What is the difference between feeling and thinking? The answer is not always so clear. You hear people trying to express their opinion saying, “I feel…” or “I feel as though….” when they are really trying to express a thought, not a feeling.
So what is the difference? Feelings are things like happiness, sadness, and anger whereas thoughts are ideas. The first pertains to emotions and the second pertains to the intellect, or reason. In the same way that you would not say, “I think sad” or “I think happy,” you would not say, “I feel that 2+2=4.”
This distinction is very important. Many people do not make it. Why is it important? Because even though we live in the Age of Information, we do not, as a society, communicate as well as we could. Making the distinction between thinking and feeling is an important step in bringing all people together in communication.
Not only do we think and feel, but we can make others think and feel also by what we say or do. This is what communication is – taking our own thought or emotion and placing it inside of other people. Depending on the situation you will either want to communicate words or you will want to communicate emotion. If you are at the bank and you want to withdraw fifty dollars, you have to say the words, “I would like to withdraw fifty dollars.” Other times, for example, if you are consoling someone who is grieving, you might not want to say anything at all, you might just want to give a hug or a pat on the back. In this case you want to share the emotion of the moment.
So there are two different types of communication: rational communication and emotional communication. We will see that in reality these are not always separate from one another, although we can distinguish them as having two different goals.