Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
We make ourselves laugh and cry by sheer imagination. By thinking about an irritating person, we can make ourselves feel genuinely angry. Happiness, sadness, and anger, all conjured from our own minds. You can do it now. You can think of a funny or sad or unjust scene in a movie, and feel happy or sad or angry. And it could happen quickly. Perhaps instantly.
You can create your own emotions, your emotional state, from moment to moment, by choosing an emotion, and then imagining a situation that brings that emotion. Actors do it all of the time, and we believe them. We feel what they imagine they are feeling, their pretend emotions based on pretend situations.
None of this is new to you, I'm sure. You've probably heard it all before:
Mind over Matter
Cognition creates Emotion
We are what we Think
As a Person thinks, So is the Person.
So forth, and so on. Etc. Etc.
It can't be that easy, right? But if not, then why do TV shows and movies get to us so much? When you're about to watch a comedy show, for example, have you ever noticed how your mouth starts to shape itself into a perpetual smile, like you're preparing to laugh? I've noticed it when I watch comedies during the week. It's like I'm getting into a comedy mindset. Or an angry mindset when I watch a crime show of some kind. Watching TV proves that creating emotions by imagination is really quite easy.
What if we practiced using our own minds in the way TV show writers use them everyday?
I think we actually already do this without knowing it. We do it when we rehearse arguments before they happen, or when we keep thinking about something or someone that really bothered us during the day. We imagine the conversation over and over again; we imagine what we could or should have said differently. And we feel what we imagine.
What if we simply did this deliberately, and determined what we want to feel as a habit of our lives?
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