having the same old thought and thus, the same old feeling.
Weight loss is a great example of this, and before you send hate mail, I’m not about to talk about weight loss as a good thing. I’m not a proponent of weight loss as an inherent concept. I am all about health at every size. All bodies are amazing, perfect, incredible, and good bodies.
I had a client, Lisa, who wanted to lose 10 pounds. She did this through hating herself. By not eating enough, by working out really intensely. She cut out healthy foods that she loved like sweet potatoes, butter and steak. All while thinking unconsciously that she would be lovable once she finally lost the weight.
Once she lost the weight, she came to me more miserable than ever. The scale had gone down but she still felt terrible about herself. That was because sweet darling Lisa still had the same old thoughts. The weight loss did nothing for her self-worth because it can’t.
Lisa was trying to change her feelings about herself with an action. To change a circumstance of her life. To change her thought, I don’t love my body, with an action. That just doesn’t work.
Loving your body is how you love your body. Not by changing your body. When you try to change the number, when you try to take the action from a place of anger or shame it doesn’t matter what the number is. It’ll never be good enough if it’s a stand-in for your value as a human.
If this issue of weight doesn’t resonate for you, fill in the blank. Title at work, income, married with children. You can put any false arbiter of value into this example and you can work towards it. You can take action towards it from that place of believing that once you take enough action and do the thing, you will be lovable. While the truth is you are perfectly lovable now. You just get to practice that thought.
There’s not an action in this world that’s going to make you feel that until you decide to practice feeling it.
An action I often hear people trying to take is to change how you feel without connecting into the thought that leads to that feeling. That too just doesn’t work without the step of connecting in. Feeling the feels in your body. Having that somatic experience of them. I’ve tried it a thousand times and the result is always fleeting at best.
For example, man, I am so anxious at this wedding. I’m just going to pretend to be happy and that’ll work, right? No. It may work for a minute, sure, but you know this, my darling. It’s a cover up job and you’ll soon have the same old feelings unless you’re really pausing to look at your thoughts. To ask why am I telling the story that I’m so anxious at this wedding?
What is it about being here around these people on this day? What’s the story I’m telling? What are my thoughts that are leading me to feel anxious? And how would I rather feel?
This cycle, think-feel-act, think-feel-act is the background chatter of the human mind.
Trying to cover it up by changing how you feel without looking at the thought, that’s just going to keep it all rolling around in the background until you pause to investigate it. So all of this about thoughts and feels leads us perfectly into the third arc of the process. Action. The question I long asked myself before thought work was, why on earth did I do that?
I didn’t know that my thoughts and my feelings were the driver. That they were leading me to take action, which takes us back to the central questions:
- Why do we do the things we do in this life?
- Why do we snap at the people we love?
- Why do we procrastinate?
- Why do we make a situation so much more stressful by ruminating and rolling around in stress?
- Why don’t we act more confident?
- Why don’t we value ourselves?
- Why don’t I do the things I promise myself I’ll do?
- Why don’t I take care of myself the way I say I want to?
- Why don’t I do all that self-care that makes me feel amazing?
Before I dive into answering all of that, it’s so important for me to pause here to say you are not your actions.
If you’re eating more than feels good, not exercising, drinking too much, not speaking up for yourself, if you’re battling with anxiety and your anxiety- fueled choices, know that it’s not you as a person. It’s your unmanaged mind at the helm.
I want you to pause before you beat yourself up for these actions and inactions. It simply doesn’t serve you, my darling. It gets you nowhere.
Remember, your thoughts create your feelings, lead to your actions, so every time you think thoughts like why can’t I do this, why can’t I make time for self-care, I’m the worst, then you’re going to feel bad about yourself. The action you’re going to take in response is to roll around in your self- defeating, self-recriminating thoughts and not loving yourself just as you are and holding space for change.
I want to encourage you to do the ladder that is to pause, breathe, give yourself love, care, and gentleness. Everything is okay, my love. There’s no problem here. You’re just growing. And yes, that’s painful and challenging. Yes. And let me tell you, it’s so worth it.
What you’re going through, feeling like your actions are inexplicable is totally normal and common. Most of us feel that way often. There’s nothing wrong with you, my love.
The way to shift the habits you’ve had in your life is learning to apply the think-feel-act cycle every single day.
It’s new to most of us. We aren’t taught this in school or even in therapy. So logically, your brain says if I do the thing, I’ll be worthy, lovable. You are completely and utterly perfect just as you are. You don’t need to change a darn thing to be a good person and you do get to make different decisions if you want to live this life in a different way.
You can start taking stock of the thoughts and the feelings they produce. Knowing you take action based on how you feel at the time of taking action. Everything you do or don’t do is because of a sensation or feeling in your body, which is such good news.
