How to Use Your Emotions to Shape Your Future

If you’ve ever heard someone say to smile or laugh when you’re feeling sad because it will make you feel better, it’s not just BS, there’s actual reasoning behind it. Science shows that your brain often responds to imagined events the same way it responds to real, experienced events. What this means is that you can learn to control your emotions and actively choose to feel the ones you want to experience. This ultimately puts you in control of what your future looks like in terms of your mindset and the experiences you have. 

The Science Behind It

Numerous studies show that imagined events activate the brain the same way real events do. They offer proof that the thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and emotions you experience on a daily basis have a direct link to your overall health and wellbeing.

A study done in 1992 focused on muscle strength visualization showed that people who only imagined contracting their finger muscles increased their strength by 22%. People who physically trained their fingers increased their strength by 30%, showing that visualization can physically alter the body (Yue G, Cole KJ, 1992). A similar study in 2007 proved stroke patients who practiced movements through visualization gained back more motor function than patients who did not (Page et al., 2007).

In terms of emotions, a study of the effect positive emotions have on the heart demonstrated that creating feelings of love, kindness, and compassion through meditation has a great impact on our wellbeing. It increases activity of the vagus nerve (which is what regulates everything from bodily functions like digestion and heart rate to mental states such as mood and emotions), improves resilience and social connection, and decreases symptoms of illness (Fredrickson et al., 2008). Alternatively, chronic stress and negative emotional states have been shown to weaken the immune system (Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 1995).

Emotions Predict Your Future

Essentially, here’s what all this means. How you live your life and the emotions you experience on a day to day basis can shape what your future will look like and how you feel. If you are living in a constant state of stress, fear, or resentment, you are more likely to experience illness, depression, anxiety, and continue feeling those emotions. However, if you make the intentional choice to live in a state of love, kindness, or gratitude, you can physically change your body, rewire how your brain works, and experience improved health and wellbeing. Just like in the studies, if you continuously visualize or feel the emotions of a certain event, your brain and body will change to reflect that. Visualizing and embodying health will help you become healthier whereas visualizing or embodying failure will make you more likely to fail because of reinforced negative beliefs. 

Use Emotions to Create the Future You Want

With this, you quite literally have the power to create your own reality and the future you want. You attract what your body is able to accept. You can do this through numerous ways. 

Meditation

Meditation is one of the most powerful tools to come back to yourself and start using your emotions to guide your future. This is because the practice requires you to slow down, tune into yourself, and clear your mind. Once you let go of all your fears, anxieties, stresses, and so on, you will begin to notice how you actually feel underneath all that. Become aware of where you have tension, and notice what you’re holding on to that you can let go. 

Then, practice feeling the emotion that you want to replace your negative ones with. If you want to feel gratitude, think of things you’re grateful for and notice how it feels in your body. If you want to feel love, think of someone or something you love. Hold on to that feeling and let it consume you. Picture it filling your body and mind and then imagine you’re trying to fill your whole room with it, or send it to someone next to you. If any negative emotions come up, acknowledge them and then let them go. Your focus is on the positive emotion you are now radiating. 

With consistent practice, this will begin to change the way your mind works, and ultimately change how you feel. 

Affirmations

Affirmations can be another powerful tool, when done correctly. When saying affirmations, don’t just say what you want; you need to embody it. If you say “I am loved,” you need to feel love flowing through your body and radiating from you. You need to think of times when you truly did feel loved and use that as proof to yourself that what you are saying is true. If you say “I am confident”, you need to imagine all the ways you would act and feel if you were confident. Maybe you hold your head higher, pull your shoulders back, and practice speaking with more conviction. The key here is to act as if what you are saying is already true. When you begin to truly feel love or confidence, or whatever you’re affirming, it leads your brain to believing that you are living in that new reality. 

Journaling

Similar to affirmations, you can use journaling as a way to begin feeling an emotion before the experience has happened. Think of what it is you want, whether that be a new lifestyle, new career, new relationship, success, health, wellness, etc, and write about it as if it already happened. Be as specific as you can. 

• What happened? 
• How are you feeling? 
• What doors does this open for you? 
• How did you accomplish it?
• How is your life different now that you accomplished this thing/had this experience?

Once you’ve gotten as detailed as you can, read over what you wrote. What emotions are present? What beliefs does that version of you have? Are there different actions you can take to begin aligning your present reality with your journaled reality? Try to start living as if you are already that person you wrote about. 

Others

In addition to meditation, journaling, and affirmations, there are so many more ways to help you regulate your emotions. Here are a few more:

• Breathwork – helps you calm down and regulate the nervous system
• Visualization – a technique used in meditation, journaling, and affirmations, can also be used on its own to help you experience a desired future outcome before it has happened
• Intention setting – powerful tool to help you regulate your emotions. You decide how you want to feel and then you intentionally choose to feel it
• Emotional awareness – notice when you are falling back into old emotional habits and try to interrupt those patterns with any of the actions listed above

Step Into Your Power

These techniques are so powerful because, as you can see, your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs literally shape your reality. Now, instead of falling victim to your emotions and circumstances, you can choose how you react and how you want to feel. You are what you believe you can be and what you condition yourself to feel. The only thing limiting you is your own mind. The choices you make today are what will shape your future.