Your State is Your Fate: A Guide to Managing Your Energy and Emotions

Your emotions are not a direct product of your circumstances. They aren’t an objective property of reality. Instead, emotions are an interaction between your ego and the environment—between whatever happens and your story or interpretation of what happened. Feeling has very little to do with the objective circumstances you are in.

Let’s take an example. Say you’re sitting at a restaurant waiting for a first date to show up, and they’re ten minutes late. What would you be thinking?

For some, it might be anxiety that they got stood up, rooted in a story of “I’m not good enough.” For others, it might be fear that their date got in a horrible accident. But for those who are emotionally comfortable and confident, they wouldn’t think much of it. Maybe traffic is bad, or something came up. They would take the opportunity to relax and think or write by themselves. Not because they don’t care, but because they don’t worry—and those are very different things.

Your experience isn’t a byproduct of your immediate surroundings, but what you make them mean in your mind. If you believe you are unattractive and undesirable, then when your date is late, you’re going to think it’s because you’re not good enough. Your emotions are the byproduct of your beliefs.

Feeling vs. Emotion: Weather vs. Climate

To explore this, let’s make an important distinction. Let’s say that there are feelings, which are sensations in the present moment. Like a wave of energy, a feeling is just another sensory perception, like sight or hearing, that you experience internally.

Let’s separate this from what we’ll call emotions. Emotions are feelings locked in time. They are a general pattern of feelings that accumulate to form your overall disposition or mood. You can think of it like the difference between weather and climate.

• Feelings are the weather—your present, momentary experience.
• Emotions are the climate—the general condition of your accumulating feelings, your average energetic atmosphere.

When you subconsciously create a story about a feeling, it becomes an emotion. You make an event mean something about you. The temporary feeling of sadness can become the lasting emotion of depression. Feelings are present sensations; emotions are locked in the stories, judgments, and time of the ego.

Your State: The Momentum of Your Inner World

This brings us to the idea of state. Your state is your currently felt and available mental, emotional, and physical energy. Some might call it your vibration or frequency; I prefer state because it isn’t attached to any specific model.

When you’re in a low-energy state, life sucks. You don’t want to get out of bed, you gravitate towards distractions. When you’re in a high-energy state, you’re optimistic, productive, and creative.

Thinking, feeling, and acting all affect each other in a feedback loop. Self-defeating thoughts make you feel like crap, which makes you act lazy, which makes you think you suck. It’s a vicious cycle. Conversely, taking a cold shower can make you feel good, which leads to positive thoughts, which leads to more focus. That’s a virtuous cycle.

I would call the momentum of this cycle your state. What becomes important is realizing our present state and redirecting it when it’s heading downward. You can do this with quick pattern-interrupts: a big glass of water, a few deep breaths, a walk around the block, a couple of pushups, an affirmation.

Where Focus Goes, Energy Flows

Your beliefs determine how you participate in life. Or, as Tony Robbins puts it, “Where focus goes, energy flows.” If you focus on things you can’t control and on perspectives where you declare yourself to be inadequate, your life is going to reflect that.

So how do we change this? One of the easiest ways to facilitate a shift in identity is to give yourself an experience that simply cannot coexist with a limiting belief.

If your belief is, “I could never perform on a stage,” the solution is to perform on a stage. Suddenly, the person who said “I could never” has died, and you are now the person who says, “I have performed on a stage, so I know I could do it again.” This is a huge expansion in identity and energy.

Energy also gets blocked or distorted by the expression “I should.” Whenever you “should” all over yourself, you’re kinking the hose of your natural, boundless energy. “I should eat better” feels like guilt, apathy, or shame. What if instead you tried, “I choose to respect and love my body, because being vital enables me to be and do the things I love”? That feels like power, agency, and creation.

Notice when you feel guilty, shameful, afraid, or apathetic, and investigate the beliefs that generate those feelings. What is it that you believe that is making you feel this way? And is that belief even true?

Outlets vs. Escapes

This brings us to the distinction between an emotional outlet and an escape. An outlet is a way of letting yourself change state meaningfully and consciously. An escape is usually subconscious; you don’t change your state in a meaningful way, and you never address what put you there in the first place. Outlets tend to be constructive, while escapes are distractions.

The process looks like this:

1. Recognize when you’re in a low state.
2. Accept and Transmute it. Use a pattern interrupt or an outlet (a walk, exercise, playing music, a deep conversation) to get back into a high-energy state.
3. Investigate. Once your state is back up, ask: “What was that tension all about?” Meditate, journal, or talk to a coach to figure out the story that got you to react that way.
4. Let go. Once you see the story, you can non-identify with it. This is the thinning of the ego, the ultimate state change that returns you to limitless, creative energy.

I want you to think about some of the things you do throughout your day and ask yourself: what am I actually trying to get or to feel through this action? Consider the things that might be escapes, and ask if they are truly capable of giving you what you’re trying to get out of them.