If free will is your ability to think or not, to follow reason or not, that leads to a crucial question: What is the relationship between reason and emotion?
Since Plato, there has been a widespread view in philosophy that human nature is made up of warring elements: reason and emotion—logic and desire—mind and body. Free will, on this view, amounts to your ability to override your irrational desires. To shove aside what you want in the name of the true and the good.
It’s not a crazy view. Reason and emotion can conflict. You know that you shouldn’t eat a whole bag of Doritos—but you do. You know that you should hit the gym—but you don’t. You know that you shouldn’t spend four hours a day on social media—but you do. You know you should start working on that school assignment—but you don’t. You know that you shouldn’t sleep with that guy or girl—but you do. You know that you should ask that guy or girl on a date—but you don’t.
Reason and emotion can conflict—but they don’t have to. You aren’t made up of two warring elements. Your desires need not be mysterious forces pulling you to act in ways that harm you, subvert your long-range goals, fill you with anxiety and guilt. Free will isn’t about quieting or overriding your emotions—it’s about bringing your emotions into harmony with reason.
No, you cannot control our emotions directly, the way you control your mind—but you can shape your emotions through how you use your mind so that they reflect your considered judgment. To see this, we need to take a closer look at what reason is and what emotions are.
What reason is
Animals share our power to perceive the world; what they can’t do is identify abstract relationships between the things they perceive. My cat Alfie can see a mouse. But he can’t form the idea of “mouse.” He can’t study mice, learn about their biology, and start a mouse farm to mass produce thousands of tiny victims. Alfie just sees something that entices him and pounces.
Human beings do have the power of abstract thought. As Ayn Rand observes: this power
does not consist merely of grasping a few simple abstractions, such as “chair,” “table,” “hot,” “cold,” and of learning to speak. It consists of a method of using one’s consciousness, best designated by the term “conceptualizing.” It is not a passive state of registering random impressions. It is an actively sustained process of identifying one’s impressions in conceptual terms, of integrating every event and every observation into a conceptual context, of grasping relationships, differences, similarities in one’s perceptual material and of abstracting them into new concepts, of drawing inferences, of making deductions, of reaching conclusions, of asking new questions and discovering new answers and expanding one’s knowledge into an ever-growing sum. The faculty that directs this process, the faculty that works by means of concepts, is: reason. The process is thinking.
By actively conceptualizing the world, you are better able to deal with the world. Reason is not some mysterious, mystical substance welded on to your body. It is a biological faculty. It’s a vital organ—and just as your other organs have a survival function, so does your mind. Reason doesn’t exist for the sake of pure contemplation, but for the sake of helping you navigate through your environment to meet your needs.
Plants survive by taking in light and nutrients from their immediate surroundings. Consciousness expands the range of actions open to a living organism. Animals can perceive objects at a distance and use that awareness to move toward potential resources or away from potential threats. Reason allows human beings to act over far greater distances and timescales. You can have food delivered to you from miles away using phones that were built through a global supply chain. You can work on projects that won’t pay off for a decade. As a human being, your potential environment consists of the entire universe, and your relevant timescale is not minutes or days but your entire lifespan.
The incredible advances we’ve made since the Enlightenment in scientific knowledge and standard of living testify to the awesome power of the human mind. We can achieve unlimited knowledge—about the stars, atoms, chemicals, life, history—and translate that knowledge into technological marvels and life-sustaining processes. We turn ideas into buildings, theories into computers, thoughts into food, inductive inferences into vaccines, syllogisms into airplanes. Reason turns poverty into plenty. It’s what expanded our lifespans from 30 to 80.
These grand scale achievements highlight the power of reason—but they don’t exhaust it. Reason is what you use to set your goals and navigate your way toward them. It’s what you use to learn and grow and make good decisions. It’s what you use to understand and evaluate the people and things around you so that the world becomes intelligible. And it’s what you use to make sense of your inner world, so that you can identify and fulfill your mental and emotional needs, as well as your physical ones.
Reason isn’t just your tool of cognition—it is your basic means of survival, your capacity to invent and use technology, the source of human creativity, the source of human achievement, the tool that enables you to achieve joy, serenity, and exaltation.
