0.8 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts  (Page 56/89)

Humans don't just say things without thinking about them first, so everything is going to be unconscious first.  Speech is much much slower than your thoughts are, and unless you start saying something and don't know the complete sentence before you say it, you are going to have the entire thing thought out first.  So technically everything starts with an unconscious thought.  However this thought has levels of understanding, there are levels to which you understand the thought, that is why you can't just say everything all at once, you usually have to think about it for a bit first. When people think, it takes time to think, and they don't think unconsciously in sentences.  They think unconsciously with emotions, thoughts, visualizations, anything your mind can simulate. When they think unconsciously with emotions you could be taking large emotional experiences and trying to analyze them, or little ones, you could be combining different experiences, or combining emotion with thought or emotion with visualization (etc.). Your mind doesn't just use sentences to figure out what it wants to do, that would take too long.  Sentences are actually just sounds that represent things, you don't need to simulate a sound in your head in order to think.  It might be that you simulate tiny sounds, or however it is your neurons fire to organize the thoughts, the point is the thoughts are not fully formed instantly.  It isn't the firing of one neuron once that makes a complete sentence.  There is a progression of thought.  This is obvious because when you are doing a problem, say a math problem, you often can reach the answer without having to say anything.  What is happening is that you are thinking about things unconsciously, maybe you are visualizing the number of things you need to visualize to find the answer (say adding 1 to 1 you have to visualize the separate objects, and then visualize the two objects together).

An overly optimistic attitude towards life leads to a dulling of emotion

When you go into a situation or an event the attitude you have is going to impact your emotional experience. If you think something is going to be fun, when in reality it isn’t, and you continue to think that that thing was fun afterwards, it is going to make you feel worse than if you had the right understanding of how much fun the event was. This is because an overly optimistic attitude causes you to consciously focus on things which you enjoy more, but your conscious mind can only recognize a tiny amount of things which you enjoy. So you are amplifying a disproportionate amount of emotion in your own mind. That throws things off balance in your head and you start to wonder (consciously and unconsciously) why you are enjoying some things more than others, and it throws off your responses to natural, ordinary events. In other words, your mind compares the positive things which you are amplifying to the things you aren’t amplifying (like how it compares how you work during the day to how you rest at night – that is your mind compares the work during the day to resting at night and therefore you feel more rested because your mind is comparing those things to if you didn’t work during the day). Furthermore ordinary events start to become duller because you are amplifying a few events you just think are fun, when in reality all of life is fun if you give it an equal chance.