Meanwhile, Tom Waits was pretty much all Feeling Brain all the time, and
he got paid copious amounts of money to be drunk on television talk shows.
So, there’s that.
Here’s the truth: the Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car. And
I don’t care how scientific you think you are or how many letters you have
after your name, you’re one of us, bucko. You’re a crazy Feeling Brain–
piloted meat robot just like the rest of us. Keep your bodily fluids to yourself,
please.
The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we
are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion.^16
Emotion is the biological hydraulic system that pushes our bodies into
movement. Fear is not this magical thing your brain invents. No, it happens in
our bodies. It’s the tightening of your stomach, the tensing of your muscles,
the release of adrenaline, the overwhelming desire for space and emptiness
around your body. While the Thinking Brain exists solely within the synaptic
arrangements inside your skull, the Feeling Brain is the wisdom and stupidity
of the entire body. Anger pushes your body to move. Anxiety pulls it into
retreat. Joy lights up the facial muscles, while sadness attempts to shade your
existence from view. Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion.
The two are inseparable.
This leads to the simplest and most obvious answer to the timeless
question, why don’t we do things we know we should do?
Because we don’t feel like it.
Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or
discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion. Self-control is an emotional
problem; laziness is an emotional problem; procrastination is an emotional
problem; underachievement is an emotional problem; impulsiveness is an
emotional problem.
This sucks. Because emotional problems are much harder to deal with
than logical ones. There are equations to help you calculate the monthly
payments on your car loan. There are no equations to help you end a bad
relationship.
And as you’ve probably figured out by now, intellectually understanding
how to change your behavior doesn’t change your behavior. (Trust me, I’ve
read like twelve books on nutrition and am still chomping on a burrito as I
write this.) We know we should stop smoking cigarettes or stop eating sugar
or stop talking shit about our friends behind their backs, but we still do it. And
it’s not because we don’t know better; it’s because we don’t feel better.