What emotions are
Reason is your volitional faculty: willpower is mind-power. To understand the world, solve problems, identify your needs and formulate strategies for meeting them, you have to exert effort and set your conscious mind to the task of understanding reality.
But your conscious mind is not the whole of your mind. You also have a subconscious. The subconscious isn’t some mysterious realm with its own secret agenda. It’s simply stored material that once was conscious and can be brought back into conscious awareness. For example, a friend asks (as friends often do): “Who did America fight in the War of 1812?” Your conscious mind queries your subconscious memory: “Who did America fight in the War of 1812?” Your subconscious feeds you a fact you learned way back in history class: “Britain.” Then your conscious mind has the power to judge the answer. “Was it Britain? Were other parts of the empire involved, as well as Native American tribes?” All thinking involves a constant interaction between the conscious mind and the subconscious.
Abstract knowledge isn’t the only thing that’s stored in the subconscious. The subconscious also stores behaviors and skills. Think about what it was like to learn to drive. You didn’t just study a manual and then start racing down the highway. Like all complex skills, learning to drive consists of consciously and deliberately performing certain actions until, over time, those actions become automatic. Automatization is what allows an activity like driving to become “second nature,” so that you don’t have to consciously think about each part of the process. You just drive, and your mind can focus on other things, like where you’re going or who won the War of 1812. The same process accounts for your ability to walk, to tie your shoes, to play the piano, to throw a baseball.
This is the key to understanding emotions: just as you have automatized knowledge and automatized skills, so you have automatized value judgments. Your values are the things you choose to aim at, commit yourself to, take action to create, achieve, and maintain. Every emotion you feel—love, hate, anger, joy, sadness, etc., etc.—is a verdict on your values. The emotion tells you, in effect, “I want this” or “This will help me get what I want” or “I got what I want” or “This threatens what I want” or “I lost what I want” or “I don’t want that.” “An emotion,” in psychologist Nathaniel Branden’s definition, “is the psychosomatic form in which man experiences his estimate of the beneficial or harmful relationship of some aspect of reality to himself.”
Joy, for instance, reflects the judgment that I’ve achieved a value. Love reflects the judgment that a value is a deep source of pleasure. Pride reflects the judgment I’ve lived up to my standards, especially my moral standards. Fear reflects the judgment that something threatens me. Sadness reflects the judgment that I’ve lost something I care about. Guilt reflects the judgment I have not lived up to my standards, especially my moral standards.
Your first awareness of values—of what’s good for you and what’s bad for you—comes from your physical pleasure/pain mechanism. A baby feels hunger pains and cries—the milk tastes delicious and feels good in its belly. Getting a hug from Mommy feels good. Getting a whack from the family cat feels bad. Your pleasure/pain mechanism is hardwired from birth and it’s designed by natural selection to encourage you to act in ways that promote your life and protect you from danger.
But your physical pleasure/pain mechanism is extremely limited. It can tell you that a bullet entering your chest is bad—but not that the gun pointed at your chest is bad. It can tell you that a massage is good—but not that a promotion at work is good. Pleasure/pain depends on an immediate physical interaction between you and your environment. And it does not take into account long-range consequences. A brownie smothered in ice cream tastes incredible—even if it’s moving you toward a heart attack at age 50. Going to the dentist feels like torture, even if it’s protecting your dental health.
Your emotions have a function similar to your physical pleasure/pain mechanism. They too are feelings, but instead of working by a hard-wired physical mechanism, emotions are mediated by your ideas. This allows them to account for a much wider scope of benefits and harms.
For example, you decide that you want to work as a software engineer at Apple. That’s your value—that’s what you’re going after in life. For years, you get out of bed at five in the morning and race to the computer to improve your coding skills. You turn down better paying jobs in favor of roles where you can build a track record of solving difficult, high-stakes programming challenges. You’re driven by a conscious value judgment—“Working at Apple would be amazing”—and that judgment creates the emotional desire that propels you forward over the course of years. Then one day, you get a call: “You’re hired.” You feel elation. Think about that: nothing in your physical situation has changed. Just a few words uttered over a cell phone. And yet the emotional experience is more powerful and more pleasurable than the best massage.
