Shortform | Mind Tricks: Separate Feelings From Facts
Mind Tricks explores common but detrimental mental habits. Here, we break down the tendency to interpret situations based on how you feel rather than what’s actually happening, and we offer practical, research-backed strategies for thinking more rationally.
Introduction
Do you ever jump to conclusions based on how you feel—for example, by believing you’re unlikable when you feel insecure, assuming you’ll win big when you feel lucky, or determining that danger lies ahead when you feel afraid? If so, you might default to emotional reasoning—a tendency to treat your feelings as facts. Here, we’ll explain why you rely on emotional reasoning, how it sabotages you, and what you can do to break free.
Why You Default to Emotional Reasoning
You might be prone to emotional reasoning if you tend to only notice experiences that validate your emotions, like things going well when you feel optimistic or wrong when you feel anxious. Over time, restricting your focus to such experiences creates a feedback loop that encourages you to interpret your emotions as facts: Each time you fixate on events that reflect your feelings, you prove to yourself that your emotions reveal the truth about reality—so questioning their validity feels unnecessary.
How Emotional Reasoning Sabotages You
Over time, treating feelings as facts undermines your well-being because it:
- Blinds you to contradictory evidence: When you accept your emotions as facts, you believe you already know the truth and dismiss evidence that contradicts your feelings. This leads you to draw conclusions about situations, people, or yourself that might not be true.
- Drives irrational responses: When you don’t question your emotions, you fall prey to misinterpretations and respond accordingly—reacting to people and situations based on false premises rather than what’s actually happening.
- Traps you in one emotional state: The feedback loop that convinces you emotions are facts also keeps you experiencing the same feelings—because noticing only the events that validate your emotions reinforces those emotions and prevents you from moving past them.
- Distorts risk perception: If you allow your emotions to override objectivity when assessing risks, you may misjudge which situations you’d be better off avoiding and which ones it would benefit you to pursue.
First Steps to Break Free
Research suggests that the following techniques can help you take a step back from your emotions:
- Describe what you’re feeling: Instead of identifying with emotions (“I am sad”), describe them as something you’re experiencing (“I notice that I feel sad”). This prevents you from getting entangled in your emotions, making it easier to view them as fleeting states rather than facts.
- Trace emotions to their source: The emotions you feel often stem from factors unrelated to the present moment. By identifying what triggered them, you can more easily recognize whether they’re relevant and provide accurate information about what’s happening now.
- Consider what else could be true: Searching for alternative interpretations challenges the conclusion your emotions led you to, helping you recognize it as one possibility rather than the only one.
- Categorize emotions and facts: You can separate your emotional interpretation of events from actual evidence by creating two lists—one for things you feel are true and the other for things you know are true. Comparing them side by side will reveal whether your feelings are appropriate to the situation.
- Reflect on when your emotions were wrong: By recalling times when your feelings pointed to a false conclusion, you’ll prove that your emotions often mislead you and weaken the tendency to automatically trust them.
Learn more about how to separate emotions from facts by checking out Shortform’s guides to Cognitive Behavior Therapy: Basics and Beyond by Judith S. Beck, Critical Thinking, Logic & Problem Solving by Bigrocks Thinking, Mastermind by Maria Konnikova, Peak Mind by Amishi P. Jha, Subliminal by Leonard Mlodinow, Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann, and Think Like a Freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner.
