Feelings First: Change Your Physiology to Change How You Feel

By
JD
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Feelings First

If you want to really change your thoughts or really change your actions, and act in a refreshing way, start with feelings first.

What’s the fastest way to change how you feel?

Change your physiology.

If you want to feel more confident, or happier, or unstoppable, you have to change how you feel.  But how do you change how you feel?

You change your physiology. One of the best insights from Tony Robbins is that we can’t always think our way to feeling better.  Changing your physiology is the fast path.

Let’s say you want to feel unstoppable.  One way to start is to “remember the feeling.”  Recall a time in your life when you felt unstoppable.   How would breathe if you felt unstoppable?  How would you hold yourself if you felt unstoppable?  Actually do it.  You get the idea.

So let’s not overthink this or over-analyze it.  Instead, change your physiology, and “fake it ’til you make it.”

But here’s the surprise — if you actually do remember the feeling, and if you really are holding yourself as if you are unstoppable, and if you really are breathing as if you are unstoppable — you’re not faking it …

… you’re there.

Feelings first.

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6 COMMENTS

  1. So coincidentally I was watching AR’s video clip on Youtube few days again, on how to change the mood and feeling within minutes. I guess it all boils down to conscious living of the present state that we are in and not let the autopilot subconscious mind take charge. Don’t be emotionally reactive. Btw he also mentioned about remembering the body posture too.
    ? Catherina

  2. @ Catherina — That is quite the coincidence — I’m effectively going through some of my “best of” Tony Robbin’s collection.

    Tony’s brilliant, bold, and profound.

    One of my colleagues worked with closely with Tony Robbins on an intense project in pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. He was amazed by the depth, speed, and precision of Tony’s abilities in action.

    Great point on the posture — the speaking, breathing, and gestures all play a part.

  4. JD, This makes me think of a question from solution-focused therapy, “Having remembered a time when you were (fill-in the blank), what were you doing?” Then find some small and very accessible way to put that into practice. Usually, you just try to lead a person to remember a time first. I love this take of remembering a feeling.

  5. @ lp.sharma — Thank you. I’m a fan of how things we do daily can lift us up.

    @ Aaron — Great example and I like that on two levels. First, it engages more of our senses, so we step into the experience. Second, if there was a unique thing we were doing, it really makes the experience stand out.

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