1.2 The psychology of emotions, feelings and thoughts {adv}  (Page 16/74)

So thought then is really just any short period of high attention. And thinking is long or short periods of high attention. So if you are thinking for more than a few seconds, then you are probably going to be thinking about several thoughts. Since you can think about emotions and feelings too, however, you can think about your emotions or feelings for long periods of time. [So if you have a strong emotion for a while, you could say that you were thinking about that emotion for a while, since you were just paying a lot of attention to it since it was strong, and a thought is when you pay attention to something.]

Just as thinking is made up of individual components of thought, feeling, or emotion, each of those components is made up of their own further components. In fact, when you think about an emotion or feeling you intensify that feeling or emotion a lot. Each emotion, however, is made up of experiences in the real world. The real world can include thoughts and feelings in your head as well. [So you could be emotional about a string of things you were thinking, or feeling, not just be emotional about real things.]

So emotions, feelings and thoughts are made up of real experiences. A thought isn’t just a thing in your head, but it is something that has components that are real in the world. Those things might be sounds (when you think about someone speaking, you make that sound in your head). A sound in your head is just like a sound in reality, you are mimicking the emotion that the sound in reality is causing in your head by yourself, without having the real sound be there. Just try it and think about any sound, it produces the same emotions as when the sound itself occurred outside your head. [So even though emotion and thought is made up of real experiences, all of these experiences are processed in your mind. That makes the experience a matter of perception and your personal view, in other words, you are going to feel some way about everything. Nothing is just "reality" but it is "what you felt about reality".]

So a thought in the end boils down to you thinking about sensations, any sensation, taste, touch, sound, smell, feeling, or emotion. How can a thought be of emotion? Aren’t thoughts supposed to be specific and quantifiable? Well a thought about an emotion is basically a summary of that emotion. If you played Frisbee and you get an emotion from playing Frisbee, then that emotion is a summary of the things in which you remember about playing Frisbee. The same goes with feelings. The feeling you have about something is really all the feelings that that thing causes in you, and when you focus on different aspects of that feeling, you are focusing on different aspects of the real experience which caused the feeling. [So an emotion of an experience is what you got out of that experience, if you only get an emotion from part of the experience, when you think about the entire experience you are probably going to focus more on the emotional part.]