The more awareness you have of what your body is telling you, the more information you have to guide you in understanding your actions.
Something I hear often is thinking that you took action because of the world and the situations and circumstances in it. When in fact, the more empowering truth is that you took action because of your very own thoughts.
An example of folks sort of getting that backwards that I see often is about responding to an urge or desire and blaming the situation. Like you may feel the urge to eat food that you know makes you feel bad. We’ve all done this or something similar, It makes sense if you don’t understand what’s driving your actions. You have a desire, a feeling that comes from a thought, and you respond with an action. Eating something, having another drink, hitting send, raising your voice.
You respond without pausing because you blame the circumstance. The situation. They had just baked the cookies and they smelled so good, I couldn’t help myself.
Once you understand the think-feel-act cycle and begin to write these stories out, you can see them clearly in black and white on paper. You can know that the situation doesn’t dictate your actions. Not at all. Your thoughts about it do.
You have a thought, genius body responds with a feeling, drives your action.
The reason you ate food that doesn’t serve you wasn’t because a cookie exists. It was because you had a thought and a feeling so you did x, y, z, and that action led to another thought, another feeling, and then another action.
For example, you smelled the cookie, you wanted the cookie, you had a desire and a thought, I want cookie. Then you felt deprived because of your next thought, I know I’m not supposed to eat that. Then you felt bad for yourself. Poor me, I am sensitive to the gluten and the sugars.
But you were having that thought, you were feeling bad for yourself, you were feeling deprived, so you ate the cookie. Then maybe felt guilty or shameful, knowing that you’re sensitive to the gluten and the sugars and that a belly ache, a headache, anxiety, or joint pain are on their way.
So you have the thought, well, F it. I already had one. Another isn’t going to make it that much worse. And off you go for the second, maybe the third, maybe the fourth. By now, your biochemistry is spinning in a thousand different ways. Your blood sugar is spiking and then plummeting and now you feel even worse about your choice.
You may be having the thought, I can never stick to this plan. Not eating gluten and sugar is impossible. I’m a failure and I’m going to be sick forever, which of course makes you now feel even worse about yourself, which will drive another action.
Meanwhile, had you paused and taken a deep breath, you could have looked for an alternative thought like – sure, cookies are super delicious. But my body feels so much better without gluten and sugar.
It doesn’t serve me to eat it so I’m going to choose feeling really good in my mood, in my digestion, my skin, et cetera, versus the 10 seconds of pleasure from a cookie.
Then you can breathe until you feel calmer, keep repeating the new thought that feels better for you, until you can release the story that you’re being deprived. Because you’re an adult and you’re making this choice for yourself, right?
You can get into more alignment with the choices that serve you. Like skipping foods that lead to troublesome symptoms or general inflammation.
So key to this is being kind, gentle, and loving with yourself. Please and thank you always. Remember that mindfulness is a vital part of this work and as you get more adept at seeing what you’re doing and asking yourself what am I thinking and feeling, what action is this leading to, you’ll start to gain some traction.
This will start to feel less weird and foreign and uncomfortable and awkward, I promise.
You’ll start to see results in your life when you take stock of your actions, take accountability for them, and realize once again, the empowering truth that you are in control.
One of the greatest gifts of this work is knowing that you’re not some terrible person who makes terrible decisions and takes inexplicable actions. All of your actions are predicated on a thought that leads to a feeling, so practicing noticing those unconscious thoughts is the key for taking back ownership of your life.
This applies to not doing things too. If you have the thought, I’m not smart enough for that promotion, you’ll feel less than and then you won’t do what it takes to get to the next level. If you don’t feel confident in yourself, you may not even apply to the job or go on the date, or heck, start your own podcast. Your own life coaching practice.
The think-feel-act cycle can be applied to literally everything in this life, my love. As always, it starts with awareness. That is your homework. Pay attention to the actions you take or demure from taking.
Ask yourself what you are thinking and feeling before taking action and after. Write it down. Rinse and repeat.
You’ll start to see some fascinating patterns emerge in your life. I know I have. All of this, looking at the think-feel-act cycle in our lives, is self-care in action.
Yes, get the massage. Yes, take a break with your friends. Yes, take a bath, go walk in nature, do the face mask. From a place of true self-love. Not taking action because you’re not managing your mind. In lieu of getting in touch with your thoughts and feelings because you’re always stressed and anxious and reactive.
Yes, to the self-care actions that are rooted in loving yourself and not covering up the feelings you’d rather not deal with.
Thank you for taking the time to read Feminist Wellness. I’m excited to be here and to help you take back your health!
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