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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

When I was 10 years old there was a copy of "the sky is the limit" lying around the house.

In this book you could read that "your thoughts are your own and your feelings come from your thoughts and nobody can think for you and you may have feelings but it's ultimately your thoughts about it that matter and that you control so you control how you react to everything and anything under the sun, thus your feelings are entirely under your control and your responsibility. Isn't that liberating ?" You are a musheen, Harry.

Being exposed as a kid to this kind of reasoning can distort things. It was written by an adult and read by adults.

There's a lot of coaches out there who still put out those kind of reasoning. People try to behave like cold machines and then they break down.

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I wish people were treated more like machines.

Big expensive machines, which require training to operate, and have big manuals full of pages and pages of "Danger: failure to follow correct operating procedures may lead to injury or death."

I would really love to have a custom manual showing correct min/max/optimal operating parameters for sleep, warmth, hugs, food, etc. Especially if people would have to keep to it.

And then instead of getting angry when someone doesn't do what they want (or getting angry at themselves for failing) , people would have to accept that they violated the commonly accepted operating procedures -thereby exceeding the tolerances of the system- and should do better next time.

Wouldn't that be a huge improvement over how things work now?

Yes, and it would be a big help for new parents, responsible for the care of a new small human who did not come home with such a useful manual.

For a lot of us here, I think so. The downfall is that this approach assumes the reader already understands systems and how they often play together, which our community takes for granted as a skill.

I do personally like it, though. Explaining how, for instance, your food intake has tolerances which can be exceeded in either direction temporarily but will eventually catch up to you is exceedingly useful.

I'm always surprised how many adults think they can "just push themselves" to get more out of their life, whereas studies are pretty clear you only get a few weeks before regressing not only to the mean, but below it.

Do you not believe that feelings come from thoughts and that your thoughts are not your own? Or do you believe in a more connected and behaviour based approach?

I more than believe that it depends on what your definition of "own" is. Both feelings and thoughts go hand in hand. Chemical state in your body causes negative feelings and also negative thoughts. You could inject anyone with heroin and they would feel happy and have positive thoughts. Same you could inject anyone with something negative that causes feelings of horror and same with thoughts. Same with external situations causing certain chemical releases in your body, for instance you see someone attractive and then you feel aroused and think "wow they are attractive".

"Feelings come from thoughts" is pretty much the basis of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Fairly well-understood. Of course it's not a universal technique but it's often very helpful.

I think both come from chemical state, but can influence each other to an extent. There is clear evidence in anyone's life for that. Can you think yourself to feel absolutely anything?

If you are in love with someone did your thoughts cause that love? Or did feeling of love, arousal cause those thoughts?

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