Whereas all human beings share roughly the same pleasure/pain responses, our emotional reactions can vary enormously precisely because they depend on our ideas. Take Bitcoin. In March 2022, the price of a Bitcoin surpassed $47,000. But by June, it had crashed to $20,000. Speculators hoping to make a quick buck felt frustration, disappointment, even despair. True believers saw the crash as an opportunity to “buy the dip” and felt excitement. Bitcoin critics saw the crash as vindication and felt a sense of satisfaction and triumph. People who didn’t understand cryptocurrency heard the news and felt nothing in particular, except perhaps confusion and relief that they hadn’t missed out on an opportunity after all. Same event, different emotional reactions based on different ideas.
So while your pleasure/pain responses are programmed by evolution, your emotions are programmed by you. This imposes a tremendous responsibility: you cannot take your emotions as infallible guides to what’s true or what’s good. You have to check the programming.
The two basic questions you face about the external world are: “What do I know?” and “How do I know it?” When it comes to understanding your inner world, the two basic questions you face are: “What do I feel?” and “Why do I feel it?”
Here’s the basic cause and effect chain that produces an emotion:
Awareness —> Identification —> Evaluation —> Feeling
The process of identification and evaluation that generates emotions is performed with lightning-like rapidity by your subconscious. To ask, “Why am I feeling what I feel?” is to slow things down and ask, “What is the subconscious identification and evaluation producing the emotion—and do I agree with it?” This last part is crucial. Emotions aren’t infallible: you can mis-identify something, or you can mis-evaluate it, or both.
Mis-identification. You see the girl you just started dating at a restaurant with a guy you don’t recognize. My God, she’s cheating on you. You feel a surge of anger, jealousy, and, underneath it, hurt. But as you march over to their table she smiles and introduces you to her brother. You feel relief and mild embarrassment as you realize you completely misread the situation.
Mis-evaluation. Let’s say you’re a crackhead. You see some crack. You (subconsciously) identify it as crack. You (subconsciously) evaluate the crack as desirable because of the elation it has evoked in the past immediately after smoking it. You feel the desire to smoke it. So you smoke it and the police catch you and throw you in jail for five years. Your emotions told you the crack was good for you because the subconscious evaluation didn’t take into account the long-term consequences of using crack.
If that was the whole story, introspection would be easy. But your subconscious identifications and evaluations are not independent from one another, like blades of grass arrayed on a field. You don’t have a “girlfriend having dinner with a strange guy” blade and a “girlfriend texting” blade and a “girlfriend not returning my calls immediately” blade, all being interpreted in unrelated ways and sparking unrelated emotions. Rather, you have a more generalized set of beliefs that will encourage you to interpret and evaluate whole clusters of situations in similar ways. A jealous person characteristically will interpret situations in ways that will provoke jealousy. To make sense of your emotional life, and to improve it, requires understanding the source of these emotional patterns.
The automatized value judgments that produce emotions usually come in the form of automatic thoughts. You encounter a situation, your subconscious generates automatic thoughts about the situation and its positive or negative impact on you, and you react: emotionally, behaviorally, and physiologically. For example, you see a couple walking hand-in-hand down the street, have the automatic thought, “I’ll never find someone,” and experience sadness. You’re singing in the car and realize people in the next car over can see you. You have the automatic thought, “I look like an idiot,” and feel embarrassed.
Where do automatic thoughts come from? From a complex structure of ideas and values that starts with core beliefs. Core beliefs are beliefs about yourself, other people, and the world you form growing up that thereafter shape all of your emotions. Psychologists typically classify these in negative terms: helpless core beliefs (“I am incompetent,” “I am weak,” “I am out of control”), unlovable core beliefs (“I am unattractive,” “I am bound to be rejected,” “I am bound to be alone”), worthless core beliefs (“I am bad,” “I am immoral,” “I don’t deserve to live”) and external danger core beliefs (“The world is dangerous,” “People can’t be trusted,” “Nothing ever goes right”).
These core beliefs (and their positive counterparts) shape your attitudes, rules, and assumptions—your intermediate beliefs. Take someone with the core belief, “I’m incompetent.” This could break down into the attitude, “It’s terrible to fail.” It could lead to the rule, “Give up if a challenge seems too great.” It could produce the assumption, “If I try to do something difficult, I’ll fail. If I avoid doing it, I’ll be okay.”
