How our expectations shape what we see, hear, and feel

"It can certainly feel like emotions happen to you. That they bubble up and cause you to do and say things, but that experience is an illusion that the brain creates. Not everybody has as much control as they might like, but everybody has a little more control than they think they do. When you're experiencing emotion or you're in an emotional state, what your brain is doing is telling itself a story about what is going on inside your body."

"Your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending sensory information back to your brain, and your brain isn't wired in a way for you to experience those sensory changes specifically. Instead, what you experience is a summary. And that's where those simple feelings come from. If you understand that every experience you have now becomes part of your brain's ability to predict, then you realize that the best way to change your past is to change your present."

The brain constructs emotions by predicting bodily states and summarizing interoceptive signals rather than passively receiving feelings. Emotions arise from the brain telling a story about internal sensations in relation to the external world. Past experiences become predictive resources that shape these constructions. By choosing and cultivating new experiences, the brain updates its predictive models and alters how prior events influence current feeling responses. Investing energy in varied present experiences can therefore increase control over emotional life and create new patterns for connection and growth. Emotions can be reshaped through intentional experience, analogous to exercising for physical health.

Read at Big Think