If you do not reign over your feelings, they will rule over you. There is no neutral ground. Humans have emotions and a keyboard of buttons that are played every day by the circumstances. We all have triggers that make us feel something.

Doing what you are ought to is a short-term solution. Will effort creates a division within you. Part of you does not want to act a certain way, while another part uses force to produce an action. This conflict is an unhealthy way of life that makes you feel a lack of control.

Nevertheless, there is a better way than burdening the shoulders of your will. You can tame the beast of feelings and emotions.

Feelings cannot predict the results

There are days when I do not feel like writing. After overcoming a desire to watch a movie, I sit down to write. It takes an hour or two until I get into the groove. After that, I cannot stop! A session started in the lack of positive desire and excitement ends up with a story that I am proud of.

Other days I am happy to sit and type for hours, but nothing of value comes out. This happened plenty of times that I do not measure my excitement to know how productive the project will be. There is nothing in my emotions that can accurately describe the outcomes.

I cannot say that if I feel down, I will be more successful. Or when I am excited, I will not. The fact is that I can never know.

Let us say you got an app that promised to predict the weather to the exact number of raindrops. After a week of using it, you notice that the predictions were correct only a single evening. You would call this app useless and uninstall it with joy.

Our feelings are useless in predicting outcomes. If they guess the productivity correctly, it is a lucky shot in the dark rather than a deliberate prediction. The positive result appears from perseverance, commitment, skill, and sometimes a lucky shot.

The feeling is a byproduct

If you pour vinegar on baking soda, you will get a fizzy chemical reaction. Doing it in the drain of your kitchen sink will clean the pipes. A clean sink pipe is the byproduct of the chemical reaction.

Emotions are a fizzy reaction of two experiences that separated would stay still. They can also be a byproduct of an experience. They do not lead our lives (at least not supposed to) but follow our actions.

If you watch a comedy, you will feel like laughing. The horror movie will make cause you to check every dark corner in your house because of fear. And romance will help you feel butterflies in the stomach. These emotions will appear because you watched a particular movie.

Feelings cannot predict the success of a particular writing session. If you are not excited to write, it is possible that you just read a discouraging article or saw unexpectedly low stats. Emotions are a byproduct of an experience, and every event has the potential to cause a feeling.

We should not make decisions based on emotions if they are inaccurate at predicting the results but acts as a byproduct of a past experience. I am not speaking about intuition but about an emotional state that fluctuates every day. We cannot turn into heartless creatures and expect to create something that stirs up emotions in other people. No, we have to cooperate with our feelings.

Use emotions to your advantage

In the army, soldiers are required to make their beds perfectly neat. It is not enough to simply cover it. At first, it may look like a waste of time when the soldiers could do something more necessary. A messy bed makes no difference, right? It’s incorrect! Making the bed well serves the soldier emotionally — he starts the day with a small victory.

The positive emotion of victory pumps up motivation faster than any motivational speaker. On the contrary, if your alarm didn’t wake you up at the right time, it sets a day into a wrong track where defeat is expected.

I do not allow myself to turn on the internet so that all the bad news and the list of tasks don’t demotivate me. When I start work, I answer all the messages that pilled up. Small achievements like that give me a boost of positive energy needed for the day of hard work.

You need to know activities cause you to be demotivated and which uplift your heart to move mountains. Create a habit of avoiding the first and do the latter. Breed excitement and you will crush the problems like the terminator.

A dragon or a lizard?

Emotions are responsible for building you up and for making you feel low. You cannot avoid every trigger that sets you down, but you can empower emotions of triumph. Luckily, it’s only a matter of time when you will have a significant streak of victories that will overpower any negativity.

The choice is yours. You can either be a lizard that runs away from everything, even if it means losing your tail. Or you can be a dragon who carelessly is setting on fire all the problems.

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You can read more on: 

• Medium.com (the place where I post my stories first)
• Minds Page
• Abundant Life Chronicles Blog