This network of core and intermediate beliefs can become activated in specific situations, generating situation-specific automatic thoughts. Take the person who believes “I’m incompetent.” She sits down to read a challenging new book. The material is difficult, and she finds herself having to re-read the same page multiple times. This generates the automatic thought, “This is just too hard. I’m so dumb. I’ll never master this.” She feels discouragement, and her default rule is, “Give up if a challenge seems too great” because “If I avoid doing something difficult I’ll be okay.” She sets down the book, and watches television.
Notice how these negative thoughts and feelings lead to coping strategies—strategies that from the outside appear self-sabotaging to a person’s welfare (if you watch TV instead of reading a difficult book, you could fail a class or lose your job), but which, from the inside, are experienced as routes of self-protection. Substance abuse, procrastination, binge eating, conflict avoidance, approval-seeking, and blaming (yourself and others) are just some of the traps you can fall into if you act blindly on your emotions. Emotionally, it feels like you’re taking care of yourself. But existentially, you’re harming yourself; psychologically, you’re ignoring and reinforcing the cause of your negative emotions.
Emotions are crucial to life. They encourage you to act to achieve values and reward you for achieving them. They encourage you to change course if you’re encountering frustrations and setbacks. In short, they provide crucial material for thinking and the motivation to act. But they are not infallible guides. Your subconscious doesn’t automatically take into account a complete picture of the facts, and your value premises may or may not be true. Acting on them blindly is acting blindly.
How, then, should you deal with your emotions?
Aligning emotions and reason
You are constantly experiencing low-level emotions—feelings of comfort or discomfort, engagement or boredom, irritation or tranquility, hope or worry, confidence or self-doubt, desire or aversion. These emotions are subtle and usually make up the background of your day—they don’t consciously register unless you attend to them. When you “find yourself” rushing to the kitchen for a bag of Doritos when you’re not actually hungry, or logging on to social media when you should be working, or snapping at your partner without knowing why, you’re being moved by low-level negative emotions and the desire to numb them, escape them, release them, or replace them with a jolt of pleasure.
Other emotions are powerful. When they are triggered, you know it. This triggered state is so strong, in fact, that it can sometimes feel overwhelming. You can’t focus on anything but the feeling. Calm deliberation can be impossible. These are the emotional states where acting on your feelings tends to leave you bewildered by your behavior and filled with regret. Your willpower, in such cases, doesn’t vanish, but it can be reduced to sheer inhibition: you can choose to act on the emotion or not, to lash out or cool down, but you cannot do much else.
Whether it’s low-level emotions or triggered states, when your thoughts and emotions conflict, what you’re actually experiencing is a conflict of ideas: your conscious judgment versus an automatized, subconscious judgment. Instead of thinking of reason/emotion conflicts as warring elements within your soul, where victory requires squelching emotion or silencing reason, you should think about such conflicts as “misalignment.” When your car is misaligned you don’t go to war with your car’s suspension. You just have it adjusted so that your steering wheel and tires are in harmony.
How does reason/emotion realignment work? By transforming your reason/emotion conflict into a conflict of ideas and assessing those ideas rationally.
Identification
The starting point for reason/emotion realignment is to become at home with your emotional world. That means first and foremost learning how to identify what you’re feeling.
That’s not as easy as it sounds. Most people repress their emotions to one degree or another. If you habitually push painful facts, conclusions, and feelings out of awareness, this can become automatized so that it happens without you even noticing it. To the degree you repress, you feel very little—and to the extent you do feel, you do not know what you’re feeling or why.
One insignia of repression is an impoverished emotional vocabulary. Even if you decide you want to become more familiar with your inner life, you may find that when you try to identify what you’re feeling you can’t come up with much more than “happy,” “sad,” and “angry.” I certainly had that problem. I literally had to print out a list of emotions and their definitions and study it like I was preparing for a test. But once I did, it was like discovering a whole new world.
Once you identify what you’re feeling, you can start to articulate why you’re feeling it. Whenever you have a notable emotional experience, put into words (a) the situation, (b) your automatic thoughts (i.e., the identifications and evaluations producing the emotion), (c) your emotion, and (d) your behavioral response.
The goal here isn’t change, but the precondition of change: to understand the reality of your emotional life.
Conscious questioning
Because emotions are “first take” reactions that don’t automatically take into account all of the relevant facts, we can all have out-of-context emotions. No matter how confident you are, if you find yourself in a high-stakes, unfamiliar situation, you can experience self-doubt. No matter how healthy your relationship, you can experience sexual attraction to someone other than your partner. No matter how realistic you are, you can catastrophize a setback on a crucial project.
In these cases, aligning your thoughts and your feelings is relatively easy. Psychologist Judith Beck recommends some basic questions you can ask about any automatic thought:
What is the evidence that supports this idea? What is the evidence against this idea?
Is there an alternative explanation or viewpoint?
What is the worst that could happen (if I’m not already thinking the worst)? If it happened, how could I cope? What is the best that could happen? What is the most realistic outcome?
What is the effect of my believing the automatic thought? What could be the effect of changing my thinking?
What would I tell [a specific friend or family member] if he or she were in the same situation?
What should I do?
Typically a few moments of thinking is enough to resolve these passing clashes. The greater challenge is enduring clashes between reason and emotion—cases where you have a pattern of feelings that are inappropriate or coping mechanisms that are self-destructive. This requires harder, more sustained work.
Deep mining
Enduring conflicts are rooted in core (and intermediate) beliefs. These can be incredibly hard to identify and change. People’s core beliefs, Beck points out, are “enduring understandings so fundamental and deep that they often do not articulate them, even to themselves. The person regards these ideas as absolute truths—just the way things ‘are.’”
Worse, core beliefs are self-reinforcing. It’s easy to take in evidence that confirms your core beliefs, but disconfirming evidence gets reinterpreted so that it is confirming, or it just gets ignored. A person who believes “I’m incompetent” will not be attentive to their successes, or they’ll see their successes as failures. They won’t celebrate making the football team—they’ll focus on the fact that they’re not a starter. They won’t recall all of the difficult books they did manage to read and understand—their mind will be flooded with the few books they tossed aside in frustration.
That said, you aren’t a captive of your false beliefs—not even your core beliefs. But it takes work to identify and challenge them.
One way to identify core beliefs is through the downward arrow technique. You identify your emotion and the automatic thought that led to it, and then you ask: What does that mean to me?
For example, you are assigned a project for work, you go back to your office and look over your notes and think, “These make no sense.” You feel a wave of fear. You ask yourself, “What does that mean to me?” You answer: “I didn’t do a good job paying attention to what my boss wanted.” Then you ask yourself, “Okay, if it’s true that I didn’t pay enough attention, what does that mean?” You answer: “I’m a lousy employee.” You’ve now spotted an intermediate belief—an assumption that amounts to: “If I don’t do a good job on a project, that means I’m a lousy employee.”
Now you can go deeper and hunt for a core belief by asking: what does that mean about me? You might answer: “That I’m not good enough. That I’m incompetent.”
Retraining
When you’ve identified your core and intermediate beliefs, and your coping strategies for dealing with the emotions they generate, that puts you in a position to change your beliefs and your actions. Not through sheer willpower, but through further thinking and action.
Cognitive behavioral therapists have developed dozens of tools to help in this process. The most effective ones I’ve seen and used are in David D. Burns’s Feeling Great. But, for a flavor: you might start by identifying the evidence for and against your core belief, and the evidence for and against a more accurate, new core belief. Or you can think of extreme examples to use as a contrast: Who are the people you regard as truly incompetent, and how do they compare to you? Or you can investigate the historical reasons you developed the core belief as a child: for instance, that your parents didn’t make realistic demands of you but impossible demands that no child could live up to. You can speak to that child and help them reach a more accurate conclusion about their adequacy. As your new belief becomes more plausible to you, you can start to take actions to reinforce it and to weaken your old belief.
This is what mental management looks like when it comes to emotions. Instead of passively reacting to your emotions, you have the power to identify them, question them, and deliberate about your actions. That is the power of exercising your free will. That is what it means to think rather than to drift and evade. That is how you exert fundamental control over your emotions.